It is widely assumed that the only things standing in the way of Iran developing nuclear weapons are either external pressures (sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, the threat of military strikes, and the constraints imposed by the NPT), or that Iran has yet to decide to apply its nuclear know-how to the creation of weapons.

Jacques E.C. Hymans suggests a third obstacle which is an authoritarian political culture that undermines the pursuit of such a goal.

Nuclear research and development organizations depend heavily on intense commitment, creative thinking, and a shared spirit of cooperation among large numbers of highly educated scientific and technical workers. To elicit this positive behavior, management needs to respect their professional autonomy and facilitate their efforts, and not simply order them around. Respect for professional autonomy was instrumental to the brilliant successes of the earliest nuclear weapons projects. Even in Stalin’s Soviet Union, as the historian David Holloway has written, “it is striking how the apparatus of the police state fused with the physics community to build the bomb. . . . [The physics community’s] autonomy was not destroyed by the creation of the nuclear project. It continued to exist within the administrative system that was set up to manage the project.”

By contrast, most rulers of recent would-be nuclear states have tended to rely on a coercive, authoritarian management approach to advance their quest for the bomb, using appeals to scientists’ greed and fear as the primary motivators. That coercive approach is a major mistake, because it produces a sense of alienation in the workers by removing their sense of professionalism. As a result, nuclear programs lose their way. Moreover, underneath these bad management choices lie bad management cultures. In developing states with inadequate civil service protections, every decision tends to become politicized, and state bureaucrats quickly learn to keep their heads down. Not even the highly technical matters faced by nuclear scientific and technical workers are safe from meddling politicians. The result is precisely the reverse of what the politicians intend: not heightened efficiency but rather a mixture of bureaucratic sloth, corruption, and endless blame shifting.

Although it is difficult to measure the quality of state institutions precisely, the historical record strongly indicates that the more a state has conformed to the professional management culture generally found in developed states, the less time it has needed to get its first bomb and the lower its chances of failure. Conversely, the more a state has conformed to the authoritarian management culture typically found in developing states, the more time it has needed to get its first bomb and the higher its chances of failure.

In a meeting on Tuesday, Dan Shapiro, the United States ambassador to Israel, told a closed meeting of the Israel Bar Association that the U.S. not only reserves the option to attack Iran in the event that diplomacy fails to curtail Iran’s nuclear program but that it is ready to launch such an attack.

In today’s State Department press briefing, Matt Lee from the Associated Press had the following exchange with spokesperson Victoria Nuland. Referring to a meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Israel Defence Minister Ehud Barak, Lee asked:

QUESTION: Are they going to be talking about what Ambassador Shapiro was talking about earlier this week about how the U.S. is ready to attack Iran?

MS. NULAND: Well, first of all, let me just make clear that Ambassador Shapiro’s comments were designed to reflect completely what the President has said all along, which is that even as we move forward with the P-5+1 discussions with Iran and hope that we can settle these issues through diplomacy, that we nonetheless take no option off the table.

QUESTION: Well, he went a bit further than that. He said that it’s more than just being on the table; we’re ready now. Like all it’d be —

MS. NULAND: Well, as Secretary Panetta has —

QUESTION: — a snap of the fingers and all of a sudden we’ve got missiles headed towards wherever.

MS. NULAND: Well, I think Secretary Panetta has also spoken to the fact that it is the responsibility of his building to have appropriate contingency planning. So I don’t think that should be any surprise either.

QUESTION: Okay. So in other words, this is – it should not be a surprise that he could have said this about – the ambassador could have said this about any country?

MS. NULAND: Correct.

QUESTION: Because you have contingency plans to attack any country?

MS. NULAND: Except Buffalo, New York.

QUESTION: Well, that’s not a country.

MS. NULAND: Matt, are you comforted?

Any country?

So the Pentagon has a plan to attack Israel? And Canada? And Switzerland? No wonder it’s so difficult to trim the defense budget.

