Pro-Israel Groups: US Report Rattles Our Efforts Against Iran

[Purveyor]

Many pro-Israel groups are acknowledging privately, and in some cases publicly, that the new US intelligence assessment on Iran is a significant blow to their efforts to isolate Iran and ease its threat to Israel.

Though one of the National Intelligence Estimate's conclusions was that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 due to international pressure, that's hardly comforting to Jewish organizations who feel Iran poses as a great a danger as ever and now think it will be even harder to convince the international community and American public of that.

There's also some concern that further efforts to depict Iran as an immediate threat will intensify previous accusations from some quarters that Jews are aligned with neoconservatives and are pushing for war with Iran.

"It's highly problematic, obviously, because it gives people who want to get off the hook an opportunity to do so," The Israel Project's founder Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi said of the NIE's effect on countries and international businesses who for economic and political reasons haven't wanted to slap serious sanctions on Iran, a policy her group advocates.

"I see this as a major setback," she continued, adding that the halting of the weapons program reported in the NIE had been wrongly interpreted as meaning a diminished Iranian threat. In fact, she pointed out, the NIE found that the country was continuing at full speed with the components of such a program - most significantly the enriching of uranium - in defiance of the international community.

---EOE---

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1196847262571&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

[Scurrilous]

1. Shun NIE, Jewish group asking candidates

<snip>

"A U.S. Jewish umbrella organization will ask the presidential candidates not to use a U.S. intelligence report on Iran in their campaigns.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations held an emergency conference call on Tuesday to discuss the National Intelligence Estimate declassified this week. The NIE, the consensus opinion of 16 intelligence agencies, reported that Iran had frozen its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Malcolm Hoenlein, the Presidents Conference executive vice chairman, said the NIE posed a "challenge" and that advocates of isolating Iran needed to reframe their argument to emphasize that the Islamic republic still backed terrorism.

Democratic candidates already are citing the NIE in arguing against the Bush administration's efforts to isolate and confront Iran. Hoenlein said the Presidents Conference would write letters to all the candidates asking them not to make the NIE an issue."

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/105708.html

[KG]

2. isreal still wanting us to fight their proxy wars.

jeez, haan't the US give israel enuff guns planes and tanks to fight their own wars?

[Tesha]

3. It's never "enough". (NT)