WarSclerotic

Police in Center preparing for Gaza rockets – JPost – Defense.

By Nikola Solic / Reuters

Ahmadinejad: US can no longer di… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

By REUTERS

Remembering a Christian warrior f… JPost – Opinion – Columnists.

By Sotheby’s

Special Report: Intel shows Iran nuclear threat not imminent | Reuters.

(The headline and the conclusion of this article seem to be contradicted by the full text . – JW )

(Reuters) – The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran’s nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead.

Those conclusions, drawn from extensive interviews with current and former U.S. and European officials with access to intelligence on Iran, contrast starkly with the heated debate surrounding a possible Israeli strike on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

“They’re keeping the soup warm but they are not cooking it,” a U.S. administration official said.

Reuters has learned that in late 2006 or early 2007, U.S. intelligence intercepted telephone and email communications in which Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading figure in Iran’s nuclear program, and other scientists complained that the weaponization program had been stopped.

That led to a bombshell conclusion in a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate: American spy agencies had “high confidence” that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003.

Current and former U.S. officials say they are confident that Iran has no secret uranium-enrichment site outside the purview of U.N. nuclear inspections.

They also have confidence that any Iranian move toward building a functional nuclear weapon would be detected long before a bomb was made.

These intelligence findings are what underpin President Barack Obama’s argument that there is still time to see whether economic sanctions will compel Iran’s leaders to halt any program.

The Obama administration, relying on a top-priority intelligence collection program and after countless hours of debate, has concluded that Iranian leaders have not decided whether to actively construct a nuclear weapon, current and former officials said.

There is little argument, however, that Iran’s leaders have taken steps that would give them the option of becoming a nuclear-armed power.

Iran has enriched uranium, although not yet of sufficient quantity or purity to fuel a bomb, and has built secret enrichment sites, which were acknowledged only when unmasked.

Iran has, in years past, worked on designing a nuclear warhead, the complicated package of electronics and explosives that would transform highly enriched uranium into a fission bomb.

And it is developing missiles that could in theory launch such a weapon at a target in enemy territory.

There are also blind spots in U.S. and allied agencies’ knowledge. A crucial unknown is the intentions of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Another question is exactly how much progress Iran made in designing a warhead before mothballing its program. The allies disagree on how fast Iran is progressing toward bomb-building ability: the U.S. thinks progress is relatively slow; the Europeans and Israelis believe it’s faster.

U.S. officials assert that intelligence reporting on Iran’s nuclear program is better than it was on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which proved to be non-existent but which President George W. Bush and his aides used to make the case for the 2003 invasion.

That case and others, such as the U.S. failure to predict India’s 1998 underground nuclear test, illustrate the perils of divining secrets about others’ weapons programs.

“The quality of intelligence varies from case to case,” a U.S. administration official said. Intelligence on North Korea and Iraq was more limited, but there was “extraordinarily good intelligence” on Iran, the official said.

Israel, which regards a nuclear Iran as an existential threat, has a different calculation. It studies the same intelligence and timetable, but sees a closing window of opportunity to take unilateral military action and set back Iran’s ambitions. Israel worries that Iran will soon have moved enough of its nuclear program underground — or spread it far enough around the country — as to make it virtually impervious to a unilateral Israeli attack, creating what Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently referred to as a “zone of immunity.”

While Israel would not be able to launch an effective offensive in this analysis, the U.S., with its deeper-penetrating bombs and in-air refueling capability, believes it could still get results from a military strike.

Israel has not publicly defined how or when Iran would enter this phase of a nuclear weapons program. Barak said last month that relying on an ability to detect an order by Khamenei to build a bomb “oversimplifies the issue dramatically.”

CONFIDENCE IN INTELLIGENCE

U.S. confidence that Iran stopped its nuclear weaponization program in 2003 traces back to a stream of intelligence obtained in 2006 or early 2007, which dramatically shifted the view of spy agencies.

Sources familiar with the intelligence confirmed the intercept of Fakhrizadeh’s communications. The United States had both telephone and email intercepts in which Iranian scientists complained about how the leadership ordered them to shut down the program in 2003, a senior European official said.

U.S. officials said they are very confident that the intercepts were authentic – and not disinformation planted by Iran.

“Iran has been a high-priority intelligence target for years. Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes we really are good,” said Thomas Fingar, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council when it compiled the 2007 intelligence estimate.