I know — it’s the Pentagon’s job to plan for all possible contingencies, but Lee’s question wasn’t about the existence of the plan, it was about what Shapiro meant when he said the U.S. is “ready” to attack Iran. A plan can sit in a file — readiness involves physical actions like deployment of additional aircraft carriers to the Gulf. Is that what Shapiro was talking about? Or was he just trying to sound tough in front of his Israeli friends?

The Associated Press reports: The U.S. has plans in place to attack Iran if necessary to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, Washington’s envoy to Israel said, days ahead of a crucial round of nuclear talks with Tehran.

Dan Shapiro’s message resonated Thursday far beyond the closed forum in which it was made: Iran should not test Washington’s resolve to act on its promise to strike if diplomacy and sanctions fail to pressure Tehran to abandon its disputed nuclear program.

Shapiro told the Israel Bar Association the U.S. hopes it will not have to resort to military force.

“But that doesn’t mean that option is not fully available. Not just available, but it’s ready,” he said. “The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready.”

Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, like energy production. The U.S. and Israel suspect Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, but differences have emerged in how to persuade Tehran to curb its program.

Washington says diplomacy and economic sanctions must be given a chance to run its course, and is taking the lead in the ongoing talks between six global powers and Iran.

Israel, while saying it would prefer a diplomatic solution, has expressed skepticism about these talks and says time is running out for military action to be effective.

President Barack Obama has assured Israel that the U.S. is prepared to take military action if necessary, and it is standard procedure for armies to draw up plans for a broad range of possible scenarios. But Shapiro’s comments were the most explicit sign yet that preparations have been stepped up.

In his speech, Shapiro acknowledged the clock is ticking.

“We do believe there is time. Some time, not an unlimited amount of time,” Shapiro said. “But at a certain point, we may have to make a judgment that the diplomacy will not work.”

NBC News reported in February: “Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.”

Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, describes Israel’s role in training MEK operatives to conduct assassinations inside Iran:

Trita Parsi writes:

Exactly when Israel’s ties with the MEK were established is unclear. But by the early 1990s, as I describe in my book, a relationship was forming, though its full nature and extent remains unknown.

At the time, Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh pushed Yitzhak Rabin to signal Tehran that Israel could also play the terrorist card. Sneh argued that whenever Iran used Islamic Jihad or Hamas to blow up a bus in Jerusalem, Israel should use the MEK to respond in kind in Tehran.

But cooler heads prevailed. Rabin refrained from entering into a public relationship with the organization. But the Labor government left the door to the MEK half open: it permitted the Iranian terrorist group to use two Israeli satellites to beam their TV broadcasts into Iran.

Even the MEK’s alleged revelation of the Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz in 2002 was based on information leaked to the organization by Israel, according to Israeli intelligence expert Ronen Bergman. Indeed, a former US State Department official told me recently that while Israel does not publicly acknowledge its ties to the MEK, Israeli officials privately tell the US that the MEK is “useful.”

All of this has fueled suspicions in DC that the current multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by the MEK to get off of the State Department’s terror list is bankrolled by Israeli sources. Dozens of former US officials have received tens and thousands of dollars in speakers’ fees from the MEK or its surrogates to speak out on their behalf. These former officials have likely violated US laws on material support to terrorist organizations, and several of them have had their records subpoenaed by the US Treasury in an ongoing investigation.

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Obama administration is moving to remove an Iranian opposition group from the State Department’s terrorism list, say officials briefed on the talks, in an action that could further poison Washington’s relations with Tehran at a time of renewed diplomatic efforts to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.

The exile organization, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MeK, was originally named as a terrorist entity 15 years ago for its alleged role in assassinating U.S. citizens in the years before the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and for allying with Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein against Tehran.

The MeK has engaged in an aggressive legal and lobbying campaign in Washington over the past two years to win its removal from the State Department’s list. The terrorism designation, which has been in place since 1997, freezes the MeK’s assets inside the U.S. and prevents the exile group from fundraising.

Senior U.S. officials said on Monday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has yet to make any final decision on the MeK’s status. But they said the State Department was looking favorably at delisting MeK if it continued cooperating by vacating a former paramilitary base inside Iraq, called Camp Ashraf, which the group had used to stage crossborder strikes into Iran.

