Former US ambassador to the UN says every day that goes by "puts Israel in greater danger," urges Israel to stop waiting.
“Israel should have attacked Iran yesterday – every day that goes by puts Israel in greater danger, every day Iran makes more progress,” John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the UN, told The Jerusalem Post in an interview on Monday.
“I can understand why Israel wants us to take action, but the longer Israel waits for something that is not going to happen, the greater the danger Israel is in,” the senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute said.
The US and Israel cannot expect to have perfect intelligence about Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but if Israel attacked Iran after it gained that capability, there could be “nuclear retaliation,” he said.
During his first term, President Barack Obama implied that the US would not resupply Israel with weapons used in attacking Iran, Bolton said. He added that overwhelming congressional support would have forced the issue of resupplying Israel in any case.
Now he thinks the situation has changed and the issue is whether the US would take the necessary measures to make the case that Israel was acting legitimately in self-defense.
The interview, coming a day after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Iran was approaching the red line he set out at the UN last September, constituted a warning that Israel could attack Iran as a last resort to prevent it from gaining nuclear weapons capability.
Asked about the chances that the US president would order an attack before any Israeli one, Bolton responded skeptically, “It would take a character transplant for Obama to order a US attack.”
Jerusalem Post
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