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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/washington/10diplo.html
Israeli Strike on Syria Kindles Debate in U.S.
[New York Times] Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper - A sharp debate is under way in the Bush administration about the significance of the Israeli intelligence that led to last month's Israeli strike inside Syria. The debate has fractured along now-familiar fault lines, with Vice President Cheney and conservative hawks portraying the Israeli intelligence as credible and arguing that it should cause the U.S. to reconsider its diplomatic overtures to Syria and North Korea. By contrast, Secretary of State Rice and her allies have said they do not believe that the intelligence presented merits any change in the American diplomatic approach. Current and former American officials said Israel presented the U.S. with intelligence over the summer about what it described as nuclear activity in Syria and told the White House shortly in advance of the September raid. One former top Bush administration official said Israeli officials were so concerned about the threat posed by a potential Syrian nuclear program that they told the White House they could not wait past the end of the summer to strike the facility. According to a Middle East security analyst in Washington, Syrian officials told visiting Turkish officials last week that what the Israelis hit was a storage depot for strategic missiles. Bruce Riedel, a veteran of the CIA and the National Security Council and now a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, said Israel would not have launched the strike in Syria if it believed Damascus was merely developing more sophisticated ballistic missiles or chemical weapons. "Those red lines were crossed 20 years ago," he said. "You don't risk general war in the Middle East over an extra 100 kilometers' range on a missile system." Another former intelligence official said Syria was attempting to develop airburst capability for its ballistic missiles, where warheads detonate in the air to disperse the warhead's material more widely.