Did the White House leak Israel's Iran plan?

Therefore, there are at least three players working through agents of influence that might have an interest in coloring Azerbaijan’s standing in Washington: Iran, Russia, and Armenia. Even though these three states have active lobbies in the United States, this interpretation may sound farfetched—at least to those accustomed to thinking that Israel is the only state that has a hand in shaping American Middle East politics. But consider what some analysts believe is the more preposterous option, which happens to be the premise of Perry’s scoop: Azerbaijan is renting itself out to Israel for a full-scale attack on a big neighbor with a nuclear program that even Israeli planners think they can only set back rather than destroy.

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“I think the story is absurd,” Elliot Abrams, deputy national security adviser under George W. Bush, told me. “It suggests not that Azerbaijan might allow or wink at a Mossad team, not that it might allow an IAF [Israeli Air Force] plane that was in distress to land, but that a hundred IAF jets could use Azerbaijan—that it would be the heart of the attack on Iran. Who could possibly believe that?” As Abrams pointed out, there’s no way Azerbaijan could claim innocence in an attack of that scale. “Why would the Azeris make their neighbor, their larger and stronger neighbor, into a permanent enemy by joining in an attack on it?”…

Abrams sees this potentially fake leak as part of a larger pattern. “I was suspicious of this because some of these so-called leaks against the Obama Administration are simply false. For instance, during the Netanyahu visit, there was a story that the Israelis asked for the U.S.’s larger and newer bunker busters but was turned down. I believe that’s just plain false. Those are massive 30,000 pound bombs meant for a B-2 bomber, and they cannot be delivered by any plane the Israelis have,” he said. “One thing that these leaks have in common is to make you mad at Obama. But this doesn’t bring you closer to who is responsible for leaking it.”

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