but I do believe Israel will bomb Iran very soon.
What would Israel target? Most, if not all, Iranian nuclear facilities are known, or believed, to be deeper and more heavily fortified than current conventional bunker-buster bombs could destroy or even damage.
Last September Obama OK'd the sale of 55 GBU-28 Hard Target Penetrators, something President Bush refused to do. Israel has been attempting to purchase them since 2005.
The Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-2
is a special weapon developed for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground. The GBU-28 is a 5,000-pound laser-guided conventional munition that uses a 4,400-pound penetrating warhead. The bombs are modified Army artillery tubes, weigh 4,637 pounds, and contain 630 pounds of high explosives. They are fitted with GBU-27 LGB kits, 14.5 inches in diameter and almost 19 feet long. The operator illuminates a target with a laser designator and then the munition guides to a spot of laser energy reflected from the target.
The GBU-28 ""Bunker Buster"" was developed specifically to destroy Iraqi underground hardened command bunkers during the Gulf War. Scratch built from a section of surplus 8" howitzer barrel filled with 600 pounds of explosives,
the 5,000 pound GBU-28 is capable of penetrating more than 20 feet of reinforced concrete and deeper than 100 feet underground.
The weapons are believed to be incapable of doing significant damage to Iran's super-deep hardened nuclear sites. Attacking anything other than the nuclear sites Israel would find it impossible to maintain the position, and defense, that it was a legal preemptive attack.
So what would Israel target?
To fly from Israel to Iran Israeli aircraft would need to fly through the airspace of no less than two Middle Eastern nations, as up to as many as four depending on the best flight path to take to each various target, that is unless the Israeli aircraft would take the LONG way around the barn and begin southeast down the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea and then east and then north into Iran. The distance of doing that and the almost sure loss of any element of surprise makes that impractical. So Israel would need the OK of at least two Middle Eastern nations to fly through their airspace, that or just violate it, and considering the reaction to any attack Iran would be bound to have, what Middle Eastern nations will want Iran to know, or just believe, that they gave Israel the OK to attack Iran via their airspace?
I thought it possible that shortly before Dubya left office that he would order an air attack against Iranian nuclear sites. Attacks could have been launched from aircraft carriers in international waters, thus not drawing any Middle Eastern nations into the Iranian response, and with large numbers of ground forces, at the time, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, with Iran stuck right between them, the U.S. would be better situated if Iran made a ground force response. The U.S. could have contained it and then pushed into Iran, from either or both the East and the West if it wanted to or felt it was needed, and that doesn't even factor in a possible landing on Southern Iran by Marines.
With the situation in Iraq still more in a state of flux then than it now is it would not have made for optimal conditions, but still the conditions would have been vastly better than they would be today for any such air attack made by Israel, the U.S. or a joint effort of some type.
If a much better overall situation was passed up I rather doubt that Israel will be doing anything until/unless there is absolute indisputable totally verifiable proof that Iran is producing nuclear weapons and a preemptive attack cannot be put off any longer without facing unacceptable risks when it comes to Iranian retaliation.
So I wouldn't expect anything to happen anytime in the short term or half distant future.