When we posted on former US UN Ambassador John Bolton’s prediction that Israel would take out critical Iranian nuclear facilities sometime after the fall US elections and a Presidential inauguration next January, the world was atwitter. Oil futures prices spiked. Gholam Hossein Nozari, Iran’s oil minister at a World Petroleum conference in Spain according to AP said: “any attack would provoke fierce reaction”. Manouchehr Mottaki Iran’s foreign minister at the UN in New York says that an Israeli attack is unlikely:

“We do not foresee such a possibility at the moment. The Israeli government is facing a political breakdown within itself and within the region, so we do not foresee such a possibility for that regime to resort to such craziness,” he said. “The United States, too, is not in a position where it can engage in, take another risk in the region.

The infamous Seymour Hersh in a New Yorker article suggests that the US has cranked up covert ops inside Iran aimed at destabilizing the Revolutionary Guards and the Ayatollahs - a prelude to a possible regime change. But then Hersh has been a notorious ally of what Ken Timmerman calls ‘the shadow warriors’ inside our intelligence establishment who gave us the highly misleading December, 2007 NIE.

Then there was this exchange over the weekend between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards head and the head of our Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf:

Over the weekend, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned that Tehran would respond to an attack by barraging Israel with missiles and could seize control of a key oil passageway in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz.

But a senior U.S. military commander said Wednesday that Washington would not allow that to happen.

Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, commander of the 5th Fleet spoke to reporters after talks with naval commanders of Gulf countries in the United Arab Emirates capital of Abu Dhabi. The one-day meeting was to focus on the security of the region’s maritime and trade routes and the threat of terrorism.

The 5th Fleet is based in Bahrain, across the Gulf from Iran. Cosgriff said that if Iran choked off the Strait of Hormuz, it would be “saying to the world that 40 percent of oil is now held hostage by a single country.”

Aaron Klein in World Net Daily interviewed the ex-Mossad head Amir Amit who opined:

Then we have comments of Yossi Kuperwasser the former head of the IDF’s Research and Assessment Division in Israel National News:

The former senior IDF officer has many years’ experience in tracking Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. He says that the deciding factor in the Iranian threat is Tehran’s ability to produce industrial quantities of high-grade uranium. “Within a year to a year and a half, the Iranians will have enough uranium for a nuclear bomb,” Kuperwasser notes.

“This is also the American intelligence estimate, which at the time was harshly criticized, and rightfully so. As far as we know, the Iranians have not yet reached this capability… at the same time, they continue their research uninterrupted.”

Commenting on the new SA-20 missile defense system delivered to Iran by Russia, the Israeli intelligence expert says that the missile system could make it much more difficult for Israel to launch an aerial strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“This is a missile system that can protect against missiles and airplanes. The Iranians have another aerial system today, but they view it as inadequate. Clearly, every addition to the aerial defense system may minimize the effectiveness of an aerial strike,” he says.

So what are we to make of all this? That the Iranians are intent on making nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them goes without saying. Further, the Iranains may have enough enriched uranium for making bombs next year, if they haven’t already acquired the making of several weapons. Russia has agreed to supply Iran with the advanced SA-20 air defense system which may be deployed to counter the IAF threat. Israel and Greece concluded a joint training exercise clearly aimed at a possible Iran nuclear strike mission.