Last week, we posted a comment about all the speculation as to when or could Israel undertake a strike against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. In today’s, Jerusalem Post, there is comment by Anthony Cordesman, Washington policy wonk on matters military and the Middle East, suggesting that the US wishes to pursue the diplomatic option and that, allegedly, IDF officials concurred that the US as represented by recent comments from US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullens had as much as said so. Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post article notes that IDF Chief of Staff, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi is heads to Washington shortly for ‘discussions’.

Meanwhile, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards launched highly visible war games in the Persian Gulf with the usual bellicose caterwauling from Mahdist President Ahmadinejad, at a meeting of 8 developing nations in Malaysia that Iran won’t stand down from its nuclear enrichment program. There was partial corroboration of that in a U.K. Telegraph article, yesterday about security officials in the West very uneasy about Iran’s use of faster enrichment technology, the much vaunted high spinning P-2 centrifuges that , with other key technology, give the appearance that Iran is very much on the track of making Atomic Bombs.

Iranian Foreign minister Mottaki continues the diplomatic double speak game at the UN of fostering the impression that Iran is really on the peaceful nuclear energy track and might negotiate some ‘arrangements’ with the IAEA and P5+1 (Security council plus German)vis a vis sanctions.

Last week, Muhammad Laranjani the brother of the former Deputy Prime Minister, Nuclear negotiator and speaker of their parliament, Ali Larajani, presented another existential threat against Israel at a forum in Frankfurt, Germany with the ironic name of the Peace Research Foundation. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, Muhammad Larajani said that Iran would ‘cancel’ Israel because the “Zionist project… has “created only violence and atrocities,”. Not comforting, given that Hitler’s Nazi Germany created the final solution that took the lives of Six million European Jewish men, women and children. The Peace Research institute ‘apologized’ for the Iranian’s ‘insensitive remarks’ and said, “We very much regret that the feelings of several Israeli participants were hurt.” Coming from appeasing Germans that’s really comforting.

I had the occasion this morning to exchange emails with a source close to security elements in the EU. The impression I was lent was that there appeared to be intense coordination regarding attack scenarios and that, a possible attack against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities might be sooner than most expected. According to the source, an attack could be sooner than the prognostications of former US UN Ambassador John Bolton, somewhere between the upcoming November elections and the US Presidential Inauguration next January.

While the world’s oil traders are in a literal swivet about whether an Iran attack scenario is real or not, the price of crude dropped off by $3.92 a barrel yesterday on NYMEX, the question of will the US give a go ahead to a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is moot. As we posted last week, the IDF doesn’t telegraph when an attack is coming, unlike our ‘shock and awe’ advanced PR for the opening stages of the war in Iraq five years ago. Last September, Israel didn’t announce ahead of time when it struck Syria’s bomb making plant on the Euphrates River. Israel didn’t unleash the attack until it had intelligence confirming what was going on inside the facility and who were there, North Korean scientists as it turned out. So, notwithstanding the opinions of policy wonks like Cordesman and Bolton, the Israelis will not let any existential threat pass without pre-emptive retaliation. They won’t tell us when, we’ll find that out after it occurs, successfully.

In the meantime, Ahmadinejad is playing the Tehran two step in Malaysia. He now says ‘there will be no war” between Iran, the US and Israel. He said: “I assure you that there won’t be any war in the future,” Ahmadinejad told a news conference during a visit to Malaysia for a summit of developing Muslim nations. And this after the bellicose announcement of war games in the Gulf. More taqiyya from this Mahdist? We think so.