Netanyahu draws Israel’s red line for Iran amid secret discussion with US on a spring attack

DEBKAfile Special Report

Addressing the UN General Assembly Thursday, Sept. 27  Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu graphically depicted Israel’s red line for Iran. He held up a simple diagram showing that Iran had covered 70 percent of the distance to a nuclear bomb and must be stopped before it reached the critical stage next spring or early summer.

He stressed that it is getting late, very late to stop a nuclear Iran.

The best way, he said, is to lay down a clear red line on the most vulnerable element of its nuclear program: uranium enrichment. “I believe that if faced with a clear and credible red line, Iran will back down and may even disband its nuclear program,” he said.  Red lines prevent wars, don’t start them and in fact deterred Iran from blocking the Strait of Hormuz.

Israel and the US are in discussion over this issue, said Netanyahu. “I’m sure we can forge a way forward together.

He went on to accuse Iran of spreading terrorist networks in two dozen countries and turning Lebanon and Gaza into terror strongholds. Hoping a nuclear-armed Iran will bring stability is like hoping a nuclear al Qaeda will bring peace, the prime minister remarked.

debkafile quotes some Washington sources as disclosing that the White House and Israel emissaries have come to an understanding that Israel will hold back from attacking Iran’s nuclear sites before the US election in November, while a special team led set up by President Barack Obama completes a new paper setting out the end game for Iran.

He put the team to work after concluding that negotiations with Iran had exhausted their usefulness and placed at its head Gary Samore, top presidential adviser on nuclear proliferation.

Netanyahu’s citing of late spring, early summer 2013, as the critical point on Iran’s path to a nuclear bomb appears to confirm that he has agreed to delay military action against Iran in negotiations with the White House. Our sources report that the prime minister was represented in those talks by Defense Minister Ehud Barak and National Security Adviser Yakov Amidror.

According to another view, which is current in Washington’s intelligence community, Israel was finally persuaded by fresh intelligence presented by the Obama administration which showed that Israeli estimates were overly pessimistic in judging the timeline for Iran’s nuclear facilities to be buried in “immunity zones.” That time line extended to spring 2013, leaving Israel five to six months up to April-May for ordering a military operation against those sites.

However, we have learned, Israeli intelligence circles dispute their American colleagues’ estimate as “interesting” but inaccurate.  Netanyahu in his speech confirmed that Washington and Jerusalem were constantly exchanging views and evaluations on the state of Iran’s nuclear program.

He also made the point that while intelligence services, American and Israeli alike, had remarkable aptitudes, their estimates on Iran were not foolproof.

Obama snubs Netanyahu on Iran: My decisions - only what’s right for America

DEBKAfile Special Report

US President Barack Obama said Sunday night, Sept. 23 on CBS “60 Minutes” that he understands and agrees with Netanyahu’s insistence that Iran not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons as this would threaten both countries, the world in general and kick off an arms race. But he then added:

"When it comes to our national security decisions – any pressure that I feel is simply to do what's right for the American people. And I am going to block out – any noise that's out there."

Obama went on to say: “Now I feel an obligation - not pressure but obligation - to make sure that we’re in close consultation with the Israelis on these issues because it affects them deeply.”

So, consultation? yes; cooperation? forget it. His comments removed the last hopes Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak may have entertained of cooperation with the US for curtailing Iran’s nuclear designs by military force.

The US president was crystal clear: By saying he will be ruled solely by American security interests, he showed them that they too were being left to be guided by Israel’s security interests. So forget about red lines for America, he was telling Netanyahu.

His blunt verging-on-contemptuous dismissal of Israel’s concerns as “noise out there” was not much different from the way Iran’s leaders referred to the Jewish state.

Their threats against Israel have different dimensions: On the one hand, they say that if Israel is even thinking of attacking Iran, it will be destroyed in a preemptive attack. On the other, Israel has neither the military capability nor the courage to strike Iran.

Asked on CNN Sunday whether he feared a war with Israel was imminent, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said: "The Zionists are very much, very adventuresome… They seek to fabricate new opportunities for themselves and their adventurous behaviors."

