Israel urged US to attack Iran - not Iraq

Any thoughts on this?  G. Porter claims Israel was against the Iraq invasion.  Is this real or pure spin? 

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IH30Ak04.html

Israel urged US to attack Iran - not Iraq

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Israeli officials warned the George W Bush administration that an invasion of Iraq would be destabilizing to the region and urged the United States instead to target Iran as the primary enemy, according to former Bush administration official Lawrence Wilkerson.

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 Israeli strategists generally believed that taking down the Saddam Hussein regime could further upset an Iran-Iraq power balance that had already tilted in favor of Iran after the US defeat of Saddam's army in the 1991 Gulf War. By 1996, however, neo-conservatives with ties to the Likud Party in Israel were beginning to argue for a more aggressive joint US-Israeli strategy aimed at a "rollback" of all of Israel's enemies in the region, including Iran, but beginning by taking down Saddam and putting a pro-Israeli regime in power there.

That was the thrust of the 1996 report of a task force led by Richard Perle for the right-wing Israeli think-tank the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, and aimed at the Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But most strategists in the Israeli government and the Likud Party - including Sharon himself - did not share that viewpoint. Despite agreement between neo-conservatives and Israeli officials on many issues, the dominant Israeli strategic judgment on the issue of invading Iraq diverged from that of US neo-conservatives because of differing political-military interests.

Israel was more concerned with the relative military threat posed by Iran and Iraq, whereas neo-conservatives in the Bush administration were focused on regime change in Iraq as a low-cost way of leveraging more ambitious changes in the region. From the neo-conservative perspective, the very military weakness of Saddam's Iraq made it the logical target for the use of US military power.