US Warns Israel Off Pre-Emptive Strike on Iran!

• US warns Israel off pre-emptive strike on Iran! 
  by Julian Borger Diplomatic Editor, guardian.co.uk ,  31 Oct 2012
  Arab spring has left US-friendly rulers in region nervous about possible impact of an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear programme
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  US military commanders have warned their Israeli counterparts that any action against Iran would severely limit the ability of American forces in the region to mount their own operations against the Iranian nuclear programme by cutting off vital logistical support from Gulf Arab allies.
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  US naval, air and ground forces are dependent for bases, refuelling and supplies on Gulf Arab rulers who are deeply concerned about the progress Iran has made in its nuclear programme, but also about the rising challenge to their regimes posed by the Arab spring and the galvanising impact on popular unrest of an Israeli attack on Iran.
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  The US Fifth Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain and the US air force has major bases in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Senior US officers believe the one case in which they could not rely fully on those bases for military operations against Iranian installations would be if Israel acted first.
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  “The Gulf states’ one great fear is Iran going nuclear. The other is a regional war that would destabilise them,” said a source in the region. “They might support a massive war against Iran, but they know they are not going to get that, and they know a limited strike is not worth it, as it will not destroy the programme and only make Iran angrier.”
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  Israeli leaders had hinted they might take military action to set back the Iranian programme, but that threat receded in September when the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, told the United Nations general assembly that Iran’s advances in uranium enrichment would only breach Israel’s “red line” in spring or summer next year.
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  Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak, said this week in London that it was the Iranian decision this year to convert a third of the country’s stock of 20%-enriched uranium into fuel (making it harder to convert to weapons-grade material if Iran decided to make a weapon) that had bought another “eight to 10 months”.
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  Barak’s comments appear to signal that Israel’s new red line is an Iranian stockpile of about 200kg of 20%-enriched uranium in convertible form, enough if enriched further to make one bomb. Western diplomats argue the benchmark is arbitrary, as it would take Iran another few months to enrich the stockpile to 90% (weapons-grade) purity, and then perhaps another year to develop a warhead small enough to put on a missile. Even then Tehran would have just one nuclear bomb, hardly enough to make it a nuclear weapons power.
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  France’s president, François Hollande, met Netanyahu in Paris on Wednesday but rejected the push for military action.
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