New Zealand knew of potential attack on Iran by Israel before it happened, Winston Peters says
Foreign Minister Winston Peters says New Zealand was aware of talk about a potential attack on Iran by Israel before it happened.
The two countries have been
launching deadly attacks
on each other since Israel first struck Iran on Friday.
Winston Peters said the government was "surprised, but not totally surprised".
"There had been talk of that but not in a way the New Zealand government was remotely involved in, or aware of.
"But our job is to keep our ears open and to be watching circumstances world-wide," he said, when asked to explain what that meant.
Asked if the United States advised about the attack, Winston Peters said people should not rush to judgement at this point.
He said any
New Zealanders in Israel or Iran who could leave, should do so
.
He earlier outlined New Zealand's position on the conflict: "We want diplomacy - as we've just engaged in, in Europe recently and in Jakarta in the last few days. We want de-escalation. We want a two-state solution with Israel and Palestinians living in peace and security side by side.
"We want peace and we want balance and calm, and the fact to be acknowledged that the problems in the Middle East don't come from one bad actor alone.
"We don't want New Zealanders in harm's way, we don't want a nuclear Iran, we don't want civilians starving or dying in military conflict and we don't want Hamas holding hostages and terrorising Palestinians, and we don't want Israel occupying Palestinian lands."
He said the current state of global affairs was probably the worst he remembered in his lifetime since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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Scoop
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On The West's War Against Iran
Clearly, the world needs to stop talking about Israel's right to defend itself, and start talking about the world's need to defend itself against Israel. Gaza, Lebanon, have become the stepping stones in Israel's plan to expand its rule, unrivalled, over all the land between the river and the sea. Iran was on the cusp of making a nuclear weapon? Even the crackpot American Congresswoman politician Marjorie Taylor Greene has been un-impressed by that excuse, noting that Israel 'has been saying the same thing for the past 20 years'. Donald Trump's intelligence boss Tulsi Gabbard recently testified under oath to a Congressional hearing that Iran was not engaged in building a nuclear weapon: Trump's intelligence czar Tulsi Gabbard, another anti-war figure, testified in March that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.'The IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,' Gabbard said, while noting, however, that Iran's enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels, unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons. Iran is surrounded by enemies. Like North Korea, it may well regard having a nuclear weapon capability as its best self-defence against invasion. Yet even if one treated the nuclear enrichment- to-nuclear bomb progression as inevitable – which it wasn't - can Israel actually succeed in destroying Iran's well-protected nuclear facilities? Probably not. Not unless there is regime change in Teheran, which has long been the end purpose of Israel's aggression. Israel is unlikely to succeed in this aim, either. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in recent days, called once again on the 'proud people of Iran' to stand up for their 'freedom from an evil and repressive regime.' As this Al Jazeera columnist has pointed out: The assumption that Iranians would simply do Israel's bidding as it bombs them relentlessly and unilaterally, seems akin to the notion that if Israel starves and exterminates the Palestinians in Gaza to the required extent, they would rise against Hamas and remove it from power. Even if one bought the notion that all the Iranian people have been waiting for is an Israeli strike to move against the regime, Al Jazeera says, such beliefs demonstrate a profound lack of understanding of the wider historical forces that shape Iranian politics: While many Iranians undoubtedly oppose the Islamic Republic, Iranians of all political persuasions are consistently 'patriotic', committed to supporting Iranian sovereignty and independence from any attempts by external elements to impose their agendas on their country. For that reason, any invading force should be careful about what would come in the wake of their initial 'victory.' Israel, the US and any puppets they install in power would face being mired for a generation in a war of resistance that would dwarf what happened in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. Shades of 2003 Talking of decision to attack Iran (even while talks between the US and Iran on limiting Iran's nuclear ambitions were still happening in Oman) shares that equally cynical historical precedent. Back in March 2003, the US had used the 'weapons of mass destruction' excuse to justify its invasion of Iraq, an attack it launched even while the UN arms inspectors were still at work inside Iraq, looking for those mythical WMDs. Then as now, we are not talking about a pre-emptive war against an external existential threat. This is a war of aggression against a sovereign nation, and it is being waged by an expansionist Israel, with US approval and support. Israel would not have proceeded without getting a green light from the US, which began issuing travel advisories and moving its diplomats out of the region in the week before the attacks began. Beyond the US, Israel can always count on other Western nations to do next to nothing to halt its aggression, or to punish it in any significant way. All year, the West has been bending over backwards to avoid looking as though it is criticising Israel for its genocidal use of starvation as a weapon of war against the two million Palestinian civilian inhabitants of Gaza. For example: when the leaders of Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand announced sanctions against two extremist members of the Israeli Cabinet, the co-signing leaders made a truly pathetic distinction: These measures are directed at individuals who directly contribute to extremist settler violence," said Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand. 