In new book, former defense minister says he, Netanyahu and Lieberman sought to strike Tehran’s nuclear facilities between 2010-2012, but that attempts were blocked by former IDF chief Ashkenazi and ministers Ya’alon, Steinitz.
Former defense minister Ehud Barak says in a new book that Israeli plans to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities were blocked on three separate occasions between 2010-2012, first by Israel’s military chief and later by two ministers.
Channel 2 TV aired a recording of Barak’s remarks on Friday, made in an interview for a new book about him. Channel 2 said the former minister tried to prevent the broadcast but that Israel’s military censor allowed it.
In the recordings, Barak says that in 2010, he, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then-foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman sought to bring the discussion of a possible attack against Iran to the entire cabinet, and consulted the matter with IDF chief of staff at the time, Gabi Ashkenazi.
“The answer was not positive; we could not get the combination of words out of them… You can’t go to the Cabinet and then have the chief of staff come and say, ‘Excuse me, I told you no,'” Barak says in the recording.
The report comes amid Israel’s intense lobbying against the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that would see Tehran’s nuclear program rolled back in return for sanctions relief.
According to the report, that same year a large meeting was convened at Mossad headquarters regarding an attack in Iran, and Netanyahu and Barak felt they had a majority with which they could come to the octet and then the government, including the support of ministers Moshe Ya’alon and Yuval Steinitz. However, during the meeting it turned out this was not the case.
“A year later, the chief of staff is Gantz, he says ‘there are capabilities (to launch such an attack), you know all the limitations, all the risks,'” Barak says,
“Bibi, myself and Lieberman support it and (believe it’s) time to go and present it to the octet… Bibi was supposed to make sure in long conversations with Ya’alon and Steinitz what their positions were and then at a certain point of consultations between us, Bibi said ‘They support it, it’s okay,’ and then we convened a meeting of the octet about this thing because in principle, the fact the capability (to attack) is there was something we already knew, despite the risks.”
During the meeting, however, Barak and Netanyahu learned that Ya’alon and Steinitz opposed an attack on Iran.
According to Barak, the military rank explained during the meeting that even though the IDF is capable of launching such an attack, it was a difficult operation to mount.
“When the chief of staff says ‘there’s capability,’ he doesn’t mean ‘guys, this is a game, a walk in the park.’ No – he presents all the issues, all the difficulties, all of the complications, all of the complexities and the problems, including the possibility that there might be casualties – these things are not completely surgical. And you saw how right in front of our eyes both Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Steinitz were backing away,” Barak recounts.
“You see their reactions about questions raised. Either Bibi didn’t do the prep work, or he incorrectly assessed what supporting it looks like. But these are the same ministers Ya’alon and Steinitz that today if you ask the public, they’re the most militant about attacking Iran. If they hadn’t changed their minds, there would’ve been a situation of a five or six majority inside the cabinet that believe it can be done and then we might have convened the cabinet to make a decision and then we could’ve attacked.”
Isnt that what the GCC have been doing the last few years with Hamas, Hezbullah and Syria?????? Weakening the proxies so as to reduce blowback? I have been pointing this out for years as part of the under the table understanding between the GCC and Israel. This is the only explanation which explains rationally much of BB’s decision making the last few years. All his decisions have the understandings in mind.
Let’s find out. The method is a proven winner, unlike the Obama approach of gifting violent psychotics with $150 billion and placing them on the honor system. Given that the Iranian people have previously proven themselves eager to revolt against the vermin that persecute them, they should be encouraged to resume that worthwhile pursuit.
This is idle-talk, for the key-concern is to stop the deal…and then to reformulate accordingly; we all know what each other think.
@ babushka:
You seem to take as an article faith that moral support from a super-power would carry enough weight to cause a citizens’ coup against a tyrannical regime such as the ayatollists of Iran.
But I seriously think that with the combination of the Republican Guard and the Basiji, which constitute respectively the Nazi German Schutz-Staffel and Sturm Abteilung following the orders of and protecting the ruling ayatollahs from their own citizens, no such governmental overthrow would be possible without first permanently neutralizing all at once the leading ayatollahs and the leaders of both the Republican Guard and the Basiji.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
Providing moral support to Iranian revolutionaries would have been sufficient. If the next president announces that America supports regime change, it will embolden Iranian dissidents.
Lech Walesa wrote that Reagan’s public advocacy of the Polish revolutionaries was the decisive moment in the overthrow of the communist regime. He explained that people who yearn to defeat tyranny must first overcome the sense of helplessness and isolation inflicted by a totalitarian state. Reagan emboldened the Poles with essential moral support and the regime fell. Obama remained immorally mute and the Iranian dictatorship survived.
There is no need to start a war. Energizing the preexisiting revolutionary spirit will suffice.
@ rsklaroff:
@ babushka:
RSK thinks inciting and assisting an Iranian anti-ayatollist coup d’état by means of an overnight neutralization of the ayatollist leadership “does not suffice”. But what if there is no other fix that suffices to protect Israel from nuclear destruction? Because in any nuclear exchange in the Middle East in which Israel is a target, and if multiple hostile nuclear warheads are detonated there, the result with great certitude would be the destruction of the Jewish state.
Babushka thinks the USA had an opportunity in 2009 to assist in a coup that may well have resulted in overthrow of the ayatollist regime. But I am certain that no US government will start a war in the Middle East regardless of the threat to Israel. They may indeed issue veiled threats, but nothing else will result from such threats.
Israel, as always, is truly on its own, and must act accordingly. And especially so because Iranian-manufactured warheads equipped with their enriched uranium stockpile will find their way into Hezbollah stockpiles. The clock may well be ticking. And I see no way of anybody talking their way out of this.
Arnold Harris
@ rsklaroff:
@ babushka:
concur!
Had Obama supported the 2009 Iranian uprising, the problem would be solved. The next president can do for the Iranians what Reagan did for the Poles: place the moral support of the world’s superpower behind the cause of freedom.
Your approach doesn’t suffice.
From the hints of evidence presented here, I think it is likely the civil chiefs of the government of Israel determined that the risks involved in undertaking an aerial attack against the Iranian uranium enrichment facilities and other militarily-protected targets could not assure complete success, and/or would have involved risks to the attacking forces that were unacceptable from the standpoint of Israel’s overall defense requirements.
One must assume all such targets have now been rendered all but impossible to completely destroy by any such aerial attack.
For some time now, I have been commenting that the only feasible means of ending Iran’s purposefully intentional existential threat against the State of Israel is to engineer the means unseat the present ayatollist government of that country. The only way to do that is to neutralize the key power-holders, working in conjunction with Iranian dissident groups who fervently want to pull don the rule of the ayatollists. A friendlier Iranian government not only would mount no threats against other states in and outside the Middle East, but also would be much more likely to reastablish friendly relations with Israel.
That approach, and none other, such be the focus of Israel’s strategic defense efforts against the murderous threats emanating routinely from the leading ayatollahs and their spokesmen. If such a coup could have been successfully carried out against Hitler and his leading Nazi Party cronies, the lives of most of the 6 million martyred Jews of Europe, the much more numerous millions of Russian Soviet citizens and armed forces personnel, and even the lives of millions of Germans, could all have been saved. The same error-based inaction should not again be allowed to play out its potentially deadly course.
Arnold Harris
Corroborates attack on perps by Glick during JPost conference in nyc.