Senior Obama administration’s officials leak Israeli- Azerbaijan info. to foreign policy magazine: One of the U.S. sources tells FPM, “We’re watching what Iran does closely, but we’re now watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And we’re not happy about it.”
Posted on March 29, 2012 at 3:08 PM EST
In 2009, the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Baku, Donald Lu, sent a cable to the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom titled “Azerbaijan’s discreet symbiosis with Israel.” The memo, later released by WikiLeaks, quotes Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev as describing his country’s relationship with the Jewish state as an iceberg: “nine-tenths of it is below the surface.”
Why does it matter? Because Azerbaijan is strategically located on Iran’s northern border and, according to several high-level sources I’ve spoken with inside the U.S. government, Obama administration officials now believe that the “submerged” aspect of the Israeli-Azerbaijani alliance — the security cooperation between the two countries — is heightening the risks of an Israeli strike on Iran.
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