washingtonpost.com
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>In March 2007, agents from Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, broke into the Vienna suite of the director of Syria’s atomic energy agency and secretly downloaded the contents of his computer. They discovered that Syria was building a nuclear reactor with the assistance of the North Korean regime in a region known as Deir al-Zour near the Euphrates River. Additional intelligence showed that the reactor was just months away from being activated, posing an urgent, existential threat to Israel — one found not in a more remote country such as Iran or Iraq, but in Israel’s backyard, just over the border with Syria.
>Then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert shared the intelligence with President George W. Bush, hoping to persuade Bush that the U.S. military should launch a strike that would destroy Syria’s reactor, believing that if the United States, not Israel, carried out an attack, it would send a message to the Iranian government that it should halt its own nuclear program — also a threat to Israel — before meeting a similar fate. Bush declined but didn’t stand in the way of Israel taking its own military action, and in September 2007, Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighter jets crossed into Syria, acting decisively to destroy the reactor. “Olmert hadn’t asked for a green light and I hadn’t given one,” Bush later wrote in his memoir. “He had done what he believed was necessary to protect Israel.”
>Now, it seems increasingly likely that Israel might once again bear the burden, this time in Iran, to neutralize a potential nuclear threat, using the same approach that was used 12 years ago.