The group has already renounced terrorism, which was the main earlier sticking point. Residents have resisted leaving the camp because they feared retribution if they were returned to Iran and political irrelevancy abroad.

The U.S. officials said Mrs. Clinton would make her final decision on the MeK’s status no less than 60 days after the last MeK member is relocated from Camp Ashraf to a new transit facility near Baghdad international airport. The U.S. is working with the United Nations to resettle Camp Ashraf residents in third countries. Roughly 1,200 people remain at the camp from an earlier population of over 3,000.

“The MeK’s cooperation in the successful and peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf…will be a key factor in her decision regarding the MeK’s [foreign-terrorist organization] status,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Monday.

Western and Iranian diplomats are concerned that the MeK issue could draw serious recriminations from Tehran, which has been fixated on neutralizing the group. Many of Iran’s top leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were targets of MeK attacks during the 1980s.

Iran has regularly accused Western countries of hypocrisy for providing shelter to MeK members while criticizing Tehran’s support for militant groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. “We believe that despite the claims that others make about fighting terrorism, they [Western nations] provide the most support for terrorist groups,” Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, said last week. “In Europe, the MeK has already been removed from the list of terrorist organizations and they are completely safe to continue their activities.” [Continue reading…]

Kevjn Lim writes: A new and perhaps surprising country took center stage recently in the ongoing row over Iran’s nuclear program – Azerbaijan. Citing anonymous “high-level sources” from U.S. diplomatic and intelligence circles, a controversial article in Foreign Policy at the end of March suggested the possibility that Israel might have been proffered the use of Azerbaijani airstrips for any strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The article attracted impassioned rebuttals from officials and observers alike. But the question remains: how did Azerbaijan get sucked into the controversy over Tehran’s nuclear plans in the first place?

Azerbaijan’s relations with Israel developed in earnest 20 years ago, and have grown significantly in depth and scope ever since. With bilateral trade currently hovering around $4 billion, Azerbaijan is Israel’s top trading partner among Muslim states, and the second largest source of Israel’s oil after Russia.

Conversely, Israel represents Azerbaijan’s second largest oil customer, and via the Ashkelon-Eilat Trans-Israel Pipeline, a crucial transit point for Azeri oil flowing to Asia’s growing markets. Israeli companies have also made no secret of their stake in the country’s other key, non-energy sectors, including agriculture and communications. However, it’s the military-defense aspect of bilateral cooperation that has kept Iran on its toes of late. [Continue reading…]

Gareth Porter reports: The U.S. Treasury Department’s claim of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda, which had become a key argument by right-wing activists who support war against Iran, has been discredited by former intelligence officials in the wake of publication of documents from Osama bin Laden’s files revealing a high level of antagonism between Al-Qaeda and Iran.

Three former intelligence officials with experience on Near East and South Asia told IPS they regard Treasury’s claim of a secret agreement between Iran and Al-Qaeda as false and misleading.

That claim was presented in a way that suggested it was supported by intelligence. It now appears, however, to have been merely a propaganda line designed to support the Barack Obama administration’s strategy of diplomatic coercion on Iran.

Under Secretary of Treasury David S. Cohen announced last July that the department was “exposing Iran’s secret deal with Al-Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” The charge was introduced in connection with the designation of an Al-Qaeda official named Yasin al-Suri as a terrorist subject to financial sanctions.

The Treasury claim has been embraced by the right-wing Weekly Standard and others aligned with hardline Israeli views on Iran, as primary source evidence of an alliance between Iran and Al-Qaeda.

But Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia, told IPS the allegation of a “secret deal” between Iran and Al-Qaeda “has never been backed up by any evidence that would justify such a term” and that it is “a highly misleading characterisation of interaction between Iran and Al-Qaeda….”

A month ago, Shaul Mofaz, the then newly-elected leader of Israel’s Kadima party said, “I intend to replace Netanyahu,” and insisted, “I will not join his government.” Some time between then and now, he changed his mind.