While declining to provide specific details, Fingar, now at Stanford University, said: “We got information that we had never been able to obtain before. We knew the provenance of the information, and we knew that we had been able to obtain it from multiple sources. Years of hard work had finally paid off.”

The judgment that Iran had stopped work on the weapons program stunned the Bush White House and U.S. allies. Critics accused U.S. spy agencies of over-compensating for their flawed 2002 analysis that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had active nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.

The 2007 report gummed up efforts by the Bush administration to persuade the U.N. Security Council and others to add pressure on Iran with more sanctions. It was greeted with disbelief by Israel and some European allies.

“It really pulled the rug out of our sanctions effort until we got it back on track in 2008,” recalled Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to Bush.

Overlooked by many was that the report said Iran had been pursuing a nuclear weapon and was keeping its options open for developing one, he said. “The problem was that it was misinterpreted as an all-clear when it wasn’t that at all,” Hadley said.

A November 2011 report by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency said suspected nuclear weaponization efforts led by Fakhrizadeh were “stopped rather abruptly pursuant to a ‘halt order’ instruction issued in late 2003 by senior Iranian officials.”

The reasons for this are not clear. Western experts say it was probably related to a fear of being next on the hit list after the United States toppled Saddam next door.

Iran emphasizes its nuclear program is for civilian purposes. Ayatollah Khamenei this week said Iran does not have nuclear weapons and will not build them.

DISMEMBERED AND BURIED

Some key U.S. allies were never entirely comfortable with the 2007 U.S. intelligence estimate. The Europeans conceded that a centrally directed weaponization program probably stopped, but believed pieces of the program were being pursued separately.

Many European experts believed the Iranians had dismembered their bomb program and scattered and buried its parts, some of them in military or scientific installations, some in obscure academic institutions.

Under pressure from both European allies and Israel’s supporters, U.S. intelligence agencies late in the Bush administration and early in Obama’s tenure began to take a second look at the 2007 estimate. Some consideration was given to bringing it more into line with European views. Intelligence received after publication of the 2007 estimate suggested that in 2006, Iran believed the United States was going to have to abandon its troubled venture in Iraq. Wisps of information were gathered that Iranian officials were talking about restarting elements of the bomb program, a U.S. intelligence official said on condition of anonymity. But analysts were divided about the significance of the new information. The revised estimate was delayed for months. Eventually, at the very end of 2010, an updated version was circulated within the government. Unlike the 2007 estimate, the White House made public no extracts of this document. A consensus emerged among U.S. experts that the new intelligence information wasn’t as alarming as originally thought, according to officials familiar with the result. The 2010 update largely stuck to the same assessments as the 2007 report, these officials said. U.S. intelligence chiefs issued a vague public acknowledgement of the ambiguities of their latest assessment.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress in February 2011 that “Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so.”

TIME FRAME

The United States and Israel are on the same page in judging how long it would take Iran to have a nuclear weapon that could strike a target: about a year to produce a bomb and then another one to two years to put it on a missile.

Both countries believe Iran has not made a decision to build a bomb, so even if Tehran decided to move forward, it would be unlikely to have a working nuclear device this year, let alone a missile to deliver it.

“I think they are years away from having a nuclear weapon,” a U.S. administration official said.

Three main pieces are needed for a nuclear arsenal: highly enriched uranium to fuel a bomb, a nuclear warhead to detonate it, and a missile or other platform to deliver it. For Iran’s program, the West has the most information about the first.

Iran has a declared nuclear program for medical research and producing energy, is a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allows U.N. nuclear inspectors into its facilities.

The inspections are conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and its reports provide some of the best snapshots of where Iran’s program stands.

Iran conducts uranium enrichment at the Natanz plant in central Iran and at a site at Fordow buried deep in a mountainous region near the holy city of Qom. Both sites were built secretly and made public by others.

Natanz was unveiled in 2002 by an Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Obama and other world leaders announced the existence of the Fordow site in 2009.

Natanz houses about 8,800 centrifuge machines spinning to increase the concentration of U-235, the type of uranium that yields fissile material. Fordow is built to contain about 3,000 centrifuge machines, but the most recent IAEA report says about 700 are operational.

Most of Iran’s stockpile is 3.5 percent low enriched uranium. When Tehran declared in February 2010 that it would begin enriching uranium up to 20 percent purity, that sharply increased the anxiety of Israel and others.

