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Israel Calls for "Paralyzing" Sanctions on Iran

(Reuters) Fredrik Dahl and Michael Shields - Iran's ruling clerics could use nuclear weapons to strengthen their grip on power and the world must urgently impose crippling sanctions to prevent them from building such arms, Israel's defense minister said on Sunday. Ehud Barak also predicted that Syria's ruling Assad family could fall within weeks and that this would be a "blessing" for the Middle East. Barak said he still believed that it was "time for urgent, coherent, paralyzing" punitive steps targeting Iranian oil trade and its central bank. "Nothing short of this kind of sanctions will work," he said. "This regime in Iran, the ayatollahs, they will be not be there I believe in 10 or 15 years. It is against the nature of the Iranian people and what happens all around the world. But if they turn nuclear they might assure another layer of immunity, political immunity for the regime in the same way that Kim Jong-il assured his," Barak said, referring to the North Korean leader and that country's development of nuclear weapons. He suggested that the Libyan conflict could have taken a different course if Muammar Gaddafi had declared at the outset that "he has three or four nuclear devices."
2011-12-12 00:00:00
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