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of uniformed US personnel. The focus was, of all things, on defense against a
missile attack from Iran. I contacted Leon Panetta to see whether we could delay it.
The official reason cited by the Americans, when they agreed to do it, did have the
merit of being true: that Bibi was coming under pressure to shift our budgetary
priorities away from defense toward social and economic issues. But Panetta
understood that my request for a delay meant we were at least considering military
action. He also realized that if we did launch an attack, it was in the Americans'
own interest for their troops be as far away from Israel as possible. We agreed to
reschedule the exercise for October 2012. That meant that if we did decide to
attack, we'd have until well into September, when significant numbers of US
troops would begin arriving.
As we weighed our final decision, I held a series of high-level meetings in
Washington: with Panetta, national security adviser Tom Donilon, Hillary Clinton,
and President Obama himself. Though not explicitly saying we were ready to
attack, I left no doubt that we were seriously considering it, and explained the
reasons we believed our country's fundamental security interests might make it
necessary. The message from all of the Americans I met was that the
administration shared our basic goal: to prevent, or at least seriously impair, Iran's
drive to get a nuclear bomb. But they continued to believe that non-military
pressure was the best way to do it.
The Americans knew we were skeptical that the non-military route would work,
and that we were deeply worried about the implications of not taking military
action if it failed. I discussed our thinking - and, in general terms, our plans – in
my meetings with Panetta. He already had a pretty good idea of the broad contours
of what we were contemplating, since US radar systems and electronic intercepts
had been recording the volume and nature of air force exercises we'd been
conducting over recent months. Leon and I had by now got to know each other
well, having first met when he was in charge of the CIA at the start of the Obama
administration. In one of our early meetings at CIA headquarters in Langley, there
had been a small bunch of grapes on his desk and I plucked a few in my mouth
with obvious enjoyment. Now, at the Pentagon, he had a big bowlful ready
whenever we met. The fact that he opposed an Israeli military operation made him
no less of a pleasure to deal with. He was unfailingly calm and even tempered. He
had an encyclopedic grasp of issues of defense, intelligence, budgets and policy.
He was always rock-solid in America's commitments to Israel. It's worth
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