Israel and Iran are not exactly best friends
Israel and Iran are not exactly best friends
Remember Osirak? No, I didn’t think so. That’s because the Israelis maded it nothing more than a memory in 1981. It was the Iraqi nuclear power plant just south of Baghdad. Israel flew a bunch of F-16s and F-15s around Jordan, across Saudi Arabia and Iraq, bombed the reactor, and flew home on one tank of gas. Now, according to the Washington Times, they’re planning to do the same to an Iranian plant called Bushehr.
My only question is “what were the reporters thinking when they listened to their ‘insider’?”
The Osirak mission was flown mostly at ground level, which sucks fuel like a child sucks lemonade in the summertime. The target was at the extreme end of the F-16s range. Lets assume that the Israelis would use the same planes for a Bushehr attack, since to my knowledge they do not have long-range bombers. They would absolutely have to fly at high altitude to conserve fuel, since Bushehr is on the Persian Gulf and therefore farther away than Baghdad. That means they would be flying right through a U.S. monitored airspace. True, the Saudis would not have anything reasonable to throw against them, but it does throw away the element of surprise for the Israelis.
Not that they wouldn’t try. The mission could certainly be flown at low level, if they could somehow get tankers to refuel the attackers en route. However, that is not a given, unless they are planning to get support from US tankers.
It seems highly unlikely to me that this story is accurate, given the difficulties the Israelis would face and the lack of a credited source for the story. I can understand a writer wanting to keep his sources private, but they should at least tell us where the ‘insider’ works.
Unless, of course, their insider is Jayson Blair.