VIDEO - The Sunday Times quoted a senior Pentagon official as saying that President George W. Bush has told the Israeli governmentthat he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down.
The official told the London-based newspaper that despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread skepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran ,the president has given an “amber light” to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties.
“Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack and tell us when you’re ready,” the official told The Times. But, according to the report, Israel has also been told that it can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use US military bases in Iraq for logistical support.
The Times report added that "Nor is it certain that Bush’s amber light would ever turn to green without irrefutable evidence of lethal Iranian hostility. Tehran’s test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles last week were seen in Washington as provocative and poorly judged, but both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded that they did not represent an immediate threat of attack against Israeli or US targets."
“It’s really all down to the Israelis,” the Pentagon official as saying. “This administration will not attack Iran. This has already been decided. But the president is really preoccupied with the nuclear threat against Israel and I know he doesn’t believe that anything but force will deter Iran.”
Pentagon reluctant
The official added that Israel had not presented Bush with a convincing military proposal,so far. “If there is no solid plan, the amber will never turn to green,” he told The Times.
According to the sources, there is also resistance inside the Pentagon from officers concerned about Iranian retaliation. “The uniform people are opposed to the attack plans, mainly because they think it will endanger our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he was quoted by The Times as saying.
The report said the prospect of an incoming Democratic president who has already made it clear that he prefers negotiation to the use of force is "complicating the calculations in both Washington and Tel Aviv.
"Senator Barack Obama’s previous opposition to the war in Iraq, and his apparent doubts about the urgency of the Iranian threat, have intensified pressure on the Israeli hawks to act before November’s US presidential election," The Times said.
The one thing that all sides agree on is that any strike by either Iran or Israel would trigger a catastrophic round of retaliation that would rock global oil markets, send the price of petrol soaring and wreck the progress of the US military effort in Iraq.
The Times said Israeli the media have been "rife with speculation" that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hemight order an attack on Iran to distract attention from the ongoing corruption investigation againsthim. One of the PM's closest friends told The Times that Olmert recently warned him that “in three months’ time it will be a different Middle East”.
The London-based paper said that "even the most hawkish officials acknowledge that Israel would face what would arguably be the most challenging military mission of its 60-year existence."
According to the Pentagon official, “No one here is talking about more than delaying the(nuclear) program." He added that Israel would need to set back the Iranians by at least five years for an attack to be considered a success.
The Times report said obvious targets of an Israeli attack would include Iran’s Isfahan plant, where uranium ore is converted into gas, the Natanz complex where this gas is used to enrich uranium in centrifuges and the plutonium-producing Arak heavy water plant. However, according to the report, "Iran is known to have scattered other elements of its nuclear program in underground facilities around the country. Neither US nor Israeli intelligence is certain that it knows where everything is."
Kenneth Katzman, a former CIA analyst and author of a book on the Revolutionary Guard told The Times, “Maybe the Israelis could start off the attack and have us (US) finish it off. And maybe that has been their intention all along. But in terms of the long-term military campaign that would be needed to permanently suppress Iran’s nuclear program, only the US is perceived as having that capability right now.”