Senior U.S. intelligence official: Israel won't strike Iran before November
Haaretz, Sept. 4, 2012
There is a growing American assessment that Israel will
not attack Iranian nuclear facilities before the U.S. presidential
elections on November 6.
U.S. House of Representatives
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, who visited Israel last
week, told a breakfast panel at the Republican National Convention in
Tampa, Florida on Tuesday that he believes the Israeli government is
likely to wait until after the elections.
Rogers said that after his trip,
during which he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he’d been
left with “no doubt in my mind” that the U.S. election cycle was part of
Israel’s calculations. Asked why he thought Israel would wait, Rogers
said, “Because I think they believe that maybe after the election they
can talk the United States into cooperating.”
Rogers’ remarks were published on the
website of the Washington newspaper The Hill, which reports primarily
on the U.S. Congress.
During Rogers’ meeting with
Netanyahu, the prime minister criticized U.S. President Barak Obama’s
attitude toward Iran, according to a report in the daily Yedioth
Ahronoth. This led to a sharply worded exchange between Netanyahu and
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, who was present at the meeting,
the paper said. Shapiro subsequently denied the report.
On Monday, former CIA director
Michael Hayden told Haaretz that a decision on attacking Iran need not
be made right now, as current assessments point to Iran achieving
nuclear-weapons capabilities no earlier than 2013 or 2014.
Hayden said he believes those
assessments are still valid, even though the time needed for the
Iranians to make the leap into actual production of nuclear weapons has
decreased, since the bottleneck in that plan was the missile development
and the lack of enriched uranium needed to make warheads, not Tehran’s
ability to turn the material into weapons.
Hayden added that if and when a
decision is made to attack Iran, the U.S. would be better equipped to
conduct it than Israel(1)
Not too surprising. They have to calculate the US election cycle. They want US money, diplomatic cover for the Occupation, etc, and to have a reasonable possibility for a successful strike on Iran would require a joint operation with the US military.
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