As the stories about increasing tensions around Iran, with military maneuvers around the Strait of Hormuz and more piled-on sanctions, there's another story that doesn't seem to have any legs at all--the fact that Israeli intellligence has concluded that Iran is not currently trying to build nuclear weapons and that the Defense Ministry, as announced by Ehud Barak last week, has stopped discussing the possibility of attacking the Natanz facility any time in the near future. I picked it up from Juan Cole, who got it from Haaretz, and I really don't see anybody else talking about it at all! Is there some reason why it is not significant?
Because now that everybody knows Iran is not making a nuclear device (at the moment, i.e. 2003), what's the rush to punish them for maybe doing it sometime in the future?
Incidentally, Cole thinks Israel's acknowledgment is the work of Barack Obama's quiet diplomacy, which I think if true might go a little way toward justifying that Nobel Prize.