The New York Times reports: The chairman of the opposition in the Israeli Parliament agreed early Tuesday morning to join the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a surprise move that staves off early elections and creates a new unity coalition with a huge legislative majority, according to a spokesman for the chairman.

The spokesman, Yuval Harel, said that Shaul Mofaz, the newly elected head of the centrist Kadima Party, would become a special minister in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet “in charge of the process with the Palestinians.” Two other conditions of the agreement, which Mr. Harel said would be announced at a 10:30 a.m. news conference on Tuesday, were that the Parliament would pass legislation to require national or military service of all Israeli citizens, including ultra-Orthodox Jews, and to overhaul the electoral process itself. The agreement is scheduled to run until late next year.

Mr. Harel said that Mr. Mofaz, a former defense minister and military chief who ousted Tzipi Livni in last month’s Kadima primary, met with Mr. Netanyahu “at midnight at the prime minister’s home in Jerusalem and they signed a contract.”

“It was at the initiation of both sides,” Mr. Harel added. “This is the best way to get influence.”

Mr. Netanyahu had said in a speech to the convention of his right-leaning Likud Party on Sunday night that he wanted early elections to avoid the instability of a campaign season stretching more than a year. With his coalition divided over how to replace a law expiring Aug. 1 that exempted many religious Jews from military service, it seemed that the current government had decided to disband. Elections were scheduled for Sept. 4 rather than when the government’s term expires, in October 2013.

The deal, which was first reported online by The Jerusalem Post, came after the Israeli Parliament took the first steps Monday to dissolve itself. “Moments before the dissolution of the Knesset, a hasty meeting to establish a national unity government,” Carmel Shama-Cohen, a Likud member of Parliament, wrote on his Facebook wall.

With Kadima’s 28 seats in Parliament, Mr. Netanyahu will have a government that includes 96 of the 120 lawmakers, covering a broad section of the political spectrum.

A spokesman for the prime minister’s office said he could not confirm the online reports of the deal. But Mr. Harel said that Mr. Mofaz met in the early hours with the members of his faction and that they had all approved it, though the chairman is the only Kadima member who will get a minister’s portfolio and join in Mr. Netanyahu’s closed cabinet forums.

If taking over a peace process that has been hopelessly stalled seems a dubious prize, Mr. Harel said it would soon be proven otherwise. “That’s part of the deal,” he said. “To turn on the process.”

Larry Derfner writes: Why does a national leader decide to scrap new elections that he and everyone else knows he’s going to win by a landslide, which is what Bibi did last night? Because he’s got important work to do and he wants what’s called “industrial peace” – or, as Netanyahu himself put it, “stability.” Our national leader wants to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and he’s waiting for the right opportunity to do so – when the Obama administration is hard put to stop him, meaning sometime between now and the November 2 U.S. presidential elections. Starting such a war is going to require every gram of attention and effort Bibi can call forth, and he doesn’t want the pressure of elections and forming a new government as (huge) distractions, which he would have had from now into October if he’d gone ahead with elections in September. Now, without those elections and with an absolutely unshakable coalition, he can give his full concentration to saving Israel from annihilation, as he sees it.

Following a decision by the U.S. House of Representatives Defense Appropriations Subcommittee which just approved over $948 million in funding for Israel’s anti-missile defense programs, Israel will receive a record $4 billion in military aid in 2013.

The Jewish Press reports: Approximately $679 million of the funding will go to the Iron Dome, thanks in large part to legislation initiated last month by Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), chairwoman and ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, respectively.

The remaining $269 million will go to Israel’s other anti-missile initiatives: the short-range David’s Sling ($149.7 million), and the current long-range Arrow anti-ballistic missile system and its successor the Arrow 3 ($119.3 million). These projects, unlike the Iron Dome, are joint Israel-US projects.

While the increase in funding for the Iron Dome was expected, with the Department of Defense stating in March that it “intends to request an appropriate level of funding from Congress to support such acquisitions based on Israeli requirements and production capacity,” the funding for the other projects represents an increase of $169 million over the Obama administration’s proposed number.

