Burns: We Have to Confront Iran

Iran must be confronted, the No. 2 official in the State Department said at the Herzliya Conference on Sunday, shortly after a five-hour meeting with Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, in charge of Israel's strategic dialogue with the US.

US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns said, "We have to confront Iran." Iran, Burns said on the first day of the conference, "is our most important challenge, a country with a radical agenda, a president that asserts that the Holocaust did not occur."

Live video feed from the Herzliya conference Burns vowed that the US "will continue to assert the right and the responsibility to maintain stability in the region.

"The Iranians have played a negative role in all the recent conflicts [in the Middle East]," Burns said, adding that while the US did not seek a confrontation with Iran, "no options were off the table."

Burns, along with US Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, who also participated in the conference, met with Mofaz and Gabi Ashkenazi, currently the Defense Ministry director-general and the leading candidate to replace Dan Halutz as chief of General Staff.

Following the meeting Mofaz told the conference that 2007 will be "a year of decision."

"This is the year when the world will have the responsibility of determining whether the Middle East will face a nuclear arms race, the strengthening of the radical axis and the strengthening of world terrorism, or whether it will be possible to lead the Middle East to new horizons, to a moderate, pragmatic and stable future."

Mofaz said that it was necessary to look reality in the face and say clearly: "Iran is the heart of the problem in the Middle East, it is the most urgent threat facing the world, and this is a problem that needs to be dealt with before it is too late." Saying that a Middle East with a nuclear Iran "will not be the same Middle East," Mofaz also stressed that Iran with a nuclear weapon "is an existential threat to Israel. This is the time to stop Iran," he said, "before it is too late."

Burns added that the American administration viewed Iran as increasingly more isolated in the international community. He said that "Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are US allies," later listing only four countries which support Iran: Belarus, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela. "With friends like that," Burns said to chuckles in the audience, "you can finish the sentence..."

Meanwhile, many of the American and Israeli analysts - both official and unofficial - at the conference were cautiously optimistic that Iranian influence in the Middle East could be curtailed, and that this process had already begun. The causes: isolation in the international system, economic mismanagement and a growing opposition to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"The Saudis have stopped hiding the fact that there are joint interests for Israel and Saudi Arabia, and [Saudi officials] are telling the media that the Iranian threat is greater than the Israeli one," Col. (res.) Eran Lerman, director of the Israel/Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee and a former senior IDF intelligence analyst, told The Jerusalem Post.

"It is ironic that [the Sunni Arab states] have lived for two generations with the assumption that the Jews have a nuclear weapon, but only when the Shi'ites are developing one do we hear [that they are developing their own options]," Lerman continued.

Line from Kevin Costner's movie, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves -

"Point me toward danger Hazim, I'm ready!"

It's not that he asserts that the Holocost didn't occur....it's that he wants to push a button to have another one ASAP. Sure he's crazy, but he is also smart enough to be very dangerous. I'm sitting at my window and watching WWIII beginning. Only question now is who is going to go first.

"listing only four countries which support Iran: Belarus, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela. "With friends like that," Burns said to chuckles in the audience, "you can finish the sentence..." "

Don't forget to add Russia and China to the pile, particularly Russia who has in the last year, began sucking up to Islam. To Russia, terrorists have again become a useful tool instead of combating them as part of the WOT.

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