Obama’ “noises” are Ahmadinejad’s “fabrications.”

The Iranian president had no need to explain how Iran would react, because the answer was broadcast ahead of his arrival in New York to address the UN General Assembly Thursday, by Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Revolutionary Guards missile section.

The general said Sunday:  Should Israel and Iran engage militarily, "nothing is predictable... and it will turn into World War III" Addressing Iran’s Arab-language network, he said, "In circumstances in which they (the Israelis) have prepared everything for an attack, it is possible that we will make a pre-emptive attack. Any Israeli strike would be presumed to be authorized by the US. Therefore, “we will definitely attackUS bases in Bahrain, Qatar and Afghanistan."

Tehran was therefore pulling against Obama by tying American and Israeli security interests into an inextricable bundle.

debkafile’s Jerusalem sources report that Netanyahu is now seriously considering calling off his trip to New York for a speech to the UN General Assembly scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 27. He realizes that by challenging US policy from the UN platform, he would lay himself open to criticism for gratuitous provocation of the president and interference in America’s election campaign weeks before a presidential election.

Obama’s Republican challenger Mitt Romney, in a separate CBS interview, attacked Obama’s reference to Israel’s legitimate concerns about a nuclear Iran as “noise out there,” calling it “just the latest evidence of his chronic disregard for the security of our closest ally in the Middle East.”

Earlier, Romney termed the president’s decision not to meet Netanyahu as sending a message throughout the Middle East “that we distance ourselves from our friends.”

As debkafile reported after that Obama snub, the wrangling with Washington has reduced Netanyahu’s options to start standing alone and making his own decisions.

Obama’s latest words underline this. The prime minister can no longer avoid his most fateful decision and one that is critical to Israel’s survival: to attack Iran and disrupt its nuclear program or live with an anti-Semitic nuclear Iran dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state and a threat to world stability.

For two weeks, the Israeli prime minister has dodged and ducked around the White House message. Instead, he has kept on bombarding Washington with high-powered messengers. They all came back with the same tidings: the US President is not only fed up with Israeli pressure but more determined than evade any military engagement with Iran.

By refusing to see Netanyahu, Obama sharpens his Iran dilemma

DEBKAfile Special Report

President Barack Obama’s refusal Tuesday Sept. 11 to see Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu because “the president’s schedule will not permit that,” left Jerusalem thunderstruck – and Washington too.

At one stroke, round after round of delicate negotiations on Iran between the White House, Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, the US National Security Council, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta collapsed. They had aimed at an agreement on a starting point for the meeting that had been fixed between the two leaders for Sept. 28 in New York to bridge their differences over an attack on Iran’s nuclear program.

By calling off the meeting, the US president has put paid to those hopes and publicly humiliated the Israel prime minister, turning the clock back to the nadir of their relations brought about by the comment by Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Aug. 30: “I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it” – meaning attack Iran.

By rebuffing Netanyahu, the president demonstrated that the top US soldier was not just talking off the cuff but representing the president’s final position on a possible Israel strike to preempt Iran’s nuclear program.

Tuesday, the US Defense Secretary said: “If Iran decides to make a nuclear weapon, the US would have a little more than a year to stop it.” He added that the United States has “pretty good intelligence” on Iran.

"It's roughly about a year right now. A little more than a year. And so ... we think we will have the opportunity once we know that they've made that decision, take the action necessary to stop (Iran)," Panetta said on CBS's "This Morning" program.

Panetta said the United States has the capability to prevent Iran from building an atomic bomb. "We have the forces in place to be able to not only defend ourselves, but to do what we have to do to try to stop them from developing nuclear weapons," he said.

Some optimists in Jerusalem took these comments to indicate that the crisis had become manageable now that the Obama administration was finally prepared to discuss a timeline and red lines for holding Iran back from making a bomb. This hope was soon dashed by word that the US president would rather confront Israel than Iran.

The White House may also have been incensed by the orders given by Netanyahu and Barak to the IDF to keep going on preparations for attacking Iran alongside the forthcoming meeting between the two leaders.

Netanyahu's comments to a news conference earlier Tuesday are unlikely to have salved angry administration spirits in Washington.

