Melanie Phillips on the Intelligence on Iran...

Are deals being done that undermine Israel's security???

The line coming out of the Israeli government after Annapolis was that this wasn’t about Israel and the Arabs at all. It was instead about bringing Saudi Arabia and others on board to construct an alliance against Iran, and building international capital in order that Israel might convince a sceptical world that Iran really was an unconscionable threat.

It is surely no accident, therefore, that the NIE volte-face was published after Annapolis. Had the US declared beforehand that Iran wasn’t really a danger after all, Israel surely would never have taken part in that farce.* As it is, Israel has now been absolutely betrayed. Having been humiliated at Annapolis and pushed by the US into a process in which it is expected to make suicidal concessions to people who will not even recognise the Jews’ right to their own homeland and are trying every day to kill its citizens, it now finds that, far from persuading the world that Iran is a mortal threat that must be stopped, America has actually told the world that it has no idea whether Iran is now a threat at all.

So why has America done this? Maybe because it has sold Israel to the devil, in the shape of Iran and Saudi Arabia, in order to save its skin in Iraq.

As we know, it is of overwhelming importance to President Bush that peace comes to Iraq by November’s presidential election. The situation in Iraq over the past few months has dramatically improved. This has been assumed to be because, under the shrewd strategic leadership of General Petraeus, the previously terror-supporting and fratricidal tribal leaders finally turned against al Qaeda and decided to unite to reclaim their country from the endless spiral of mass murder.

But there may be another explanation. The Samson Blinded blog suggests the US did a deal with Iran, in which Iran wound down its support for terror in Iraq — in return for which the US promised not to bomb Iran. The NIE was published to cloak this decision in the convenient if implausible fiction of the scaling down by the US intelligence community of the Iranian threat.

The major player at Annapolis was Saudi Arabia. It was Saudi’s ‘peace plan’ to destroy Israel which the US was trying to force Israel to accept. My own sources suggest that at the heart of Annapolis was another deal done with Saudi Arabia by the US.

Saudi is absolutely terrified by the power of Iran, which it perceives as a major threat to itself and its role in the entire region. Saudi well understands that for Iran, the destruction of Israel is the core goal of goals which is driving Iran’s nuclear weapons programme — a programme that also directly threatens Saudi itself. So it made a deal with the US. Saudi would tell its terror puppets in Iraq to back off — and as a quid pro quo the US would force Israel to the negotiating table with the Palestinians and set in train a process to force it into concessions that would deal it a mortal blow. Thus two birds would be killed with one stone: Iran’s frenzied impulse to build a nuclear weapon — and Israel itself.

If this analysis is correct, Israel’s existence and the safety of the world have thus been bargained away in exchange for the ability of a US president to declare success in Iraq.On the other hand, as I said in my post below, it may be that Bush has simply been out-manoeuvred by both the spooks and the State Department.