"Between July and September, weeks of high-level talks took place. The Israelis wanted to destroy the facility immediately, and had some support from the American intelligence community that had managed to miss this development. However, Condoleezza Rice and others did not. They wanted to "confront" the Syrians first -- as the Jerusalem Post puts it, to scold Assad publicly for operating a nuclear facility." Here's why you shouldn't believe a word of this cover story that is clearly being shopped around to various news sources by someone in U.S. diplo-intel circles:
The State Department is **INCAPABLE** of keeping secret a Syrian nuclear facility, or an Israeli request for a strike, from July into September.
Heck, memos of "torture" are routinely leaked, much less anything really important.
No way...no freaking way did the State Department goons keep a secret this big for this long. Heck, they'd have their book out on Amazon.com doing the Micahel Schuerer shuffle by this point if they'd been informed of the above back in July.
...But this sort of news "leak" will cause normally pro-Bush Americans to bash Condi Rice, as if the story was accurate.
Not buyin' it.
I guess we had Elint platforms up on the Iraq/Syria border to wag fingers at the IAF on their way by?
A game is afoot, and there is a domestic component.
Good points. State Department is a sieve and would have at least tipped the Syrians. But what surprises me is that the Bush administration itself was able to keep this a secret. If they did not want Israel to perform the attack, they could have leaked the info. The good news is that the Bush administration can at least keep some secretes. What I find somewhat disturbing however is that Israel would actually delay their attack awaiting our approval. Kinda shows the geopolitical influence the US now has in the Middle East ever since we ponied up.