The Jerusalem Post reports: A former senior Pentagon official said Saturday that now is not an opportune time for an Israeli strike on Iran, and that any such strike would inevitably draw in the United States.

Colin Kahl, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East until December, said that any Israeli strike that prompted an Iranian retaliation would affect the United States.

“Even if it’s just retaliation against Israel, the Americans will be in it from the beginning,” he said, since the US would provide assistance to Israeli defense and because Iran would see an Israeli attack as inseparable from an American attack.

Kahl assessed that the Iranian response would be far-reaching and include rocket attacks on American embassies in the region, using area allies and proxies and threatening the functioning of the Strait of Hormuz.

“No one should delude themselves that … the prospect of America getting dragged into this is minor. It’s not,” he warned.

Kahl also laid out conditions that he felt should be in place before any country undertook a strike on Iran: that other options such as diplomacy and sanctions have run their course; that Iran had clearly decided to move toward nuclear weaponization; that the military action could seriously degrade Tehran’s capabilities; that an international coalition could be maintained after a strike.

“One reason I’ve been so critical about the Israelis taking action against Iran’s nuclear program is that at this moment they don’t satisfy any of those four criteria,” he said.

The Los Angeles Times reports: In what would be a significant concession, Obama administration officials say they could support allowing Iran to maintain a crucial element of its disputed nuclear program if Tehran took other major steps to curb its ability to develop a nuclear bomb.

U.S. officials said they might agree to let Iran continue enriching uranium up to 5% purity, which is the upper end of the range for most civilian uses, if its government agrees to the unrestricted inspections, strict oversight and numerous safeguards that the United Nations has long demanded.

Such a deal would face formidable obstacles. Iran has shown little willingness to meet international demands. And a shift in the U.S. position that Iran must halt all enrichment activities is likely to prompt strong objections from Israeli leaders; the probable Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney; and many members of Congress.

But a consensus has gradually emerged among U.S. and other officials that Iran is unlikely to agree to a complete halt in enrichment. Maintaining an unconditional demand that it do so could make it impossible to reach a negotiated deal to stop the country’s nuclear program, thereby avoiding a military attack.

The New York Times reports: One day after Israeli newspapers reported that the nation’s top general had said economic and diplomatic pressures against Iran were beginning to succeed, his superior, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, said Thursday that the chances “appear low” that the Iranian government would bow to international pressure and halt its nuclear program.

The remarks by Israel’s top defense officials added to uncertainty over the unity of the nation’s leadership in its approach to Iran’s nuclear program, which Israel fears is aimed at producing weapons. While Israeli officials insisted Thursday that there was no disagreement, the comments by Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz to Israeli journalists did not appear to line up completely either with the tone of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, or the assessment of Mr. Barak.

“The truth must be told: The chance that this level of pressures will make Iran respond to the international demand to halt the program in an irreversible manner — the chance of that appears low,” Mr. Barak said during an Independence Day celebration in Herzliya. “I will be happy to be proved wrong. But that is my best assessment, and it is based on years of tracking Iranian maneuvering and on historical precedents of North Korea and Pakistan.”

Mr. Barak’s remarks came even as top officials tried to erase the perception of disagreement over Iran. The day began with General Gantz’s telling reporters “there is really no distance” between his view and that of the prime minister, according to an aide who was with him. But it was unclear whether the general was being pressed to walk back from his comments, if he felt his message was misconstrued or if it was all part of a broader strategy of trying to offer dual messages for different audiences.

In any case, the discrepancies, however slight, were self-evident.

In an interview published Wednesday in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, General Gantz described the Iranian government as “very rational.” Mr. Netanyahu had told CNN on Tuesday that he would not count “on Iran’s rational behavior.”

General Gantz said Thursday morning that he thought Iran would ultimately decide against building a weapon because of sanctions and the threat of a military strike from multiple nations; hours later, Mr. Barak said he thought it unlikely that the sanctions would succeed and that he did not see Iran as “rational in the Western sense of the word, meaning people seeking a status quo and the outlines of a solution to problems in a peaceful manner.”