He said that with every passing day, Iran comes closer to a nuclear bomb, heedless of sanctions and diplomac. The world tells Israel 'wait, there's still time'. And I say, 'Wait for what? Wait until when?' Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don't have a moral right to place a red light before Israel," said Netanyahu on a note of frustration against the Obama administration.

debkafile reported earlier Tuesday:

The wrangling over Iran between the offices of the US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Monday, has been reduced essentially to a battle for the agenda of their meeting in New York on Sept. 28: Netanyahu will be pressing for a US commitment to military action if Iran crosses still-to-be-agreed red lines, while the White House rejects red lines – or any other commitment for action – as neither necessary nor useful.

Israel’s latest rebuttal came Monday, Sept. 10 from former Military Intelligence chief, Amos Yadlin, who argued that even without agreed red lines, Israel was quite capable of coping with its enemies without the United States.

The sparring appeared to have reached a point of no return, leaving Obama and Netanyahu nothing more to discuss. However, just the opposite is true. For both leaders their upcoming tête-à-tête is vital. It is the US president’s last chance to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program before he faces the American voter on Nov. 6, while the prime minister will not forego any opportunity to harness the US to this attack. He needs to prove - not just to the anti-war camp ranged against him at home, but also to assure the military - which has been falsely reported as against an attack - that he bent over backward to procure US backing.

Netanyahu does not feel that even if he fails to talk Obama around (more likely than not), he has lost American support; he counts on the US Congress to line up behind Israel’s case for cutting down a nuclear Iran which is sworn to destroy the Jewish state, as well as sections of the US public and media and some of he president’s Jewish backers, including contributors to his campaign chest.

Those are only some of the reasons why the last-ditch US-Israeli summit cannot be avoided and indeed may be pivotal - both for their participants’ personal political destinies,and for the Middle East at large.

debkafile’s Washington and political sources disclose that their dialogue will have two levels according to current planning:

1. In New York, Obama and Netanyahu will try and negotiate a common framework;

2. At the Pentagon in Washington, defense chiefs Leon Panetta and Ehud Barak will be standing by to render any agreements reached in New York into practical, detailed plans which would then be referred back to the two leaders for endorsement.

The heated dispute between US and Israeli officials over “red lines” was therefore no more than sparring over each of the leaders’ starting-points for their New York dialogue and therefore their agenda and final understandings. Behind the clash of swords, US and Israeli diplomats are working hard to negotiate an agreed starting point. They are putting just as much effort into preventing the row deteriorating into a total rupture before Sept. 28.

Netanyahu discussed another red line Monday when he interviewed President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, their first meeting in three months. Although the Israeli presidency is a largely titular function, Peres has elected himself senior spokesman for the opponents of an Israeli military operation against Iran.

While their advisers sought to establish agreed lines between them ahead of Netanyahu’s meeting with Obama, debkafile reports that the confrontation between the two Israeli politicians ended inconclusively, because Peres kept on demanding that the prime minister bend to the will of the White House.

Massed US, UK, French navies for drill simulating breach of blocked Hormuz

DEBKAfile Special Report

The third US aircraft carrier, USS Stennis, is moving into place off the Iranian Gulf coast to lead a 12-day naval exercise of 25 nations on Sept 16-27, that will include a large-scale minesweeping drill simulating the breaching of the Strait of Hormuz against Iranian efforts to block oil passage through the strategic waterway. President Barack Obama may see Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on the last day of the exercise. He hopes to present him with proof of US readiness for military action against Iran and demonstrate that an Israeli strike is superfluous.

The Stennis will join two other aircraft carriers, the USS Enterprise and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, and their strike groups, which are already on operational duty off the coast of Iran, ready for the drill which kicks off in the strategic Strait of Hormuz on Sept. 16.

US officials say the Stennis will replace the Enterprise, but according to debkafile’s military and Washington sources all three carriers will remain in place opposite Iran in the Gulf region in the coming months. British and French warships are completing their transfer to new stations off Iran for the big exercise in which the Saudi and United Arab Emirates navies will also take part.

In addition to practicing tactics for keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, the exercise will simulate operations for destroying Iranian naval, air and missile bases in the Persian Gulf area.

