NETANYAHU: I HAVE NOT DECIDED WHETHER TO STRIKE AT IRAN

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday night that he had not yet decided whether to order military intervention to thwart Iran’s nuclear drive,” reports the Times of Israel. “When the time did come to decide, he added, however, objections from military and security chiefs would not prevent him and his government colleagues from ordering a military strike should they deem it necessary. ‘I’ve not made a decision yet,’ he told Channel 2 News. But he then invoked Israel’s 1981 air strike to destroy Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, Iraq. Menachem Begin, the prime minister of the time, made the decision to attack despite the opposition of Israel’s security chiefs, he noted. And it would always be the case, he said, that ‘the political echelon’ would make such decisions. It was the job of ‘the professional echelon’ — the IDF and security services — to carry them out….Netanyahu said he would be only too pleased were the international community to succeed in thwarting Iran’s drive to the bomb via sanctions and non-military methods. But ‘as of this moment,’ he said, while sanctions ‘have hurt the Iranian economy,’ they haven’t pushed back the Iranian drive by ‘so much as a millimeter.'” The article noted that IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz “said Tuesday that the IDF was ‘prepared, and ready to act’ and that, for the IDF, the oft-repeated statement that ‘all options are on the table’ is  ‘not a slogan, it’s a work plan.'”

>> New poll finds 80% of Americans believe Iranian nuclear weapon threats America; two-thirds say sanctions won’t stop Iran from getting the Bomb

>> For a political thriller about an American President pushing Israel not to launch a preemptive strike against Iran, but the Israeli Prime Minister choosing to launch the attack anyway,  read The Tehran Initiative, now out in paperback.

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