[Indeed. And what country keeps pounding the panic button about Iran?]
October 10, 2004 Israel Trades One Nightmare for Another By STEVEN ERLANGER
JERUSALEM — One of the major winners of America's war on terrorism has been nuclear-bound, terrorism-supporting Iran, and it is giving the Israelis nightmares.
Israelis have been targets of terrorists since long before American cities were struck three years ago - a fact driven home last week by bombings that killed dozens of vacationing Israelis at three resorts in Egypt. But the nightmares about Iran are of another dimension.
Iran - large, ambitious and run by radical clerics committed to the destruction of the Jewish state - is seen by Israelis as the most obvious and urgent threat today to Israel's very existence.
The overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan eliminated one of Iran's main fundamentalist rivals to its east, while the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to its west eliminated Iran's main military rival in the Persian Gulf. Not only is Mr. Hussein gone, but much of Iraq is in disorder, presenting opportunities for Iran to meddle in Iraq's heavily Shiite south, even to create a kind of Iranistan there.
So the Israelis who plan for this country's security confront a paradox: While they are relieved that the American invasion of Iraq removed a sworn enemy, they are increasingly nervous about the opportunities that the same invasion has opened for another. And they see the Middle East moving from conventional military rivalries to far more dangerous nuclear rivalries.
That is why Israeli officials have been threatening for months to take "the necessary steps,'' as Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz puts it, to prevent Iran, his birthplace, from developing nuclear weapons.
Behind that threat is a hope that the rest of the world can persuade Iran, with threats and diplomacy, to drop the parts of its nuclear program that could be used for armaments. But Israeli officials say they have not had great success so far in encouraging a preoccupied Washington, a conflicted Russia and a divided Europe to do much about Iran except talk anxiously about it.
Iran's program - which its leaders maintain is for peaceful purposes - is far more sophisticated and widespread than the single Iraqi nuclear reactor Israel bombed in 1981, and Israeli officials make clear that they do not want to act alone against Iran....
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/weekinreview/10erla.html?pagewanted=all&position=>
Carl