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, December 11.
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.
Asked about prospects for an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear sites, 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," Barak said, adding there was a need for a "direct attack, isolation, by the whole world" of the Iranian central bank.
Barak said he would "love to see the Arab Spring jumping over" the Gulf into Iran, referring to political upheaval in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere over the last year.
"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," he said, Haaretz reported.