This war game has three additional objectives, reported here by debkafile’s military sources:

1. To forestall an Israeli offensive against Iran, President Barack Obama wants to convince its leaders as well as Gulf rulers that the US-Western military option for disrupting Iran’s race to a nuclear bomb is deadly serious and ready to be exercised when the need arises – although determining “when the need arises” is the nub of the US-Israel dispute.

The exercise winds up Sept. 27, the day penciled in by the White House for Netanyahu to arrive for talks with President Obama and enable him to show his visitor that there is no need for Israel to act.

2.  The exercise is intended to convey the same message to Iran, that the US military option is real and genuine and will be exercised unless it halts its nuclear weapons program. The awesome might the US-led  coalition is capable of wielding against the Islamic Republic in a prospective war will be brought home to Iran’s military strategists, its Revolutionary Guards, Navy, and Air Force commanders, across their television screens, radar and spy satellites.

3. The drill will assemble massive strength on the spot in anticipation of an Israeli decision after all to cut down the Iranian nuclear menace on its own.. 

The Netanyahu government found further grounds for going it alone in certain key amendments inimical to Israel introduced in the new Democratic Party’s platform on the Middle East. It is due for endorsement by the convention in Charlotte, Ca. Wednesday, ahead of Obama’s confirmation as the party’s presidential nominee. Those amendments are hardly designed to revive Israel's trust in the president's Middle East policies.

The 2008 platform confirmed a “commitment which requires us to ensure that Israel retains a qualitative edge in the Middle East for its national security and its right to self-defense.”  The 2012 platform is amended to “[t]he administration has also worked to ensure Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region,” with no commitment to doing so in the future.

The Democratic platform has also dropped the Democrats’ affirmation of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, leaving its status open for a negotiated peace with the Palestinians.

Also removed is the statement that Palestinian “refugees” should be settled in a future Palestinian state, not in Israel.”  The Obama White House has given itself a free hand to follow the Palestinian position on the refugee issue too like on Jerusalem (which he pointedly avoided visiting during his presidency.)

The new platform omits language characterizing Hamas as a terrorist group

The Israeli cabinet held a wide-ranging debate Tuesday, Sept. 4, on Iran after hearing briefings from the Military Intelligence, the Mossad, the Shin Bet and the Foreign Ministry’s Research Department on current Middle East crises, topped by Iran.  No bulletins were issued from the closed, classified proceedings.

Some of the participants described the information put before them as “worrying though not frightening.” They implied that the IDF’s level of preparations and alert has not been reduced, sharply refuting the misinformation opponents of direct Israeli action against Iran have circulated widely and planted in media headlines.

If Israel attacks Iran, US Mid East bases will pay dear – Nasrallah

DEBKAfile Special Report

Cutting through the US-Israeli debate over where to put “red lines” for Iran, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Monday night, Sept. 3 that Iran would hit US bases in the Middle East in response to any Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities, even if the Americans were not involved in the attack.

Earlier Monday, the New York Times reported on the debate in the White House over whether US President Barack Obama should declare “red lines” for Iran beyond which the US would act, in response to Israel’s complaint that he has been too vague about how far Iran will be allowed to go.

But even if Obama did set a clear red line now, the NYT admits its credibility would be questionable: “The US and its allies have allowed Iran to cross seven previous red lines in 18 years."

The statement by the top US soldier, Gen. Martin Dempsey, last Thursday that America did not “want to be complicit” in an Israeli attack on Iran was interpreted by the prime movers as meaning that US-Israeli discussions in the last two weeks on where to put the "red lines" were at an impasse.

In an attempt to contain the fallout from the Dempsey comment and put the dialogue back on track, the White House is sending CIA director David Petraeus to Jerusalem for more “red line” palaver with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

debkafile, which first disclosed his mission Sunday, Sept. 2, voiced doubts about his chances of success. Both parties to the debate know that the sands on a nuclear Iran are running out faster than they can talk. Roughly by the end of this month or early October, Iran will have enough 20-percent enriched uranium for its first nuclear bomb, overtaking any “red lines” and making them irrelevant.