Mr. Barak’s extensive foreign policy comments were quite unusual, given that they were offered during what was billed as a holiday toast, but hewed closely to the positions he has long stated regarding Iran and its nuclear program. He also warned of “a nuclear arms race” with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and “even the new Egypt,” calling Iran “a challenge for all the world.”

General Gantz, meanwhile, hinted Thursday that Israel had international backing for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying: “The military force is ready. Not only our forces, but other forces as well.”

The Washington Post reports: Israel’s military chief said in an interview published Wednesday that he believes Iran will choose not to build a nuclear bomb, an assessment that contrasted with the gloomier statements of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pointed to differences over the Iran issue at the top levels of Israeli leadership.

The comments by Lt. Gen Benny Gantz, who said international sanctions have begun to show results, could relieve pressure on the Obama administration and undercut efforts by Israeli political leaders to urge the United States to get as tough as possible on Iran.

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have repeatedly stressed that they do not think sanctions and diplomacy will persuade Iran to halt a nuclear program they describe as a military one, and they warn that the time to stop it is quickly shrinking.

But the Israeli security establishment is believed to be far less convinced about the urgency of military action. Gantz made his own reservations clear in a handful of rare interviews with Israeli newspapers, offering comments that analysts said seemed intended to inject nuance into a debate that has reached frenzied heights this spring. Speaking to the newspaper Haaretz, he said that the Israeli military would be ready to act if ordered, but that he did not think that this year would be “necessarily go, no-go.”

Gantz described Iranian leaders as “very rational people” who are still mulling whether to “go the extra mile” and produce nuclear weapons.

“I believe he would be making an enormous mistake, and I don’t think he will want to go the extra mile,” Gantz said of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. While Gantz cautioned that Khamenei could still change his mind, the supreme leader has said repeatedly that Iran does not intend to build a nuclear weapon, and that its uranium enrichment program is for peaceful purposes.

Although striking in its bluntness, Gantz’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear intentions did not differ dramatically from comments made publicly and privately by other current and former Israeli officials in recent months. Others have also concluded, for example, that Iran intends to achieve nuclear weapons capability but would stop short of assembling and testing a bomb, steps that would almost certainly incur a military response from Israel and perhaps the United States.

But Gantz’s comments differed starkly in tone from those made recently by Netanyahu about the diplomatic efforts of the United States and other world powers.

Shmuel Rosner writes: The seven days between Holocaust Memorial Day (last Thursday) and Independence Day (this Thursday) are packed with national symbolism. Seven days to remind the Jews of Israel of their trajectory from near annihilation to sovereign revival. Seven days for much sorrow and much pride.

And seven perfect days for political messaging.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the season last week by dismissing those who “prefer that we not speak of a nuclear Iran as an existential threat” and “do not like it when I speak such uncomfortable truths.” These “truths” are in fact a matter of much debate, and yet Netanyahu can’t really go wrong asserting them as fact. However remote the possibility that a nuclearized Iran would actually spell calamity for Israel, that outcome is too serious not to strike fear.

It wasn’t the first time Netanyahu used the specter of the Holocaust to characterize the danger posed by Iran. I remember hearing him make the case at the annual gathering of the Jewish Federations of North America in Los Angeles in 2006. “It is 1938,” he said back then. “Iran is Germany, and it is about to arm itself with nuclear weapons.”

Six years later, for Netanyahu at least, it’s still 1938 — maybe 1939 — and Iran is still comparable to Nazi Germany. During his speech last week, Netanyahu told his many critics that those who do not understand in the same terms as he does the gravity of the threat “have learned nothing from the Holocaust.”

Apparently one of those know-nothings is the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. “Iran is a danger, but to claim that it is creating a second Auschwitz? I compare nothing to the Holocaust,” Wiesel told the Globes last week. He believes that to invoke the Holocaust like this is to trivialize it.

Yes, to invoke the Holocaust in response to every Israeli fear is to trivialize it — but it also isolates the Holocaust from the horror of a war in which as many as 70 million people died. Those who beat the drums of war need to remember how hard war is to contain and how unpredictable its outcome. Netanyahu doesn’t just trivialize the Holocaust; he trivializes war itself.

