Jonathan Freedland-18/07/2007

Jonathan Freedland, (Guardian)

"I do not detect any gung-ho Israeli desire to pounce. Several voices in the military and political establishment speak instead of pursuing diplomacy and precisely targeted sanctions to the very end. They reckon that if the Iranian elite is denied international financial credit and the refined oil on which they rely, the regime could begin to crack under the strain. The aim, one Israeli insider explained to me, is to have "the head of the Bank of Iran furious that his son cannot study at Harvard or his daughter at the Sorbonne" and venting his fury at Ahmadinejad and his nuclear policy. "Iran is not North Korea," he argued - there is a civil society and an elite which might pressure the leadership to drop the nuclear dream if it proved too costly. Even Iranian public opinion is tepid about nukes once the price gets too high.

Israel has other reasons to be wary. An air assault on Iran's nuclear sites would not be the clean, surgical hit on a single location that took out Iraq's plutonium reactor at Osirak in 1981. Tehran's uranium-enrichment centres are dispersed, hidden and protected. Above all, Iran has the power to retaliate - probably through terror cells that would hit Israeli and Jewish targets around the world, as they have in the past."

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