Israel To Nuke Iran? No - Another Neocon Story Plant

Today's scariest news is from the London Sunday Times, which reports that israel has a secret plan to use tactical nukes to destroy Iran's nuclear program.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.

“As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.

Personally, I don't believe it. I'm writing it off as made up to create pressure on Iran to negotiate - especially because one of the report's authors, Sarah Baxter, is a common UK mouthpiece for US neoconservative and pro-Israel lobby story-plants. Ask yourself, if Bill Kristol or Eli Lake was the one touting this as truth, would American pundits be more inclined to take it as a propaganda piece rather than established fact? Exactly.

Dave Schuler seems to agree with me and has an interesting graphic as well as a great set of arguments against any such strike. There is no route between Israel and Iranian targets that doesn't involve overflying a Moslem nation or two. Nor is there a route that would not at least involve America standing by and letting the strike happen. Israel would have to be suicidal to want to incite war with several neighbours at once while losing all support from its allies. The U.S. would have to be insane to let another nation involve it by proxy in such a massive regional conflict as would break out. Even Bush isn't that daft.

The uber-right, however, love it. Their posts today seem to center around some variant or other of "Israel will do what the US and UN don't have the courage for".

And that's the other real reason for this piece. UK newspapers, especially the Times and Telegraph, seem to have an inflated sense of "worthiness" in the U.S. By planting this story (like many others) in the UK and then letting the US uber-right noise machine run with it, the neocons create more pressure on American politicians - always most scared of being seen as timid - to be more warlike towards Iran too.

Oh Look, Whaddayaknow...

The AP/New York Sun is quoting Israeli defense analysts as saying it's just propaganda.

Olmert's office and the Israeli military declined to comment on report by The Sunday Times.

But Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev denied the report, saying Israel was supporting diplomatic efforts. "If diplomacy succeeds, the problem can be solved peaceably," he said.

Some analysts viewed the report as another element of a delicate diplomatic dance.

"I refuse to believe that anyone here would consider using nuclear weapons against Iran," Reuven Pedatzur, a prominent Israeli defense analyst and columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, told The Associated Press in Jerusalem. "It is possible that this was a leak done on purpose, as deterrence, to say: 'Someone better hold us back, before we do something crazy.'"

Ephraim Kam, a former senior Israeli intelligence official who is now at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Strategic Studies, also suggested the report should not be taken literally.

"No reliable source would ever speak about this, certainly not to The Sunday Times," he said.