Nuclear experts say that enriching uranium from the naturally occurring 0.7 percent concentration of U-235 to the low-level 3.5 percent accomplishes about 70 percent of the enrichment work toward weapons-grade uranium. At 20 percent concentration, about nine-tenths of the work has been completed. For Iran, getting to 90 percent would require changing some of the plumbing in the centrifuges, experts said.

“From 20 to 90 is exponentially easier,” a U.S. intelligence official said.

An IAEA report last month said that Iran has produced nearly 110 kilograms (240 pounds) of uranium enriched to 20 percent. That is less than the roughly 250 kilograms (550 pounds) that nuclear experts say would be required, when purified further, for one nuclear weapon.

Iran’s enrichment program was set back by the Stuxnet computer virus, which many security experts suspect was created by Israeli intelligence, possibly with U.S. assistance. It wormed its way into Iranian centrifuge machinery as early as 2009. The Institute for Science and International Security estimated that Stuxnet damaged about 1,000 centrifuges at Natanz and stalled its enrichment capability from growing for about a year.

But it isn’t clear how lasting an impact Stuxnet has had. Reuters reported last month that U.S. and European officials and private experts believe Iranian engineers have neutralized and purged the virus.

EYES IN THE SKY

U.S. officials and experts are confident that Iran would be detected if it jumped to a higher level of enrichment.

The IAEA monitors Iran’s enrichment facilities closely, watching with cameras and taking measurements during inspections. Seals would have to be broken if containers that collect the enriched material were moved or tampered with.

U.S. and European intelligence agencies are also keeping tabs through satellites, sensors and other methods. They watched for years as a hole was dug into a mountainside near Qom and determined – it is unclear precisely how – late in the Bush administration that Fordow was likely a secret uranium enrichment site.

Obama was briefed on Qom when he was president-elect and was the one to publicly announce it to the world in September 2009.

“They had a deep understanding of the facility, which allowed them to blow the whistle on Tehran with confidence,” a U.S. official said.

Rumors periodically pop up of other secret enrichment sites, but so far they have not been substantiated. “Most of the people who make the argument that they might have a covert facility or a series of covert facilities are doing that to justify bombing them sooner rather than later,” said Colin Kahl, a former defense official focused on the Middle East.

“We are very confident that there is no secret site now,” a U.S. administration official said. But given Iran’s history of secretly building facilities, the official predicted Tehran would eventually construct another covert plant.

THE UNKNOWN

One of the biggest question marks is how far Iran advanced in designing a nuclear device – a task considered to be less complicated than producing highly enriched uranium.

The more primitive the device, the more enriched uranium is required. Making it small enough to fit on the tip of a missile would be another challenge.

The IAEA has information that Iran built a large containment chamber to conduct high-explosives tests at the Parchin military complex southeast of Tehran. Conventional weapons are tested at that base, and the U.S. government appears convinced that any nuclear-related tests occurred prior to the 2003 halt.

But Iran denied the IAEA access to the Parchin site in February, raising more suspicion, and the nuclear agency seems less confident that weapons work has halted altogether.

IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said recently, “We have information that some activity is ongoing there.”

In its November 2011 report, the IAEA said it had “serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”

It cited Iran’s efforts to procure nuclear-related and dual-use equipment, acquisition of nuclear-weapons development information and work on developing a nuclear weapon design in the program that was stopped in late 2003.

“There are also indications that some activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device continued after 2003, and that some may still be ongoing,” the IAEA said.

While Iran does not yet have a nuclear warhead that can fit on a missile, it does have the missiles.

Iran has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East, and many of those projectiles could be repurposed to deliver a nuclear device, intelligence director Clapper said in congressional testimony.

Western experts also point to Iran’s test firing of a rocket that can launch satellites into space as an example of a growing capability that could potentially be used for nuclear weapons.

“The nuclear threat is growing. They are getting relatively close to the place where they can make the decision to assemble all three parts of their program — enrichment, missile, weaponization,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said in an interview. Khamenei “hasn’t said ‘put it together’ yet,” said Rogers, a Republican. “Have they decided to sprint to making the device that blows up? Probably not. But are they walking to a device that blows up? Yes.”

The debate over air strikes, supercharged by Israel’s anxiety and U.S. election-year politics, has raised the specter of the Iraq war. The White House justified that conflict on the grounds of weapons of mass destruction, as well as significant ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Both proved to be mirages.

“There are lots of disturbing similarities. One has to note the differences, too,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst.

“The huge difference being we don’t have an administration in office that is the one hankering for the war. This administration is not hankering for a war,” said Pillar.

