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Panetta Interview:
Obama Giving Green Light for Israel to Bomb Iran?

In an ominous interview with CBS-TV News aired on the evening of Dec. 19, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta appeared to give the Israeli government President Obama's okay to an attack Iran. Panetta's remarks shows a clear shift in position from previous warnings he has delivered on the severe consequences of starting an escalating war in the region.

The full interview with the Defense Secretary will be broadcast on the "60 Minutes" program – on Christmas Day! But in what has already aired, he tells News Anchor Scott Pelley that Iran could "assemble a bomb within one year or potentially less" – and that the U.S. "will take whatever steps necessary to stop it." Thus, Panetta echoes the "three quarters of a year" formulation of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who had just left the United States after meetings with President Obama, NSC head Tom Donilon, Secretary of State Clinton and Panetta himself on Dec. 15 and 16.

The following excerpt from the interview shows the change in Panetta's statements from Dec. 2, when he stated at the Saban Center that a military strike would probably only set Iran's nuclear program back by one to two years "at best", but would provoke retaliatory measures and engulf the entire region.

Pelley: So are you saying that Iran can have a nuclear weapon in 2012?

Panetta: It would probably be about a year before they can do it. Perhaps a little less. But one proviso, Scott, is if they have a hidden facility somewhere in Iran that may be enriching fuel.

[That, by the way, is a huge proviso, as there is no indication of such a facility, as confirmed by the IAEA.]

Pelley: So that they can develop a weapon even more quickly...

Panetta: On a faster track....

Pelley: Than we believe....

Panetta: That's correct.

Pelley: If the Israelis decide to launch a military strike to prevent that weapon from being built, what sort of complications does that raise for you?

Panetta: Well, we share the same common concern. The United States does not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us and that's a red line, obviously, for the Israelis. If we have to do it we will deal with it.

Pelley: You just said if we have to do it, we will come and do it. What is "it"?

Panetta: If they proceed and we get intelligence that they are proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon then we will take whatever steps necessary to stop it.

Pelley: Including military steps?

Panetta: There are no options off the table.

Pelley: A nuclear weapon in Iran is...

Panetta: Unacceptable.

CBS News did however add that the Defense Secretary said elsewhere in the interview that "he has no indication yet, that the Iranians have made the decision to go ahead, "with assembling a weapon.

The Pentagon spokesman since downplayed the Secretary's statements the following day.

While many observers connected Panetta's dangerous shift with the meeting between Obama and Barak, qualified U.S. military sources had told EIR more than two weeks before, that the U.S. President was already giving in to the right-wing Netanyahu government's position. Thus, Obama himself was behind Panetta's apparent "green light" for war.

Nonetheless, it is highly probable that Ehud Barak carried a "secret dossier" to his meetings in Washington, which was just as manipulated as the dossier on Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction, touted by Tony Blair in 2003. This, LaRouche emphasized, is "the Iraq War all over again, but thermonuclear -- and don't forget Tony Blair, now as well as then."

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