| Talkback | |
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Title: | Reporting from the Front Line of Israel`s Secret War | |||
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| Name: | Joseph E . post 2 | | |||
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| City: | Givatayim | State: | Israel | | |
| FP: In the book, you point to many failures that occurred over the years in the fight against Iran. Was this your goal when you set out to write the book? RB: I set out to write a book about the secret war with Iran. After I finished, I realized that it was actually a book about the failures during that war. History wrote itself perfectly. FP: Where is Iran on the nuclear timeline today? And is it such a great threat to Israel as the government makes it out to be? RB: There are different assessments among the intelligence agencies about Iran`s progress. The recent American National Intelligence Estimate report demonstrates those differences over the way Iran is perceived to be, or not to be, progressing with its nuclear program. People are always making comparisons with the claims made before the Iraq war, which turned out not to be true. But this is wrong; there is a difference between the two. The Iranians speak openly about their nuclear program. The Iranians even claim that they are more advanced than they really are. There is no disagreement that they are developing nuclear capabilities. The question is whether their program has a military application. Ernst Bergman, one of the founding fathers of the Israeli nuclear program (who some mistakenly have stated I`m related to) once said that there is no such thing as a nuclear program for civilian purposes and then another program for military purposes. They are one and the same. The Americans, in the NIE, did not say that Iran is not developing a nuclear program. What they said was that from 2003 on, they do not have proof that Iran is moving forward with its military program. Israel claims differently, and I cannot say which is correct. FP: Over the years, we have seen estimates of the date that Iran will have nuclear weapons change quite often. Once it was 2003, then 2005, 2010, and now 2009. As someone plugged into the intelligence community, how do you explain this constantly changing timeline? RB: There are three explanations: The first is that there is a lack of knowledge, since we don`t really know what is going on there. The Iranians are very sensitive to intelligence infiltrations, both electronic communications and human intelligence. Secondly, the intelligence community has its own agenda, and it too was traumatized by Iraq and by their having warned of something that [wasn`t there]. We in Israel are traumatized by not knowing about the relationship between Iran and Pakistani scientist [and nuclear black marketeer] A.Q. Khan. And thirdly, there are more and more delays in the Iranian program, due to international efforts. |
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