It seems to me that an attack against Iran will not take place. Israel has failed to overhype the danger of Iran to the world. While Israel itself does not have the capacity to take on Iran or to absorb Iran’s reaction.Israel is like a child throwing a tantrum.
(CBS News) LONDON - Former CIA director Michael Hayden has told an Israeli newspaper that the Jewish state is not capable of carrying out and sustaining military action against Iran’s nuclear sites without U.S. support, and that there is still time before a decision on any such strike needs to be made.
“I do not underestimate the Israeli talent, but geometry and physics tell us that Iran’s nuclear program would pose a difficult challenge to any military,” Hayden told the widely-circulated Haaretz daily in an interview published Tuesday, adding that, “Israel’s resources are more limited than those of the U.S.”
“There is no absolute certainty that all targets are known,” he told the paper, suggesting that Iran’s alleged efforts to conceal a nuclear weapons program may be outwitting even the world’s most advanced espionage agencies.
He reiterated previous comments by American officials who have said a single bombing raid would not be able to inflict significant damage on Iran’s heavily-fortified nuclear sites. “They will have to be revisited - which only the U.S. Air Force would be able to do.”
Meanwhile, one of Iran’s most powerful non-state allies, the Islamic militant group Hezbollah, warned that any strike on Iran’s nuclear sites - by Israel or the U.S. - would be met with “huge” retaliation.
“Iran will not forgive a strike against its nuclear facilities,” Nasrallah said in rare live television interview. “The Zionist entity (Israel) will not be the only target. American bases in the region will be targets, too,” he warned, referring to American bases in the Middle East which are in range of Iran’s conventional missiles.
“America takes responsibility for what Israel does,” he told a Lebanese television channel.
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Despite the sabre-rattling, an attack on Iran is now unlikely - Comment - Voices - The IndependentDespite the sabre-rattling, an attack on Iran is now unlikely**
No sooner was Israel’s bombardment of Gaza over than Israeli and US officials started to ratchet up the prospects of an Israeli air attack on Iran in the next few months.
This is scarcely surprising. The threat has served Tel Aviv and Washington well in the past because it enabled them to persuade the rest of the world to impose swingeing sanctions on Iran as the only alternative to war. Even so, claims that a final confrontation with Iran is only months away are looking a bit dog-eared, given that this must be one of the most frequently postponed wars in history.
Iran would be very different. It is almost 1,000 miles from Tel Aviv to Tehran. If the Israelis wanted to destroy Iranian nuclear or missile manufacturing facilities they have probably left it too late, even if such an operation was ever feasible. The Iranians have had a long time to hide whatever they want to conceal, or bury it in deep bunkers.
The Israelis could only do serious damage to Iran if the US air force joined it in a prolonged and wide-ranging assault similar to that the Americans carried out in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. But this is unlikely to happen because the one thing American voters do not want is another war in the Middle East.
This is significant because the support of the US is all important to Israeli security. For all the talk of Israel acting unilaterally against Iran, this is not going to happen. Israel’s resources are too small and its dependence on the US too great. Israeli voters do not like prime ministers who are on permanently bad terms with Washington, as Netanyahu found to his cost when he lost the general election in 1999.
The political difficulties Israel had in carrying out even a quite minor operation like “Operation Pillar of Defence” against a puny enemy underlines the problems the country would face if it confronted Iran. There is another lesson to be learned from what has just happened in Gaza: for all his bellicose and defiant rhetoric, Netanyahu is a cautious political leader. He ended the latest crisis much more quickly than his predecessors as Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, in 2006 and 2008, or Shimon Peres in 1996. He is not a gambler. This makes it unlikely that he would launch a risky venture such as attacking Iran.
Moreover, by showing that he is prepared to use military force on a small scale in Gaza, Netanyahu has made it easier to back away from his threats against Iran without being accused of weakness.
Netanyahu has always been a master of threat inflation when it comes to frightening the Israeli voter or the rest of the world. Almost any opponent, however weak, can be demonised as a threat to Israel. It might be Iran, but for some of his ministers it might also be desperate and impoverished African immigrants trying to stay in Israel.
It is never been entirely clear to me whether the Israeli leadership takes the Iranian threat as seriously as it claims. Official Israeli hostility to Iran does not date from the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979 but from about 1992. Israel’s understandable priority has always been to remain a close ally of the US. For decades this relationship was cemented by Israel being America’s ally against Arab states permanently friendly to the Soviet Union. But with the fall of Communism a new foe was needed against which Israel and the US could unite. Suddenly Iran was being denounced by Israelis as an existential threat to themselves and everybody else.
Ex-CIA Analyst Tells Us The Real Reason Israel Wants To Strike Iran Before The US Election
For months senior Israeli officials have said the “window of opportunity” for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities is “before the U.S. presidential election in November” because Iran’s nuclear facilities will soon be in fortified underground bunkers out of the reach of Israeli bombs.
But former CIA analyst Ray McGovern believes that delaying Iran’s nuclear capabilities is not the primary concern of a military strike, but simply the pretext.
“The Israelis want to pretend the Iranians are building up their nuclear capabilities, want to zap them between now and November 6, and the chances are at least even that they will try to do that thinking the U.S. will come in with both feet,” McGovern told us.
McGovern thinks that “Israel does not fear a nuclear weapon in Iran’s hands” because Israel already has a nuclear arsenal and the threat of Iran having a couple of nukes “would not be all that credible except in a limited, deterrent way.”
McGovern believes that Israel’s primary goal is to “have Iran bloodied the same way we did to Iraq” so that Iran “would no longer be able to support Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere.”
And the reason Nov. 6 is an important date, McGovern wrote in a recent article, is that “a second-term Obama would feel much freer not to commit U.S. forces on Israel’s side” and “might use U.S. leverage to force Israeli concessions on thorny issues relating to Palestine.”
There is serious doubt that Israel could handle a full-fledged war with Iran, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted that he would prefer the U.S. and its superior firepower lead any attack.
A potential loss of leverage after Nov. 6 would explain the current drumbeat of war being played by Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
But, as McGovern notes, it may not be up to the U.S. at this point.
“We are at war with Iran right now—not only the cyber attacks, but the special forces inside Iran and the assassination of the Iranian scientists,” McGovern said. “The only question is whether that will extend to an attempt to destroy their nuclear-development facilities, and that’s up to Israel.”
