One of the great cliches of war-craft is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This expression comes to mind in considering the plausibility of a claim made in my recent conversation with a weapons dealer. He thinks that this June, Israel will use Saudi Arabia as its base for an attack on Iran’s suspected nuclear site.

This weapons dealer has been traveling to Tel Aviv and Jeddah to meet with military leaders who are loading up on his specific weapon category in anticipation of a war with Iran. According to my source — who is planning another trip to both countries soon to sell more weapons – the military leaders are looking to launch the attack in June....

BEIRUT - The EU should get ready for Palestine's renewed push to upgrade its UN status and stop calling for "illusory" peace talks with Israel, a senior Palestinian politician has said.

Palestine grabbed world attention in New York last September when it asked the UN for full membership and in November when the UN's cultural agency, Unesco, let it join.

The UN campaign then vanished from sight. But Souheil Natour - a legal scholar and a senior politician in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) - told EUobserver in an interview that it will come back on the agenda after Palestinian elections, expected in May or June....

Hamas and Fatah have lately ratcheted up their rhetoric against Israel in a clear bid to distract attention from their failure to end their power struggle.

By backing a "popular resistance" against Israel, Hamas and Fatah are hoping to distract attention from their failure to end their dispute and form a unity government.

The two rival Palestinian parties are hoping that Palestinians would turn their anger and frustration toward Israel and not toward either of them....

The first law of human affairs is force. Before all other laws, the ballot box and appeals to reason is that primal law that enforces submission through violence. Islam is a religion built on that first law, forcing everyone to choose whether they will be the oppressors or the oppressed, whether they will be a Muslim or a Dhimmi.

The organizing force of Islam can be seen in urban gangs which react in much the same way to being ‘disrespected’. When your religion is little more than an entitlement to be a thug, to elevate your way of life over that of everyone else, violent outrage over even the most minute sign of disrespect is to be expected. And when your beliefs are little more than an excuse to hate, rioting over a slight is the sacrament of your faith.

Islam did not expand through the persuasiveness of its illiterate child abusing founder, at least not beyond the initial persuasion that allowed him to gather bandit troops to raid, murder and enslave the multicultural peoples of the desert until there was nothing left but Muslims and their slaves. It expanded by force and it has gone on expanding by force. Faced with advanced civilizations, it has reacted with the violent petulant fury that is its spiritual heritage....

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan have held talks today to discuss how the newly appointed Joint Special Envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League for Syria can help to end the deadly violence gripping the country and find a peaceful political solution.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today appointed Norman Farrell of Canada as the prosecutor of the United Nations-backed independent tribunal set up to try those responsible for the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today appointed Norman Farrell of Canada as the prosecutor of the United Nations-backed independent tribunal set up to try those responsible for the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

The head of United Nations relief operations said today that she was "deeply disappointed" that she has not yet been able to visit Syria to assess the humanitarian situation and meet with some of the country's top officials.

Israeli officials say they won't warn the US if they decide to launch a preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one US intelligence official familiar with the discussions. The pronouncement, delivered in a series of private, top-level conversations, sets a tense tone ahead of meetings in the coming days at the White House and Capitol Hill.

Israeli officials said that if they eventually decide a strike is necessary, they would keep the Americans in the dark to decrease the likelihood that the US would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel's potential attack. The US has been working with the Israelis for months to persuade them that an attack would be only a temporary setback to Iran's nuclear program.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak delivered the message to a series of top-level US visitors to the country, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House national security adviser and the director of national intelligence, and top US lawmakers, all trying to close the trust gap between Israel and the US over how to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions....

In world politics, irrational does not mean “crazy.” It does mean valuing certain goals or objectives even more highly than national survival. In such rare but not unprecedented circumstances, the irrational country leadership may still maintain a distinct rank-order of preferences. Unlike trying to influence a “crazy” state, therefore, it is possible to effectively deter an irrational adversary.

Iran is not a “crazy,” or wholly unpredictable, state. Although it is conceivable that Iran’s political and clerical leaders could sometime welcome the Shiite apocalypse more highly than avoiding military destruction, they could also remain subject to alternative deterrent threats. Faced with such circumstances, Israel could plan on basing stable and long-term deterrence of an already-nuclear Iran upon various unorthodox threats of reprisal or punishment. Israel’s only other fully rational option could be a prompt and still-purposeful preemption.

Picured left - At the time this photo was made, smoke billowed 20,000 feet above Hiroshima while smoke from the burst of the first atomic bomb had spread over 10,000 feet on the target at the base of the rising column (6 August 1945).

Today, a nuclear Iran appears almost a fait accompli. For Israel, soon to be deprived of any cost-effective preemption options, this means forging a strategy to coexist or “live with” a nuclear Iran. Such an essential strategy of nuclear deterrence would call for reduced ambiguity about certain of its strategic forces; enhanced and partially disclosed nuclear targeting options; substantial and partially disclosed programs for active defenses; recognizable steps to ensure the survivability of its nuclear retaliatory forces; and, to bring all of these elements together in a coherent mission plan, a comprehensive strategic doctrine....