Washington has decided to negotiate directly with Iran, and will resort to military force in four or five months if diplomacy can’t persuade Tehran to relinquish its alleged atomic weapons program, Israel’s Channel 10 News reported on Tuesday night, quoting a senior American official.
The channel’s veteran diplomatic correspondent Emmanuel Rosen reported that President Barack Obama had decided to bypass Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and leave Israel out of the loop.
Rosen said that Obama believed Netanyahu was personally behind a recent series of purported leaks from reports produced by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) about the Iranian program. According to a report Monday in the Guardian, Western officials speculate that Israel could have leaked the information in order to increase international pressure on the Iranian regime.
Channel 10 suggested that America’s decision to hold off on military involvement in Syria for the time being was due to the fact that it didn’t want to open a new front with the prospect of a war against Iran looming on the horizon.