Time Running Out For Attack On Iran-Israeli expert

`Israeli forces could pull off successful strikes independently`, Isaac Ben-Israel said.

Israel has a year in which to attack Iran's nuclear facilities preemptively, an Israeli legislator and weapons expert said on Wednesday.

Israeli forces could pull off successful strikes independently, Isaac Ben-Israel said, though these would only delay, rather than end, Iran's progress towards atomic weaponry.

Echoing Israeli government assessments, shared by some in the West, that Iran is about a year away from acquiring enough enriched uranium for a warhead, he said a window for last-ditch military action was closing.

"Last resort means when you reach the stage when everything else failed. When is this?" Ben-Israel, a retired general and former senior Defence Ministry official, told an Israeli security conference in Herzliya. "Maybe a year, give or take."

Iran says its atomic programme is peaceful but Western nations suspect it could be used to make bombs. Its virulently anti-Israel rhetoric has stirred fears in the Jewish state, believed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal.

However Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, said this week Iran would face technical and political hurdles if it sought to build nuclear arms and there was "ample time" to deal with the issue.

"Even if I go by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence, the estimations (are)... we're still talking about two to five years from now" for Iran to have nuclear weapons capacity, he said.

MILITARY OPTION "POSSIBLE"

Ben-Israel, who belongs to the centrist, ruling Kadima party, is a member of parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defence committee and once headed the Defence Ministry's weapons research and development unit.

Israel, like the United States under President Barack Obama, has refused to rule out using military force to deny Iran nuclear weapons. But in break with the administration of President George W. Bush, Obama has pledged to talk directly with Tehran about its nuclear programme.

For now, Washington is leading international efforts to solve the dispute by a "carrot and stick" combination of diplomatic overtures and economic sanctions.

Israel bombed Iraq's atomic reactor in 1981 and carried out a similar sortie over Syria in 2007 which the CIA said destroyed a secret reactor, though Damascus denied having such a facility.

Many independent analysts believe Israel's air force is too small to take on Iran's nuclear installations, which are numerous, distant, dispersed and fortified.

But Ben-Israel disagreed.

"The military option is possible. It's possible also for the independent forces of the State of Israel. It's possible in the sense of delaying (the Iranian programme) for a few years. It won't be more than three years, say, and the more time passes, the more it (potential delay) is diminishing."

He said Iran was steadily producing a stockpile of enriched uranium and would eventually recover from any attack to make more.

Addressing the Herzliya Conference on Tuesday, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak called for a "strategic agreement" with the United States on Iran's nuclear programme.

Such an agreement, he said, would ensure the duration of any talks the new U.S. administration might hold with Iran "should be kept short and followed by harsh sanctions and readiness to take action".

Barak said "all options" must be kept on the table in preventing a nuclear Iran that "would be a danger not just to Israel but also to the region and the entire world".