U.S. has pinpoint attack ready on Iran, says Israeli official

A senior Israeli security official who has been clued in on parts of the American plans for possible military action against Iran said: “The Americans are planning for this scenario very seriously.”

With U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit here beginning Wednesday, the senior Israeli official said: “Obama’s administration, as opposed to that of his predecessor, George Bush, has prepared a pinpoint military option in the event that the United States decides to attack in the end. The Americans, if they choose, will be able to mount a focused operation on the Iranian nukes without necessarily sparking a comprehensive regional war.”

The Israeli security establishment is aware of the Americans’ ongoing moves to tighten the sanctions on Iran and to prepare a military option. “It’s very important for them to convey determination,” the official said. “We saw this in the words of Vice President Joe Biden at the AIPAC conference earlier this month [where Biden said “this president doesn’t bluff”] and we’ll hear it again from the president in Israel. They mean what they say. Their problem is historical precedent: After North Korea obtained nuclear capability, Israel is skeptical.”

The Iranian question will be discussed in depth during Obama’s visit. In his declarations over the past few months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has frequently stressed Iran’s progress toward nuclear capability and has argued that the time to stop the Iranian regime’s advance is running out. During the visit the president is apparently expected to announce more steps to assist Israel in the framework of the security cooperation between the two countries, which in recent years has reached unprecedented levels.

May be window for Israeli attack this year

Israel has seriously weighed initiating an air force attack over the past several years. In the past, former defense minister Ehud Barak described 2012 as the year Iran’s nuclear program could enter the “immunity zone” against attack, but despite this assessment Israel didn’t attack last year.

However, there may still be a window of time for an Israeli attack at least until the end of this year, and such an attack could have some effect, delaying the realization of the Iranian plans by 18 months to two years.

Because America’s attack capabilities far exceed Israel’s, it’s assumed that the final “deadline” for an American attack is considerably later than the Israeli one.

In September of last year, in his address to the United Nations, Netanyahu defined the red line − before which Iran must be attacked − as Tehran’s accumulation of 90 percent of the uranium needed to manufacture a nuclear bomb ‏(around a quarter of a ton‏). The prime minister was referring to uranium that is 20-percent enriched ‏(the highest level Iran has reached to date‏), from which it’s possible to later produce a nuclear weapon, after the uranium is enriched to an even higher level ‏(93 percent‏). This, said Netanyahu, is the unacceptable point as far as Israel is concerned, and this line is likely to be crossed by this summer if Iran isn’t stopped before then.

Meanwhile, according to International Atomic Energy Agency reports, Iran has been proceeding at a relatively slower pace because it is diverting some of its 20-percent enriched uranium to fuel rods meant for scientific research ‏(and it is very difficult to later convert the nuclear material back for military purposes‏).

The U.S. administration wasn’t happy with Netanyahu’s UN declaration, which was also controversial among Israeli officials. The United States is speaking in general terms of a policy that is “deterrence and not acceptance” of an Iranian nuclear threat, but various remarks by senior administration officials show that Washington sees the red line, whose crossing would require action, as the acquisition of full ability to produce a nuclear weapon − a bomb that could be fitted to a warhead on a ballistic missile.

Haaretz