U.S. option to bomb Iran still on the table

Matthew Fisher,
National Post
Monday January 14, 2008

JERUSALEM -Nobody actually said very much but Israeli officials seemed happy with how talks about Iran went here last week with U.S. President George W. Bush.

Sallai Meridor, Israel's ambassador to the United States, who came home for the President's visit, said that Israel and the Bush White House were "in sync" about the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. All options, including a military strike, remained on the table, he said, despite a recent National Intelligence Estimate prepared by an alphabet soup of U.S. intelligence agencies that concluded Iran no longer had a nuclear weapons program and had not had one since 2003.

The NIE provoked shock, anger and deep disappointment in Israel, which fears a nuclear-armed Iran would

be a mortal threat because it already has missiles capable of reaching the Jewish state. A sense of how acutely and urgently Israel regards the danger posed by Tehran can be seen online by accessing the home page of the Jerusalem Post. It includes a permanent tab that opens to a special section on Iran.

While the awkwardly worded NIE findings were widely thought in the West and elsewhere to have precluded U.S. military action against Iran any time soon, Israel, which probably has had nuclear weapons for more than 20 years, has tried to counter its conclusions in a series of meetings here and in Washington.

Far from having his hands tied by the NIE, or by secret talks the United States may be having with Iran about Iraq, Bush has given the Israelis hope of military action by keeping the rhetoric at a boil.

"Iran was a threat, Iran is a threat, and Iran will be a threat," Bush said while in Jerusalem, unless the international community united "to prevent that nation from the development of the know-how to build a nuclear weapon."

Full article here.