Re-set your watches for October - the new deadline

Haaretz - With a hot and dry summer sun already blazing over the Middle East, the diplomatic efforts to solve the uranium enrichment program all but over, no effective opposition left in Israel and America deep in its election cycle, Israelis are going to sleep with the feeling that in the morning, they may wake up to find that their air force bombed Iran overnight.

What are the chances this will happen without any sort of warning? Quite slim actually. For a start, despite the failure of the talks last week in Moscow, there is still a process underway, albeit at a relatively low-level, and Israel has given Washington assurances not to attack until the diplomatic procedure is exhausted and the sanctions have had a chance to really start biting into the Iranian economy. Since a new round of sanctions takes effect this weekend, on July 1, this means that at least for a couple of months, things are going to remain static.

In addition, it is virtually impossible from an operational point of view to launch a campaign of this magnitude without the U.S. military and intelligence services, which are working extremely close with their Israeli counterparts, noticing and reporting to Washington. The presence of American officers will grow exponentially as they prepare for the Austere Challenge 2012, set to take place in October. This is the largest joint U.S.-Israeli military exercise ever, which will rehearse a full-out missile attack on Israel, from Iran, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, with missile defense systems of both militaries working in tandem.

The imminent presence in Israel of thousands of U.S. Army personnel, along with billions of dollars of hardware (including the ship-based Aegis Combat System and THAAD missiles) can mean one of two things. One possibility is that the Israeli leadership is bluffing, and there is not going to be an attack on Iran this year (by the time the Americans leave, weather conditions will reduce the chances of Israeli success) and the drill will serve President Barack Obama as a huge display of his commitment to Israel's security, a month before the elections. The other possibility is that Israel, or the United States, will come to the conclusion, after a few months of deeper sanctions and the exhaustion of all diplomatic measures, that a military strike is the only viable method of denying the Iranians nuclear weapons.

The missile defense cover which will start building up in mid-September is not just an exercise, but a contingency for possible retaliation by Iran and its proxies, following a possible strike by either Israel or the U.S. (with breathtaking electoral timing).

The embarrassingly public dispute between the Bibi-Barak leadership duo and the cabal of ex-security chiefs over the desirability of an Iranian strike go to prove how hard it would be to hide the preparations for an imminent attack. And it is highly likely that when the Obama Administration gets wind of an attack happening at a less than convenient juncture for the president's re-election chances, whatever it knows will almost immediately be leaked to a compliant media.

But while it is hard to picture an attack on Iran taking place over the next couple of months, this won't dampen the international media's appetite for just about any story somehow connected to regional machinations. The bar has already been lowered. Just over the last few days we have had a report on a giant military exercise involving the armies, navies and air-forces of Iran, Syria, Russia and China. No matter that the first and only source for this report was a scandal-mongering Syrian website with tenuous connections to the Assad regime, and that such an unlikely exercise would run counter to Russian and certainly Chinese doctrines of keeping their armed forces out of harm's way, whenever possible.

Then we had the Spanish report of Venezuela shipping an F-16 to Iran. This story, a reheated version of a premature report from 2006, is highly improbable, since Venezuela, despite its current hostility to the U.S., would be very foolish to go against all the terms of its arm contracts and supply an American warplane to another country. But even if true, this would not have benefited the Iranians greatly, since the Venezuelan planes are old versions, with only a superficial resemblance to the advanced combat jets currently fielded by Israel and the U.S.

We have had of course nearly daily reports on more computer mega-viruses attacking Iran, as if even a nation such as the U.S. didn’t need many months to develop these cyberweapons. And then there was the new president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, who apparently had said that he plans to deepen his countriy's ties with Iran. Except that he didn't say anything of the sort and a healthy relationship with Tehran is not very compatible with Muslim Brotherhood doctrine, as radical as they may be.

Re-set your watches for October, that is the new deadline. We are now officially in the silly season and most reports you will read and hear that sound unbelievable are just that.