Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark told Newsmax on Friday that Israel "has to establish escalation, dominance in the region" and respond "very, very forcefully" to Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared in a rare sermon Friday that his country's ballistic missile attack on Israel earlier this week was "legal and legitimate" and that the "resistance in the region will not back down even with the killing of its leaders."
"And if Iran comes back again, then Israel has to take all the gloves off, take out the nuclear facilities, and the United States has to join in," Clark told "American Agenda."
"Iran is on the verge of getting nuclear weapons," he added.
"There's no point in trying to say, 'Oh, let's negotiate.' How are you going to negotiate when they are a week away by official estimates and you know, who knows whether that official estimate is correct or not?
"They could already have nuclear weapons. And we have always said that for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, it's unacceptable. We wouldn't permit it. Well, it's time to pay the piper on it, in my view. And we start by a very strong Israeli response. And if Iran comes back, they lose it all."
Official estimates say Iran is "a week away from having enough material to assemble a bomb, and they've done all the homework for it and so forth.
"So essentially, they have the bomb. And if you're a week away, then who knows what that means? Now, my friends who claim to have inside sources say [Iran] has three or four weapons already, but this would be like in before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, curveball saying that there's biological weapons, so you have to go through a process of vetting intelligence and the best estimate is that they have not yet assembled a nuclear weapon. What will it mean if they get it? Well, imagine you hear what the Ayatollah said and what the deputy commander of the IRGC just said about taking out this from Israel. Imagine if they said, 'make one more move and if you don't stop shooting at Hezbollah, we're going to bring nuclear weapons to bear on you.' That's unacceptable in the region. And you've got an Iran, a state that has previously said we're going to get nuclear weapons and we're going to use them. And so you're dealing with a state really that that there's no real room for diplomacy on this."
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Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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