Feeling the approaching heat, Netanyahu called a special cabinet meeting for Tuesday, Sept. 4 with the participation of the heads of Israel’s clandestine services, Military Intelligence, the Mossad, the Shin Bet and the Foreign Office Research Division, to hear their annual report.

It is likely to go on all day with updates on the situation in Syria, Egypt and Jordan – all weighty topics. But the agenda will certainly be topped with a detailed rundown on the current state of Iran’s nuclear program.

After that rundown, the prime minister and defense minister will enter the final decision-making stage on war against Iran.

At this critical moment, wit calculated timing, Petraeus is due to land in Israel.

Although the opponents of Netanyahu and Barak are fond of painting them as irresponsible adventurers ready to gamble with Israeli lives, it is Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has now raised the stakes in this game of dare and slapped down the highest cards.

The red line he instructed the head of Iran’s Lebanese surrogate Hizballah to lay down was unambiguous and designed to leap over the range of steps the US was planning short of war to “forestall an Israeli attack, while forcing the Iranians to take more seriously negotiations…”.

Nasrallah’s pitch took the scenario straight into stage one of the war to come: “If Israel targets Iran, America bears responsibility,” he told the Beirut-based Al Mayadeen TV Monday night.

“A decision has been taken in Tehran to respond and the response will be very great,” he said, citing “Iranian officials.”

Nasrallah carried a triple message from Tehran to Washington and Jerusalem:

1.  Iran believes an Israeli attack will take place before the US presidential election on Nov. 6;

2.  Tehran is drawing on a powerful deterrent: Lest anyone expected a low-key Iranian response to an attack on its nuclear facilities, the Hizballah leader put them right when he said, “the response will be very great” and “America bears responsibility.”

3. By putting Nasrallah out front as a leading Iranian spokesman, Khamenei signaled that Hizballah would take an active role in the coming conflict.

debkafile: The chatter about “red lines” in the last few days has therefore had the effect of stirring the Iranians into preempting them by a single sharp stroke.

Iranian leaders in Israel’s sights after calling for its destruction

by DEBKA file

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have bandied thousands of words in their dispute over an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites. For a time, their argument muffled the abiding ambition of the Islamic Republic to destroy Israel - come what may.

However, the message roared by Iranian leaders over last weekend - before and after Al Quds Day - was quite simply this: Israel must be destroyed, irrespective of whether or not it attacks the Islamic Republic

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was cheered by half a million demonstrators in Tehran shouting: Death to Israel! Death to America! when he declared Israel is a "cancerous tumor" that will soon be finished off in the new Middle East. He called “the Zionist regime’s existence an insult to all humanity.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said:  “The fake Zionist (regime) will disappear from the landscape of geography,”

And although both were severely rebuked by world leaders for their violent invective, it continued to pour out of Tehran in a comment by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force Chief, Brig. Gen. Amir Hajizadeh who said an Israeli attack would be welcome “as a pretext to get rid of Israel for good."

Israel’s new Home Defense Minister Avi Dichter laid it out in plain language: While Syria, Lebanon and Gaza confront Israel with a strategic threat, Iran imperils our very existence.”

Certain Western intelligence sources were reminded of a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 2006 when he quoted a Holocaust survivor as saying:  “My main lesson from the Holocaust is that if someone tells you he is going to exterminate you, believe him. And I add to that.

Believe him and stop him!”

Six years later, those sources now suggest, after America’s top soldier Gen. Martin Dempsey offered the opinion that Israel can no longer destroy Iran’s nuclear weapon capacity – only delay it , that Netanyahu may be willing to go further: Not only to stop them, but kill them.

They are quietly using the term “decapitation.”

They point to the Israeli Mossad’s long record of targeted covert operations for dealing with past and would-be annihilators: In the fifties, the Mossad captured the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann in Operational Finale.

In the seventies, Golda Meir ordered Operation Wrath of God to hunt down and pick off one by one the Palestinian Black September murderers of 11 Israeli sportsmen at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

In February 2008, Iran’s senior terrorist operations commander, Hizballah’s Imad Mughniyeh, was liquidated in Damascus, so ending a bloody career of assassinations, terrorism and abductions against US and other Western targets as well as Israel.

