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Ehud Barak Meets with JCS Vice Chairman Admiral Winnefeld in Israel
8 September 2012
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak met Thursday with the Vice Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. James Winnefeld in Tel Aviv, where they discussed the Iranian issue. Winnefeld just spent a week in Israel to try to prevent Obama from provoking the Israelis to attack Iran and launch a thermonuclear world war. "The challenge is shared but the clocks tick differently," Barak said at a pre-Rosh Hashanah celebration held by his Independence Party after the meeting. "Israel is maintaining its right to make sovereign decisions, and the U.S. respects that," he added. "We cannot ignore the Americans’ impressive readiness for dealing with the Iranian challenge," the Defense Minister said. He noted that the U.S. is deploying forces in the Persian Gulf, a measure of "utmost importance." However, he stressed that the [Israeli] "government is the only one to decide how to act." Barak has recently been saying privately that he now opposes attacking Iran, but clearly the U.S. Joint Chiefs don’t believe in his conversion, or they would not have sent Adm. Winnefeld with yet another stern warning. Unlike Barak, Minister Shalom Simhon, also a member of the Independence Party, said during the event, "I wish for another year without wars." "The man sitting before us [Barak] is a level-headed man, and we’ve seen a government before us that waged two wars," he added. |