[Jerusalem Post] Herb Keinon - Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sat in the Kremlin on October 18 and told Russian President Vladimir Putin the Iranians needed to fear that if they continued with their nuclear march, "something will happen to them that they don't want." That was on October 18, 2006. Exactly a year later, Olmert was back in the Kremlin. The urgent manner in which Olmert dropped everything and jetted off to Moscow Thursday for a three-hour meeting with Putin indicates that Israel has changed phases. It has gone from treating the Iranian problem as an international one, that the world has to deal with, to taking steps indicating that it sees it increasingly as an Israeli problem, that might necessitate an Israeli solution. Nobody is tiptoeing around the possibility of military action against Iran any more. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner raised the possibility of war a few weeks ago. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown didn't rule anything out in comments he made in October, and President George W. Bush said Wednesday a nuclear Iran could trigger World War III. Regardless of comments Putin made in Iran that there was no concrete evidence Teheran is after nuclear weapons, the former KGB man knows full well what the Iranians want. Putin knows the facts, and the problem is not with Moscow's intel. The problem is with Russia's own interpretation of its interests.
2007-10-19 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive