/ BARAK / 141 was important to convey to him honestly, face-to-face, where Israel stood on Iran. Or at least where I stood. * * * With our joint exercises pushed back until the fall, the logical time for us to attack was the summer of 2012, when the atmospheric and weather conditions were optimal. Operationally, everything was ready. Politically, those ministers who were against military action had not changed their minds. If anything, they seemed more strongly opposed. Ironically, they now argued that because we’d waited so long, the Iranians were too close to their “window of immunity.” Even some senior members of the military and security establishment, though in agreement over the technical aspects of the attack plan, retained political reservations. But as I'd told President Obama, now that we had the operational support of the military and intelligence professionals, the decision in effect rested with Bibi and me. The fact we were ready to go ahead in those circumstances was not unprecedented. When Menachem Begin ordered the bombing of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in 1981, he had acted against the advice of the then-heads of both the Mossad and military intelligence, the chairman of our nuclear energy commission, and of Shimon Peres, who was head of the Labor opposition. But as we neared our final, formal decision, we were forced into another delay. In the summer of 2012, an unrelated flare-up of tensions in the Gulf caused Iran and several of its neighbors to place their forces on heightened alert. Though the peak-alert phase passed quickly, Iran’s military was still not back on a fully normal footing by the start of September, and when small American advance teams began arriving for the joint exercises, Iran’s alert level went up again. Technically, we could still have gone ahead with the attack. In all probability, it would still have succeeded, setting back the Iranians’ program by at least a year and, depending on how quickly they could rebuild and