"The Israelis aren't going to ... they can't do it, it's beyond their capacity. They only have the ability to make this worse!"

"... Without an actual occupation of Iran, which nobody wants to contemplate, the Bush administration concluded that the result of a limited military campaign in Iran would be counter-productive, according to Hayden.

"What's move two, three, four or five down the board?" Hayden said, arguing that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities was only a short-term fix. "I don't think anyone is talking about occupying anything..... The Israelis aren't going to [attack Iran] ... they can't do it, it's beyond their capacity. They only have the ability to make this [problem of Iran's nuclear program] worse. We can do a lot better," he said. "Just look at the physics, the fact that this cannot be done in a raid, this has to be done in a campaign, the fact that neither we nor they know where this stuff is. [The Israelis] can't do it, but we can."

Hayden then went into some detail about how a U.S.-led strike on Iran's nuclear facilities could be accomplished, and why it would not solve the Iranian nuclear threat....  he also said that efforts to slow down the nuclear program, through mostly clandestine measures and encouraging internal dissent, is the better course of action.

"Could we go back to July 2009 and see where that could have led?" he said, referring to the Green Movement protests that raged through Iran then but ultimately failed to alter the regime's course. "It's not so much that we don't want Iran to have a nuclear capacity, it's that we don't want this Iran to have it (a pro-Israeli Shah was OK!) ... Slow it down long enough and maybe the character [of the Iranian government] changes."

Hayden's comments track closely with the argument made by Colin Kahl, the recently departed head of Middle East policy at the Pentagon, who opposed a military strike on Iran in an article this week in Foreign Affairs...."