Hizballah’s chief Hassan Nasrallah knows the score: He has spent six years hunkered down in a fortified bunker, taking care never to  broadcast his inflammatory speeches calling for Israel’s destruction live, only by video.

It cannot be ruled out that this point, Israel may decide to disable Iran’s nuclear program by going for its leaders.

WATCH VIDEO HERE

Iran can build an N-bomb by Oct. 1. Cairo coup hampers Israeli action

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

At its present rate of enrichment, Iran will have 250 kilograms of 20-percent grade uranium, exactly enough to build its first nuclear bomb, in roughly six weeks, and two-to- four bombs by early 2013, debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report. Hence the leak by an unnamed Israeli security source Sunday, Aug. 12, disclosing Iran’s progress in developing the detonator and fuses for a nuclear warhead which can be fitted onto Shehab-3 ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel.

Since 20 percent refined uranium is a short jump to weapons grade fuel, Iran will have the capability and materials for building an operational nuclear bomb by approximately October 1.

This knowledge is not news to US President Barack Obama, Saudi King Abdullah, Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, or Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu - and certainly not to Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.  Netanyahu’s comment at the opening of the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday: “All threats against the home front are dwarfed by one – Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear arms!” – was prompted by that deadline.

Ex-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did not have that information when he “assured” Tel Aviv students Sunday, “Iran’s nuclear program has not reached the threshold necessitating Israeli action now or in the near future.” He further claimed that Israel’s “defense leaders” don’t subscribe to the view that “action now is unavoidable.” Olmert, who stepped down under a cloud of suspected corruption in 2009, has not since then had access to regular intelligence briefings on Iran. So either he spoke out of ignorance or willfully joined an opposition chorus of voices speaking out against Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

The fact is that when Olmert approved the Israeli strike for destroying a nuclear reactor under construction by Iran and North Korea in northern Syria in September 2007,  Iran was years away from accumulating enough enriched uranium and the capability to build nuclear warheads.
Both are now within Tehran’s grasp in weeks.

Leading an opposition campaign to bring down the incumbent government is legitimate. Discrediting belated Israeli action to pre-empt a nuclear Iran as fodder for that campaign is not.  If what Olmert and Barack (the same defense minister as today) did in 2007 was necessary then, action now for delaying Iran’s imminent “breakout” to a bomb is many times more necessary and far more urgent.
However Netanyahu and Barak have put themselves in a straitjacket by two lapses:

1.  By foot-dragging on their decision for two years, they have led their opponents at home and in Washington – and Khamenei’s office too – to believe that, by turning on the heat, they can hold Israel back from military action against Iran’s nuclear program until it is too late. The time has been used not just for Iranian nuclear progress, but to enlist ex-politicians and retired generals at home and add them to the voices, especially in the White House, which believe Israel can learn to live with a nuclear-armed Iran.

2.  Netanyahu and Barak have behaved as though a decision on Iran is in their exclusive province, insulated from the turmoil and change swirling through Israel’s Arab neighbors in the past two years.
But the Middle East has a way of catching up with and rushing past slow-moving politicians:
Sunday, at 10:00 a.m. Netanyahu warned his ministers that no threat was worse than a nuclear Iran. At 17:55 p.m., Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi dropped a bombshell in Cairo. In one fell swoop, he smashed the Egyptian military clique ruling the country for decades, sacked the Supreme Military Council running Egypt since March 2011 and cut the generals off from their business empire by appropriating the defense ministry and military industry.

That fateful eight hours-less-five-minutes have forced Israel’s leaders to take a second look at their plans for Iran.

Morsi’s lightning decisions were the finishing touches that proved the Islamist Bedouin terror attacks in Sinai of Aug. 5 fitted neatly into a secret master plan hatched by Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to seize full control of rule in Cairo – a plan debkafile first revealed exclusively last Friday, Aug. 10.

Netanyahu now faces one of the hardest dilemmas of his political career - whether to go forward with the Iran operation, which calls for mustering all Israel’s military and defense capabilities – especially for the repercussions, after being suddenly confronted with unforeseen security challenges on its southwestern border, for thirty years a frontier of peace.

