Barak: "My impression is that Washington US could live with a nuclear Iran..."

Politico/ here

"............ But the most interesting moment of Barak’s address to the friendly Washington audience with lots of familiar faces for him came when Barak finished his overview. And the Institute’s executive director Rob Satloff, in the typical format of such events, asked Barak a first question to get the discussion going before turning to the audience for questions.......... Satloff asked Barak about how well he thought U.S. and Israel were coordinating on the Iran issue.

Barak listened to Satloff’s question and then said, 'Let’s take a few more questions and I will answer them in a bunch.' And Satloff, the event host and moderator, laughed and said, 'Well, answer that opening question and then I can call on members of the audience and take several questions' in a bunch. And Barak smiled, acknowledging the laughter, and then said, again, "Let’s take a few more questions." Until it became quite clear that he did not want to answer Satloff’s question about the state of U.S.-Israel relations on Iran, and this was not based on a misunderstanding of the format procedure....

Asked by a Middle Eastern correspondent, why Israel couldn’t live with a nuclear Iran, Barak said Israel welcomed U.S. leadership in seeking international sanctions on Iran. But he added, that with all the instability the U.S. is currently managing including a nuclear Pakistan and North Korea, Afghanistan, draw down in Iraq, etc. it was his impression that Washington believes that while it’s highly undesirable, at the end of the day the U.S. could live with a nuclear Iran. While for Israel, Barak said, it would be a “tipping point” in the strategic equation in the region.... some in the U.S. see a world with a “nuclear Pakistan, India, North Korea….From this corner of the world (Washington), [perhaps] it doesn’t change the equation” if Iran goes nuclear. .... For his part, Barak also said he thought Iranian leaders' decisionmaking is quite sophisticated, and he thought it highly unlikely that they would lob a nuclear weapon at Israel. And he said he thought that neither a nuclear Iran, nor anything else, poses a threat to the continuity of Israel's existence."