U.S. refuses Israel weapons to attack Iran:

According to Reuters this morning the United States has turned down Israeli requests for military hardware to help it prepare for a possible attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, a frontpage report in Israel's Haaretz newspaper said on Wednesday.

The unsourced report said the Americans had warned Israel against carrying out any such attack and had refused to supply offensive military hardware. Instead they had offered to improve the Jewish state's defenses against surface-to-surface missiles.

Interviewed on Israeli Army Radio, Defense Minister Ehud Barak did not deny the Haaretz story, but refused to discuss it. "It would not be right to talk about these things," Barak said. You would think that after the Georgian misadventure, and given the fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of Russian technicals working with the Iranians on their nuclear program, that the lesson given over the past five days would have been more astutely taken by all those for whom it was intended. Attacking Iran will be the functional equivalent of attacking Russia and very possibly China, as well. There is no more room for unilateral cowboy antics - or as my man Nanakwame put it, "it's very interesting watching the welding of the circumference of the world".