(Editing by Warren Strobel.)

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis March 24, 2012, 10:46 PM (GMT+02:00)

Barack Obama and Tayyip Erdogan get together

US President Barack Obama this week gave his two allies, the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu, a lesson in the politics of expediency, when Tuesday, March 20, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced exemptions for 11 nations from new US financial sanctions against countries that don’t reduce the Iranian oil purchases by June 28.
The countries benefiting from this concession are Britain, Germany Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Spain, Holland, Poland and Japan.

The news flew over the heads of Israelis who were too completely caught up in the terrorist attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse for it to register. Ankara took note – and umbrage. It was a cold shower on the high hopes Prime Minister Erdogan had entertained for his meeting with President Obama in Seoul, South Korea Sunday, March 25.

Their conversation was allotted six hours! The Turkish prime minister took that as a sign that he would be handed the starring role of Washington’s senior broker in the controversy over Iran’s nuclear program. This would be tantamount to US recognition of Turkey as the leading Middle East power bar none.

Erdogan also counted on his services in this regard winning US recognition by Turkey’s addition to the list of 11 nations enjoying exemptions from the new sanctions. Ankara needs this concession in view of the large quantities of oil it continues to import from Iran, and the use Iran makes of Turkish banks to facilitate its international oil sales.

Above all, Ankara is deeply engrossed in an effort to have the new Iranian and Iraqi pipelines to Europe routed through Turkey, reducing the Strait of Hormuz’s crucial importance as a primary route for the world’s oil supplies. This pipeline would also hurt Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf oil producers, all of whom are dead set against Erdogan’s hegemonic aspirations in the Middle East.
But for now no exemption appears to be on offer to Ankara.
debkafile’s intelligence sources report that Erdogan had planned to fly straight from his long conversation with Obama to Tehran and hand Iran’s leaders a Turkish formula counter-signed by the US president for digging the nuclear dispute out of its crisis.
This might still happen. But, when he returns home, the Turkish prime minister will still have to explain why Turkey was left off the exemptions list.

Even worse, it only dawned on Erdogan belatedly that Ankara was not Washington’s main channel to Tehran as he had believed. In the past month, he had sent Hakan Fidan, the Director of Turkish intelligence, MIT, traveling in and out of Tehran to tie up the last ends of their understanding ready for his summit with Obama. Certain he would be the bearer of tidings, he was brought up short by discovering that the Obama administration and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s office had been in dialogue through a separate secret channel for some time.

On March 12, a close Obama associate, the former US Senator Chuck Hagel, virtually gave the game away when he said in an interview: “There may be back-channel talks, I don’t see any other way around this.”
Israel did not fare any better than Turkey at Obama’s hands.
While Defense Minister Ehud Barak stressed in an interview Thursday, March 22 that America and Israel were in close accord on intelligence evaluations of the state of Iran’s program, he omitted mention of the intelligence gap on the hidden US-Iranian negotiating track.

Hagel was also revealing on another question. Asked by the interviewer: So does this mean “Bomb Iran or live with Iran with a bomb?” He replied: “Exactly. We may eventually wind up with those choices. But I don’t think we’re there now.”
What he was saying was that the secret US-Iranian channel has not yet run its course. This may explain why no date has been set for the Six Power talks with Iran in Istanbul next month.
At all events, the Obama administration appears to be rethinking sanctions as a bludgeon for turning Tehran away from its nuclear weapon aspirations.
Those second thoughts were closely reflected in a new assessment coming from London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies Friday, March 23, which asserted that sanctions were having an effect – “but just not the effect they were supposed to have.”
They have made the Iranians more not less committed to pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was said, and “had the knock-on effect of pushing oil prices to levels threatening the global economy.”

To put things into perspective, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said Saturday, March 24, that the Six Power nuclear talks with Iran next month will be the last attempt to persuade Tehran to give up is nuclear weapon program by talks.

‘Planned number of Iron Domes can’t offer full… JPost – Defense.

By Ariel Jerozolimski/The Jerusalem Post)

Former defense minister Amir Peretz said on Saturday that the number of Iron Dome rocket-defense batteries Israel plans to purchase will not enough to fully protect the country.

While it is reasonable to acquire a total of only 13 batteries, as Israel currently plans to do, Peretz said, “If we want complete coverage we will need to get to between 20-26 batteries.”

Peretz also warned against using the Iron Dome system to defend military and strategic sites instead of population centers.

