Barak's adviser: ""Remember the Iranians are always 5 to 7 years from the bomb.. Time passes, but they're always 5 to 7 years from the bomb"

Trita Parsi in the AsiaTimes, here

"...Remember, the Iranians are always five to seven years from the bomb," Shlomo Brom, deputy national security adviser under former prime minister Ehud Barak, told this analyst sarcastically during an interview for a book on Israeli-Iranian relations. "Time passes, but they're always five to seven years from the bomb."

But Israel's new and aggressive Iran policy didn't lack critics. An internal government committee concluded in the mid-1990s that Israel's harsh public position on Iran had backfired, caused Israel to unnecessarily make itself a target of Iran and made Tehran's nuclear ambitions appear as an Israeli problem, rather than being a concern of the entire international community. The Rabin-Peres government countered that its aggressive stance had pushed Washington to take on Tehran instead of striking a deal with the Iranian clergy, an argument that was well received even by the Labor government's critics..."