‘Israel Must Consider Ties with US when Weighing Attack on Iran’

Amid reports that US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is heading to Israel next week for talks on Tehran's nuclear program, a senior US defense official has told The Jerusalem Post that an Israeli strike on Iran could be profoundly destabilizing and would affect US interests.

Israel needed to take its relationship with America into account in contemplating any such attack, he warned.

Gates, who last week described the Islamic republic's nuclear drive as the greatest current threat to global security, is set to spend six hours next Monday, discussing the Iranian threat with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. He will also visit Jordan, according to officials involved in planning the trip.

In his interview with the Post at the Pentagon, the senior US defense official also suggested that Syria might be ready to "fundamentally" reorient its position toward the United States, which would include restarting talks with Israel, at a time when “Hamas and Hezbollah have been put "on the defensive" by Obama administration policies and events in Iran.”

Those events, said the official, who insisted on anonymity, hadn't been seen to affect Iran's timeline on developing nuclear weapons. What was clear, he indicated, was the negative effect an Israeli strike would have. "A unilateral third-party attack on Iran's nuclear program could have profoundly destabilizing consequences, and it wouldn't just affect the general level of stability in the region. It would affect Israel's security and it would affect our interests, and the safety of our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere," the official said, when asked if the US expected Israel to inform it of any decision to strike Iran.

"It's a pretty big deal, and given the closeness of our relationship with Israel, I think we would hope that they would take those strategic calculations into account."

His comments in the interview, conducted on Friday, came on the heels of conflicting signs from the Obama administration about whether it had given Israel a so-called "green light" to attack Iran, after Vice President Joe Biden said "Israel can determine for itself - it's a sovereign nation - what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else" on July 5. Obama clarified on CNN later in the week that he had "absolutely not" given Israel permission to strike Iran.

The comments also followed a report in The Washington Times that Israel had not asked the US for permission for a possible military attack on Iran out of fear America would say no.

"There may be some disagreement about how quickly the Iranians could weaponize," he noted of Israeli versus American assessments, "but the general timeframe about when the Iranians might cross a threshold of a nuclear weapons capability is broadly in that one-to-three year timeframe that the chairman [Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] has noted on a number of occasions."

He said that when it came to Syria, the US still hadn't seen "on the Hamas or Hezbollah front that there's been any improvement," and “we're approaching a time where it's pretty clear the Syrians need to start showing pretty concretely that they're ready to start changing their behavior, not just their words.” Still, he said, "There is a change in that Syria is increasingly willing to have a productive conversation with us" and "there's reason to be cautiously optimistic."