“With all due respect, the bases were not meant to be covered by the Iron Dome,” Peretz said. “There’s no way that bases will be preferred over civilians.”

Last year, the United States warned Israel that it would have to review funding for the anti-rocket system if it were deployed to protect bases instead of civilians.

Turning to the Iranian nuclear threat, Peretz said that a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities would be better if an outside actor such as the US carried it out instead of Israel.

“We should prefer an outside actor does it because Israel doesn’t need to be confronted by the whole Muslim world,” Peretz said.

“We know that a minute after an attack, it will be comfortable for the Western countries to point a blaming finger at Israel. If it’s an American actor, the crisis will be smaller. We need to think about the day after.”

Western world is blind – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Op-ed: Despite Muslim murderousness, West refrains from admitting Islam is the problem

Shaul Rosenfeld

Many in Israel and in the West have condemned the Toulouse murders and killer’s monstrosity in recent days, and some even expanded the scope of denunciation to include Mohammed Mareh’s jihadist sources of inspiration and the hotbeds of fundamentalist Islamic incitement. Yet still, almost everyone is staying away from pointing the finger at Islam as a whole, a religion that like an interminable production line gives rise to such phenomena, organizations and murderers.

These terror attacks, in Israel and abroad, are aimed at killing as many people as possible, at times while executing children; the Islamic terror industry knows no boundaries and cannot be satisfied. In 2010 alone, according to official figures, Islamic terror and violence slaughtered no fewer than 29,832 people. The actual numbers are likely much higher.

Yet in the West, which has turned double standards into a vocation and the rolling of one’s eyes into an art form, people are looking helplessly at the numbers and horrors. Not only do they fail to even imagine that something in Muslim culture may encourage this horrifying violence, they focus on identifying the “real culprits”: Western colonialism, Israeli occupation, American imperialism or Western support for corrupt, greedy Arab leaders.

And so, a terror endorser like Professor Tariq Ramadan from Oxford enjoys wonderful Western hospitality and is an honorable guest at almost any relevant academic forum in the West. Moazzam Begg, known as the Taliban’s most well-known supporter in Britain, receives Amnesty’s patronage, and Iqbal Sacranie is knighted after warmly endorsing Ayatollah Khomeini’s religious edict against Salman Rushdie.

Meanwhile, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf became President Barack Obama’s envoy to the Persian Gulf, even though he claimed that US policy contributed to the September 11 attacks and does not view Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Blame Israel

At this time, almost any terror group on earth originates from the Muslim world, with some Muslims not shying away from executing children, in Itamar or Toulouse. Nonetheless, we see an amazing alliance flourishing between the finest members of Western and Israel’s elites – which seemingly espouse equality, democracy, human rights, and women’s and minority’s rights – and the finest Islamic zealots, who crudely trample all of these values.

Given such atmosphere, it is only natural for an intellectual like Noam Chomsky to curry favor with well-renowned Lebanese humanist Hassan Nasrallah and slam Israel, or for an eminent feminist like Judith Butler to gleefully endorse a boycott of Israel. At the same time, she travels to the kingdom of freedom and progress in Ramallah and Jenin in order to share with local Arabs her insights on women’s rights, while outside the lecture hall the subjects of her lecture walk around wearing veils, burqas or hijabs.

In the West and in Israel, there is nothing new about this hypocrisy or blindness. In the same spirit, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were able to wholly deny the horrific acts of Stalin and Mao Zedong, even when evidence showing otherwise was piling up. When intellectual elites are the ones to distinguish the sons of light from the sons of darkness, leftist icon Sartre can become the flag bearer of the sons of light, while a man like Albert Camus, who dared to condemn the crimes of Soviet communism, is slammed as a son of darkness.

In this day and age, when anyone who praises the violent and repressive Islamic religion and culture is assured of dubious glory, we won’t see a local Camus rising anytime soon. For the time being, we shall have to settle for the likes of David Grossman and Amos Oz, who will resort to holy literary fury in order to explain why blame lies almost entirely with the Jewish state, and not with our Muslim neighbors, heaven forbid.

Lieberman: Next month’s talks are Iran’s last chance | The Times of Israel.

Iran seeks Islamic revolutions everywhere, foreign minister tells Singapore’s Jewish community

Blog: Obama is Fooling Lots of People on Israel.Neil Snyder

As speculation grows regarding an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, Israel’s audacious, deeply controversial raid of June 7 1981 on Iraq’s nuclear reactor is often cited as a precedent. The diplomatic files on Britain’s reaction to the raid have recently been released and some of the revelations in these documents are startlingly pertinent.

