"Perhaps we'll let the Israelis do it".

Greg Djerejian in the Belgravia Dispatch, here

".... Permit me a brief personal vignette. On a flight a year or so back, I bumped into a former Cabinet member from a previous Administration (he will remain nameless, and I won't even mention his exact post or what Administration he served, suffice it to say a prominent man quite well known still). Discussing Iran briefly, he looked at me with his shrewd eyes and said (relying on memory and so probably slighly paraphrasing): "Perhaps we'll let the Israelis do it". The comment was revealing I thought for a couple reasons: 1) the notion that somehow we would 'authorize' the Israelis, as if they were our proxy to so delegate out the mission; and 2) perhaps less surprising, the fact he thought an extensive bombing campaign of Iran not a bad idea, essentially apparently just a dusting off of the Osirak precedent, I thought without sufficiently appreciating that this operation would be materially more challenging several times over, for many reasons, to include two hot wars on both sides of Iran with hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in the neighborhood.

This little anecdote leads me to a further thought, I think Biden was essentially just trying to refute "1" above, e.g. the sense that it's up to us, thus stressing Israel is a sovereign state that makes up her own mind about such things, so that perhaps he was purposefully distancing the U.S. some from a possible Israeli action, whether in scripted or unscripted manner I'm not sure (I'd probably guess the latter). Of course, how the region and world interpret his comments could be as more of a flashing greenish light, even if that wasn't the intent. Of course too, no one in the region would believe--even were it true (which would be highly unlikely)--that an Israeli action didn't enjoy tacit American support/approval, a variable that we should keep uppermost in our minds (among others) when dealing with the Israelis on this issue/dossier going forward..."