Sanger's article noted that in 2008, "the Israelis secretly asked the Bush administration for the equipment and overflight rights they might need some day to strike Iran's " nuclear sites. They were turned down, but the request added urgency to the question: Would Israel take the risk of a strike? And if so, what would follow?
"Now that parlor game question has turned into more formal war games simulations. The [U.S.] government's own simulations are classified, but the Saban Center for Middle East Policy [a neoconservative adjunct] at the Brookings Institution created its own in December."
The war game, directed by Kenneth M. Pollack, assumed that Israel would attack Iran without notifying the Obama administration, which would then demand that Israel halt the bombing even as Washington beefed up its own military forces in the Persian Gulf.
As the war game played out, Iran would retaliate against both Israeli targets and Saudi oil fields, spiking oil prices and pushing the United States toward the brink of its own attacks to destroy Iran's military capability to disrupt oil supplies. At that point a hypothetical eight days into the conflict the war game ended.
Interestingly, the Times' accompanying graphic included a rare though indirect acknowledgment of Israel's undeclared nuclear-weapons capability. In a box entitled "Iran Strikes Back," the war game anticipated that Iran would fire "missiles at Israel, including its nuclear weapons complex at Dimona."
It would seem that if the Times truly wanted to provide an objective assessment of the Iranian nuclear issue including Tehran's possible motives for wanting a nuclear bomb the Times would routinely make reference to the region's rogue nuclear states of Israel, India and Pakistan.
That the Times typically ignores that key fact suggests the Times sees its journalism on Iran as similar to its credulous reporting about Iraq's non-existent WMD in 2002-03, more as propaganda than as a fair-minded presentation of the relevant facts.
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