The New York Times reports: Iran disconnected several of its main Persian Gulf oil terminals from the Internet on Monday, local news media reported, as technicians were struggling to contain what they said were intensifying cyberattacks on the Oil Ministry and its affiliates.

Iranian officials said the virus attack, which began in earnest on Sunday afternoon, had not affected oil production or exports, because the industry is still primarily mechanical and does not rely on the Internet. Officials said they were disconnecting the oil terminals and possibly some other installations in an effort to combat the virus.

“Fortunately our international oil selling division has not been affected,” said a high-level manager at the Oil Ministry who asked not to be mentioned for security reasons. “There is no panic, but this shows we have shortcomings in our security systems.”

There were some reports that the virus had forced widespread Internet shutdowns. “The ministry has disconnected all oil facilities, operations and even oil rigs from the Internet to prevent this virus from spreading,” said another Oil Ministry official who asked to remain anonymous, because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the attack. “Everybody at the ministry is working overtime to prevent this.” His assertion about the extent of the shutdowns could not be independently verified.

The Iranian Students’ News Agency said that the virus, called “wiper” by its creator, had successfully erased information on hard disks at the Oil Ministry’s headquarters, a hulking black glass skyscraper on Taleghani Street in central Tehran. The ministry appears to have been the initial target of the virus, which the Iranian authorities say they first noticed in March but apparently were unable to dismantle.

The Web sites of several oil related institutions, like the National Iranian Oil Company, which handles most oil sales in the country, were down on Sunday and Monday. It was unclear whether the virus took the sites down or if they were switched off by the Oil Ministry.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Iran has been forced to deploy more than half its fleet of supertankers to store oil at anchorage in the Gulf as buyers of its crude cut back because of sanctions, two Iran-based shipping sources said.

The sources, who are familiar with operations at Iran’s main export terminal Kharg Island in the north of the Gulf, said 14 of National Iranian Tanker Company’s (NITC) fleet of 25 very large crude carriers, each loaded with about 2 million barrels of oil, are now at anchor acting as floating storage.

A further five of Iran’s nine Suezmax tankers, with capacity of one million barrels, are also parked offshore with oil aboard.

Robert Mackey writes: In a reminder that Persian rhetoric is not always easy for English-speakers to interpret, a senior Israeli official has acknowledged that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, never actually said that Israel “must be wiped off the map.”

Those words were attributed to Mr. Ahmadinejad in 2005, in English translations of his speech to a “World Without Zionism” conference that October. As my colleague Ethan Bronner reported the next year, one problem was translating a metaphorical turn of phrase in Persian that has no exact English equivalent — there was, for instance, no mention of a map — and there was a heated debate about whether the original statement was a threat or a prediction.

Last week, Teymoor Nabili of Al Jazeera suggested during an interview with Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister of intelligence and atomic energy, that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s rhetorical flourish had been misinterpreted. “This idea that Iran wants to wipe Israel out,” Mr. Nabili said, “now that’s a common trope that is put about by a lot of people in Israel, a lot of people in the United States, but as we know Ahmadinejad didn’t say that he plans to exterminate Israel, nor did he say that Iran’s policy is to exterminate Israel.”

In response, Mr. Meridor said that Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iran’s ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had said repeatedly “that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right, but, ‘It will not survive.’ ”

Mr. Meridor also pointed out that Iran’s leaders have continued to deny Israel’s right to exist and used highly inflammatory terms to describe the state. After Ayatollah Khamenei compared Israel to a cancerous tumor in February — adding, it “should be cut off” — Mr. Meridor noted those remarks were echoed by the president just last month. “Israel is unnatural, it will not exist, it’s on the verge of collapse,” Mr. Meridor said. “When you hear this from these people, you need to take it seriously.”

As the Guardian columnist Jonathan Steele explained in 2006, a more direct translation of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s remarks would be: “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,” echoing a statement once made by the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. [Continue reading…]