Former Ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, offered a dire prediction of a U.S. confrontation with Iran, saying it could escalate into war as early as next year."I'm afraid that 2013 is going to be a year in which we're going to have a military confrontation with Iran," he said Sunday on "Face the Nation."Indyk joined a roundtable of foreign policy experts to discuss the latest protests in the Middle East and Israel's public statements pressuring the United States over Iran.The former ambassador said the time has not come, yet, that the U.S. needs to take military action. "Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon," he said. [W]hile there's still time, there's not a lot of time."Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, echoed Indy's assessment that negotiations with Iran have not dissuaded the Iranians to halt their nuclear program. He said Netanyahu has sought to increase pressure publicly because "he doesn't want these things to be drawn out indefinitely."The roundtable also discussed the anti-American protests across the Arab World the past few days, saying they are a defining moment for newly-minted, post-Arab Spring governments."[T]he old world of the Middle East is gone. No new world has yet taken its place," Haas said, likening the protests to a "forest fire" and the Middle East to the "wild west.""It's more than about a film. This is the equivalent of a forest fire. Anything could set it off, so the film is the wrong place to focus," Haas said. "I think the president was right on one thing he said the other day: these countries are not allies, they're not adversaries, they're somewhere in-between," he added. "The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, in Egypt, it has to decide whether it's a government, a political party, or a popular movement."Indyk, who is now at the Brookings Institution, said the problems of some Middle Easter countries go beyond anti-American protests. The Middle East is experiencing a "descent into chaos and the potential for a sectarian war between Sunnis and Shias, to spread from Syria to Iraq to Lebanon and then to Bahrain and even Saudi Arabia. And so there's real potential here for much more instability that we're already witnessing."
[ED NOTES:ILL EDIT THIS FURTER INA BIT,HAVE TO STEP OUT..
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