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While everyone has obsessed over an I-P settlment over the last few years, a new dynamic has emerged that will perhaps help settle the Palestine issue by making the interested parties aware of it's relative secondary nature as an issue compared to the New Iranian threat to All in the region.
Previous statments/whispers by members of the govts of Kuwait, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, testify to this.
Persian Isolation: A Quiet Axis Forms Against Iran in the Middle East - SPIEGEL ONLINE
7/15/10 --- Alexander Smoltczyk/Bernhard Zand
Previous statments/whispers by members of the govts of Kuwait, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, testify to this.
Persian Isolation: A Quiet Axis Forms Against Iran in the Middle East - SPIEGEL ONLINE
7/15/10 --- Alexander Smoltczyk/Bernhard Zand
Israel and the Arab states near the Persian Gulf recognize a common threat: the regime in Tehran. A regional diplomat has not even ruled out support by the Arab states for a military strike to end Iran's nuclear ambitions.
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This makes the words uttered last Tuesday by the UAE's ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba, in Aspen, Colorado, more than 12,500 kilometers to the west, all the more interesting. Otaiba was attending a forum at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival, and the mood was relaxed, or at least it was too relaxed for diplomatic restraint.
The discussion revolved around the Middle East. When asked whether the UAE would support a possible Israeli air strike against the regime in Tehran, Ambassador Otaiba said: "A military attack on Iran by whomever would be a disaster, but Iran with a nuclear weapon would be a bigger disaster."
These were unusually candid words. A military strike, the diplomat continued, would undoubtedly lead to a "backlash." "There will be problems of people protesting and rioting and very unhappy that there is an outside force attacking a Muslim country," he said.
But, he added, "if you are asking me, 'Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran,' my answer is still the same. We cannot live with a nuclear Iran. I am willing to absorb what takes place at the expense of the security of the U.A.E."
Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman said afterwards that she had never heard anything like it coming from an Arab government official. Otaiba, she added, was "astonishingly honest."
Notwithstanding the shocking nature of his remarks, Otaiba was merely expressing, in a public forum, "the standard position of many Arab countries," says Middle East expert Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for 'The Atlantic Monthly' who moderated the panel discussion in Aspen.
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