Israel's former spy chief says Iran strike would be 'stupid'

SUNDAY, 08 MAY 2011 18:43

Telegraph

Israel's former intelligence chief has stated that the idea of bombing Iran's nuclear programme was "the stupidest thing I ever heard".

By Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent

Meir Dagan, who was head of Mossad until retiring in September, was speaking for the first time since leaving his job.

He was known to be sceptical of the threat to use force to destroy Iran's nuclear programme, which Israel and the West fears is intended to make a nuclear weapon, but his decision to go public and the strength of the language he used came as a shock to the government.

Speaking at a conference at the Hebrew University on Friday, he distinguished between Iran's civilian and covert military nuclear programme. Any attack on the former would be "patently illegal under international law", he said.

But he added that the military nuclear programme was scattered across the country, unlike the Iraqi reactor struck by an Israeli air raid in 1981, which is often cited as a precedent for an attack on Iran.

The difficulty would be completely destroying the programme, and what came next, he said. "It will be followed by a war with Iran," he said. "It is the kind of thing where we know how it starts, but not how it will end."

The Israeli government is split on what to do about Iran, whose military nuclear programme is said to have been set back by a computer virus thought to have been infiltrated into the system by Israel or the United States.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has not ruled out the use of force, regarding an Iranian bomb as an "existential threat". But Ehud Barak, his defence minister, gave an interview last week in which he said he didn't believe that even if it had a nuclear weapon Iran would necessarily use it against Israel.