The bombing raid on the Osirak reactor, later known as Operation Babylon, was regarded in Israel as a great success. The then prime minister, Menachem Begin, described it as a “supreme act of self-defence” and claimed that Iraq would have acquired up to five nuclear bombs within four years, had they not attacked.

The reaction in Washington was mixed. The Reagan administration initially condemned the operation. Britain’s ambassador to the US, Sir Nicholas Henderson, was with the US defence secretary, Caspar Weinberger, when news of the raid broke and Weinberger remarked that Begin “had taken leave of his senses”. President Reagan, though, showed more understanding. Saddam Hussein, according to the Israelis, had claimed that Iraq’s nuclear plant was designed to produce weapons for use against the Jewish state; Reagan had received a letter from Begin justifying the raid on those grounds, and accepted this explanation. It later emerged that there was no substance to the allegation, but even so, some were quick to express private satisfaction. Richard Burt and Richard Perle, officials in the State Department and the Pentagon, had both told Henderson that Israel’s attack was “a blow on behalf of non-proliferation”.

The British government, however, was unequivocal in its condemnation. Margaret Thatcher was very popular within Anglo-Jewry, partly because of her admiration for the local community and her outspoken support for Soviet Jews. She was viewed as a strong friend of Israel, while the Foreign Office was perceived as a hostile institution. Yet she outflanked the Foreign Office in rejecting Israeli claims of self-defence. Indeed, several weeks after Operation Babylon, Mrs Thatcher told the Iraqi trade minister, Hassan Ali, that the attack had been “totally wrong and contrary to international law”. Moreover, she claimed that the Israeli allegations regarding Saddam’s ambitions to target the Jewish state were untrue.

The prime minister took an even stronger line in her correspondence with a leading friend of Israel within the Conservative Party. She claimed that Iraq, unlike Israel, had acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and had agreed to subject its nuclear facilities to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Not only was Mrs Thatcher convinced that Iraq’s nuclear reactor was being used solely for peaceful purposes, she insisted that Israel’s refusal to accede to the NPT, and its attack on Osirak was “a setback to the cause of non-proliferation” and later sent a telegram to Saddam congratulating him on achieving the “valuable objective” of a unanimous UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s attack.

One leading Tory supporter of Israel was convinced that Mrs Thatcher had been unduly influenced by Foreign Office Arabists. Plus ca change… Today, Foreign Secretary William Hague has been condemned by leading members of Conservative Friends of Israel for being “under the thumb of pro-Arabist” officials in the Foreign Office. However, Hague has been more sympathetic towards Israel’s predicament over Iran than Mrs Thatcher was over Iraq. He has been a leading proponent of the sanctions campaign and although he has stated that an Israeli attack would be “unwise”, it appears that his main concern surrounds the timing and success of an operation, rather than its legitimacy. After all, Britain itself has not ruled out the use of force against Tehran.

From a Western perspective, one could argue that Israel’s attack on Osirak posed more problems than would a similar operation against Iran today. There were good reasons why Mrs Thatcher was appalled by the raid. Through most of her premiership, she shared Foreign Office concerns that Moscow would gain ground in the Arab world by exploiting regional instability. Britain’s moderate Arab allies were both incensed and alarmed by the Israeli strike and King Hussein of Jordan, a friend of the West, was furious with the Reagan administration for its soft response. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, fully exploited Washington’s support for Israel by posing as a strong advocate of the Palestinian and Arab cause. In the Cold War atmosphere of 1981, there were fears that Arab countries would turn to Moscow for support. Few tears would be shed today, though, by Arab leaders if Iran’s nuclear facilities were attacked.

Following Operation Babylon, a British official wrote that Iraq’s capability had been put back perhaps three to four years, adding that this would “not make anyone sleep much better at night”. In a similar vein, many analysts believe that an Israeli strike against Iran may at best cause only temporary damage. Either way, an Israeli operation now appears inevitable. Perhaps we should leave the final word to Begin. On being asked whether Israel would take action against other countries with nuclear ambitions, he replied that Israel was dealing with Iraq first. “The others we’ll deal with another time.” Israel attacked a Syrian nuclear installation in 2007. Will it do the same with Iran in 2012?

Dr Azriel Bermant is Assistant Editor at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation

via Lessons from Israel’s Operation Babylon – World – DNA.