'The measures are not directed against the state of Israel itself." Right. So, what on earth would Israel have to do – and what would a collectively responsible Israeli Cabinet have to sign off on - before New Zealand could gather up the courage to impose sanctions on the state of Israel? To state the ago, Israel went well past the point of proportionate retaliation for the Hamas terrorist actions of October 7,2023. Israel's subsequent actions in Gaza continue to be unfathomably cruel and evil. What mother or father, watching their sons and daughters being systematically starved to death before their eyes, would not risk crowding and jostling for the inadequate amounts of dried food (much of it useless without fuel or water) that is being dribbled out through a handful of privately-run US aid centres – and not through the far more extensive and competent UN aid facilities? Desperate Palestinians are being drawn by the hunger of their families into congregating outside these sham US aid centres, where scores of them are then being shot down by Israeli troops on a daily basis. Food is being used as a lethal magnet to facilitate further mass killings, while New Zealand – and the rest of the Western world- continue to urge both sides to show restraint. Ludicrously, we continue to call on Israel to abide by the norms of international law that the IDF has consistently flouted in Gaza for the past 18 months. Nearly 20,000 dead Palestinian children later, and with the surviving children being slowly and deliberately deprived of food and water, we are still imploring Israel to show restraint. Iran's bomb Reportedly, Israel's latest attacks targeted and killed Ali Shamkani, Iran's chief negotiator in the US-led nuclear containment talks in Oman. Israel has also killed at least six of Iran's leading nuclear scientists, including Fereidoun Abbas, the former head of Iran's Atomic Energy Association. (Back in 2010, Abbas had been seriously wounded when a motorcyclist detonated a magnetic bomb under his car.) Since 2010, Israel has been steadily murdering a succession of Iran nuclear scientists, who had been working on the country's development of nuclear energy in order to meet the country's long-term and entirely legitimate energy needs. Because of the potential that further nuclear enrichment might someday result in the development of a bomb, the Obama administration struck a deal in 2015 with the then-relatively liberal administration of Hassan Rouhani in Teheran. Under the terms of that 2015 deal, Iran agreed to desist from added enrichment, in return for economic sanctions being lifted, and for Iran being enabled to trade with the West. In the wake of this opening, a more democratic society might have been able to emerge in Iran. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors at the time, Iran lived up to its side of the bargain. America, however, did not. Once elected in 2016, Donald Trump immediately scrapped this deal, and imposed even heavier trade sanctions. By doing so, Trump fatally undermined Iran's political liberals, and confirmed the predictions made by the regime's hard-liners that the US could never be trusted. By scrapping the 2015 deal, Trump also forced Iran into an enduring dependence on China as the only major market for its oil. This entirely avoidable outcome gave China a reliable proxy state in the Middle East, and a platform for influence that it had never had before. Fast forward to this year. Nearly 10 years after Iran had restricted its nuclear ambitions in return for trade advantages that it never received, Trump was back again at the bargaining table in Oman – offering Iran what one critic called 'a dime-store version' of the same deal that Trump had torn up in 2016. Regardless, Iran continued to talk, while preparing for the Israeli attack that everyone knew was coming, whatever concessions Iran offered. Few will shed tears over the likely fall of the stupidly brutal and corrupt regime in Teheran, which lost its revolutionary lustre decades ago. For example: even on the cusp of the Israeli attack, the religious authorities in Teheran were engaged in a crackdown on ordinary citizens walking dogs in public, or riding with them in cars. Allegedly, a prayer said when one has a dog hair on one's clothing will not be effective. ( I'd love to know how this was tested.) To repeat: Iran will not be an easy conquest. The country has had long experience of being subjected to external aggression and to the rule of foreign-backed puppets. For example, a US/UK funded coup in 1953 toppled the democratically elected Mossadegh government, and brought the Shah to power. As mentioned above, if Iran's current government is overthrown by external forces it will be extremely difficult to govern, given the underground resistance that will surely flourish in the wake of any foreign-led regime change. might the US and Israel like to install as the ruler of a newly 'democratic' Iran? That amenable puppet could well be the 65 year old Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of the Shah deposed in 1979. The more things are changed in Iran, the more they are likely to stay the same. Footnote: Meanwhile, back in Gaza: to discredit and divide support for Hamas, the Israelis have reportedly armed and assisted a criminal Palestinian militia led by a Rafah resident called Yasser Abu Shabab. 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