The exceptional talents of Netanyahu and Barak to put off strategic decisions until they are overtaken by events has landed Israel in an especially perilous plight, surrounded now by a soon-to-be nuclear-armed Iran from the east;  threatened Syrian chemical warfare from the north and the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt to its south.

Olmert’s acquittal qualifies him to lead a new left-of-center bloc

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis

Ehud Olmert leapt agilely from deep pit of disgrace straight into the political limelight Tuesday, July 10 as a potential political game-changer. After living under the cloud of corruption for four years, he was cleared for lack of proof “beyond reasonable doubt.”by the Jerusalem District Court of the two most heinous counts which forced his resignation as prime minister.  Surrounded by political allies and friends, he smilingly warned reporters: “You’ll soon be seeing plenty of me around.”

He moved so smoothly that it was hard to remember that he was convicted of one of the three charges: breach of trust while serving as Minister of Trade and Industry; or that he still faced trial for graft in the big Holyland case while Mayor of Jerusalem.

Olmert clearly expects to land on his feet as the great unifier of a left-of-center political bloc. He sees himself as the only man capable of merging an amorphous assortment of left-wing, socialist, protest and otherwise angry groups and parties, which are too small, weak and fragmented to form a viable opposition to the broad right-of-center government coalition headed by Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud.

Aside from being a remarkably slick politician, Olmert has another qualifier: Before his forced resignation in 2008, he was the Israeli prime minister who came closest to a deal with the Palestinians by offering uniquely generous concessions.

As such, Olmert is in a position to attract the dwindling far-left Meretz, the fledgling Yesh Atid (There is a Future) and Socialist Labor, although Labor’s Shelly Yachimovitch will fight hard for her dream of restoring Labor to its old preeminence.

He would be able to rally factions in the Kadima party he once led, who are disgruntled with their current leader Shaul Mofaz for joining the Netanyahu government as deputy prime minister.

Olmert could also provide a home for anti-Likud, out-of-work, dovish ex-security and army heads like the former Mossad director Meir Dagan, former chiefs of staff Gaby Ashkenazi and Meir Halutz and ex-Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin.

The burgeoning social protest movements may also be swept up in the unifying momentum, particularly as most of them draw their ideas and funding from the same, often foreign, sources and share the same hankering to overturn the government in power.

All these groups and figures would temporarily throw their differences to the winds in their rush for a place in a new left-of-center coalition - however short-lived it may be. The long-stalled negotiations with the Palestinians would provide a handy political slogan for factional fusion.

Even before this nascent process takes off, the politicians who succeeded Olmert as leaders of Kadima: Tzipi Livni and the man who beat her to the top, Shaul Mofaz, look like shadows.

As foreign minister in the Olmert government, Livni will not be forgiven for conniving with (the then and now) Defense Minister Ehud Barak to drive him out of the prime minister’s office when he was accused of suspected corruption. He was hounded out even before he was indicted.

Just four days ago, Livni made a well-publicized appearance at a big demonstration in Tel Aviv on behalf of a new law for ending exemptions from military duty for ultra-religious yeshiva students and Arab citizens (Equal Sharing of the Burden). Tuesday, her image and hopes of a comeback were quickly overlaid by the triumphant former prime minister.

Some scrambling was also detected in the ruling camp under Netanyahu’s unchallenged leadership. His popularity has recently taken a knock from the way he wavered over legislation for making compulsory conscription universal. His actions were criticized for being prompted by the narrow political motive of preserving his government coalition against the loss of Kadima’s Mofaz who championed the Equal Burden movement, rather than meeting a just popular demand.

Prime Minister Netanyahu feels the need to shore up his government against the loss of a senior coalition partner: The hard-line Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of Israeli Beitenu goes on trial next month for alleged financial wrongdoing including money laundering. For the duration of the trial and in case of his conviction, Lieberman has chosen an able successor, Yair Shamir, son of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir who passed away on June 30.

Shamir is close to Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon of Likud. They are emerging as possible leaders of a solidified right-of-center alliance against a future left-of-center bloc. It would bring together Likud, Israeli Beitenu, Independence (led by Ehud Barak) and the National Union.

