Israel Training to Attack Iran

Analysis by Peter Hirschberg

"JERUSALEM, Jun 25 (IPS) - Israeli defence experts were not surprised by a New York Times report over the weekend that the Israeli air force had recently conducted what appeared to be a rehearsal for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Israel, the experts say, has never taken the military option off the table and they therefore expect the air force to be training for a strike in Iran. "It is logical that the army is training for an Iranian mission," says Efraim Inbar, head of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies near Tel Aviv. "We are preparing for it. The air force is in charge of this file.".....

But Israel has gone it alone in the past when it suspected an Arab state was developing nuclear weapons. Israeli planes flew all the way to Iraq in 1981 and destroyed a nuclear plant built by Saddam Hussein at Osirak. Last September, Israeli planes destroyed an installation in Syria that U.S. intelligence officials later said was a nuclear reactor that had been built with the aid of North Korea.

Listening to a somewhat cryptic Ben-Eliyahu, it doesn't sound like the difficulties Israel would face in striking Iran's nuclear installations have stopped the army from training to do just that. "There is only a military option if you are training for it," he said. "