And speaking of who knew what....

The Guardian for February 4 reports that Yossi Sarid, a member of the foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, says that "It was known in Israel that the story that weapons of mass destruction could be activated in 45 minutes was an old wives' tale."

However, he said, Israel didn't tell Washington.

"Israel didn't want to spoil President Bush's scenario, and it should have," he said.

Another member of the committee, Ehud Yatom, said Israel had told the Americans it believed the weapons existed but had not seen them.

Some of this may have been to counteract a statement on Sunday by Scott Ritter that the Israelis had known for years that Iraq no longer had WMDs and that if they knew, "the CIA knew it and thus British intelligence too." Saying Israel withheld the info gets the US and the UK off the hook.

But in this case, at least in any ethical sense, the cure is clearly worse than the disease, since if it's true it means that Israel deliberately and consciously deceived both nations (not to mention its own citizens) in order to manipulate them into attacking Iraq. Indeed,

[i]n November 2003, a respected Tel Aviv thinktank concluded that Israeli intelligence had joined the US and Britain in an "exaggerated assessment" of Iraqi weapons.

In 2002, the former head of the Mossad intelligence agency, Efraim Halevy, told a closed meeting of Nato that there were "clear indications" that Iraq had renewed its efforts to build WMD after the UN weapons inspections were halted in 1998. He also said Iraq had preserved elements of its ability to manufacture chemical and biological weapons.

This at a time when, no matter if Sarid, Yatom, or Ritter has the precise scenario, Israel knew such statements to be untrue.

Don't expect any more of a reaction here than in the case of Turkey over Cyprus or Pakistan over proliferation.