Rumors now coursing through the upper echelons of the US and pro-Israel Jewish communities anticipate a unilateral Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites in the run-up to the presidential election in November, 2012. Backers of the sneak attack strategy believe that the pre-election timing will guarantee Congressional backing and prevent President Obama and other members of his government from opposing what will be a mirror image of the Israeli pre-emptive strike on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1982.
The critical shipment of highly advanced US materiel (100 GBU-28 bunker busters) was contracted for sale to Israel by the USA in 2007, but the shipment was not ready until after the Bush administration retired, and the Obama administration arrived.1 Apparently, someone in the Obama administration reduced the arms shipment from one hundred bunker busters to a mere fifty-five; then the sophisticated laser-guided bombs were trans-shipped to Diego Garcia. There was some speculation at the time about these weapons stored at Diego Garcia, a remote British-owned island in the Indian Ocean that serves as a strategic US military base. In 2009, observers were perplexed as to whether the laser-guided bombs were ultimately meant for shipment to Israel for attack on Iranian nuclear sites in a rerun of Osirak-1982.2
It is well known that the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu is "strained" and for good reasons. Netanyahu resented Obama's overtures to Iran (the Nowruz statements), his Cairo speech, his push for peace via Special Envoy George Mitchell, his insistence on the ten-month suspension of settlement construction, and worst of all, the president’s insistence of moral equivalency, an abandonment of the double standard with one set of rules for Israel and another for everybody else.
The bottom line – the right-wingers realize that during the presidential re-election offers them a unique opportunity for punishing Iran. The US presidential campaign has already begun with both sides running TV spots and raising funds as aggressively as they know how to do at this stage. Right-wingers perceive that Obama, whom they regard as a closet Muslim peacenik from Africa, is literally hand-cuffed to Congress. So, the right-wing government of Israel is free to attack Iran with relative impunity from the political and diplomatic perspectives.
