MIDDLE EAST Israel won't rule out strike as Iran's nukes spark worry

Compounding the threat is the fact that Iran has a medium-range missile.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
JERUSALEM -- Increasingly concerned about Iran's nuclear program, Israel is weighing its options and has not ruled out a military strike to prevent the Islamic republic from gaining the capability to build atomic weapons, according to policymakers, military officials, analysts and diplomats.
Israel says it would much prefer a diplomatic agreement to shut down Iran's uranium-enrichment program, but if it concluded that Tehran was approaching a "point of no return," it would not be deterred by the difficulty of a military operation, the prospect of retaliation or the international reaction, officials and analysts said.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his top aides have been asserting for months that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a clear threat to Israel's existence. They have repeatedly threatened, in elliptical but unmistakable terms, to use force if diplomacy and the threat of sanctions fail.
'All options'
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper last month that "all options" were being weighed to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability. The army chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, declared: "We will not rely on others."
Iran presents "a combination of factors that rise to the highest level of Israeli threat perception," said analyst Gerald Steinberg of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
"Nuclear weapons in a country with a fundamentalist regime, a government with which we have no diplomatic contact, a known sponsor of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and which wants to wipe Israel off the map -- that makes stable deterrence extremely difficult, if not impossible," Steinberg said.
Israel's concerns are magnified by the fact that Iran already possesses the medium-range Shahab-3 missile, capable of reaching Israel with either a conventional or nonconventional warhead. Iran said this week that it had test-fired an upgraded, more accurate version of the missile.
Essential philosophy
Pre-emptive strikes have always been an essential element of Israel's military doctrine. Perhaps the most pertinent example is the air raid that destroyed Saddam Hussein's Osirak nuclear reactor in June 1981.
Experts are divided, however, on whether that precedent should be viewed as a window into Israel's thinking on Iran.
"The comparison to 1981 is of the utmost relevance, because the decision making is based on the same factors," said army reserve Col. Danny Shoham, a former military intelligence officer who is a researcher at Bar-Ilan University. "Those are: What is the reliability of the intelligence picture? What would be the response of the opponent? What is the point of no return in terms of nuclear development, and what would be the international response?"
Key differences
He and others noted key differences that could weigh against a military strike. Iran's nuclear development sites are widely scattered, in many cases hidden underground and heavily fortified, so Israel would have far less opportunity to deal the Iranian program a single devastating blow.
"It would be a complicated operation. In order to undermine or disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, you would have to strike at least three or four sites," said Ephraim Kam, the deputy head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "Otherwise the damage would be too limited, and it would not postpone the program by more than a year or two, and this could, in the end, be worse than doing nothing."