Israel’s political anatomy is historically dominated by two big rival alliances which operate on opposite sides of the aisle most of the time, but tend to join forces for national unity in some national emergencies.

The two camps have this in common:  Each traditionally enlists ultra-religious groups, Shas and Degel Hatorah, as tie-breakers to gain the lead in forming a government, and then builds them safe niches in their coalition governments.

Putin-Netanyahu talks to focus on rising Islamist power: Cairo then Damascus

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis

The Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt – and soon, possibly, in Syria - will have pushed to the sidelines such obvious topics as Iran and gas when Monday, June 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin on a short visit to Israel meets Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

On this subject at least, the Russian and Israeli leaders will find common ground: Both are concerned, to put it mildly, by the chain of Muslim Brotherhood governments rolling out along Middle East shores – Libya, last year; Egypt, yesterday; and Syria, tomorrow. In their view, this process is a menace to regional stability which rivals even that of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Putin counts US President Barack Obama’s sponsorship of Muslim Brotherhood power as a strategic threat to Russian national security because of it could be the match which lights the flame of radical Islam in the Caucasus and among the Russian Muslim populations of the Volga River valleys.

As for Netanyahu, his calm-sounding congratulations for the new, democratically-elected Egyptian president, disguise trepidation. After one domino fell in Cairo, he fears another will fall in Damascus leaving Jordan vulnerable to having its king pushed over by the kingdom’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood.

Israel would then be under siege from three Islamist-ruled neighbors - “moderate” in Obama’s eyes, alarmingly “extremist and expansionist” in the view of Putin and Netanyahu.

In contrast to the Israeli prime minister, the Russian president makes no bones about his utter disapproval of the US President’s “pro-Islamic” policies. His blunt words in support of Syria’s Bashar Assad at the G20 in Mexico Sunday, June 18, were meant as a monkey wrench for US plans to continue to install Muslim power in Arab lands.

Not surprisingly, their conversation on the summit sidelines was described as “candid” – a euphemism for “difficult” – and must have raised a stop sign against the “reset” of ties heralded last year by Washington.

The Israeli Prime Minister keeps on smiling to Obama while grinding his teeth over the security avalanche set in motion at Israel’s front and back doors and wracking his brains for a plan of cooperation with Moscow to arrest the slide.

Israel has already had a foretaste of the trouble to come from Cairo. It bounced all the way from Libya’s Islamist regime to land this month with a sinister bang across Egyptian Sinai’s border with southern Israel.

In the past year, since a new regime took power in Tripoli, the strategic peninsula has been transformed into a major smuggling eden for the distribution of contraband arms and infiltrating Islamist terrorists, including Muslim Brotherhood adherents, into the Hamas-ruled the Gaza Strip and onward to other countries in the region.

For Putin the math is simple: If Libyan Islamists can travel 1,360 kilometers to reach Israel’s borders without anyone stopping them, why not 2,558 kilometers to the Russian Caucasian?

Ironically, the victim of the first suicide attack the Libyan terrorists mounted inside Israel from Sinai was an Israeli Muslim from Haifa, Said Fashasha, who died in a bombing-shooting ambush on Route 10 to Eilat Sunday, June 18. On the same day, the “candid” Obama-Putin conversation also took place at Los Cabos.

Now as then, President Obama continues to push the Russian leader to accept the compromise of Syria’s Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa, a Sunni Muslim, replacing Bashar Assad, with Assad’s brother-in-law, deputy chief of staff Gen. Shawqat Asif, serving alongside him. With those chips in place, Washington believes Assad might be persuaded to go into exile in Moscow.

What Putin hears is that Obama is so eager to have a Sunni Muslim installed in Damascus that he is willing to put up with retaining the Assad clan in power, even Gen. Asif, a chief instigator of the regime’s bloody savagery.

So both Putin and Netanyahu, when they talk in Jerusalem Monday, know they are stumped for a strategy to hold back the Islamist tide washing across this region and potentially farther afield – any more than a diplomatic solution has been found to stall Iran’s nuclear plans.