“The world is uniting against Iran,” Ayalon said at a Saturday event in Tel Aviv. “In a month we will see sanctions against her. I am not sure the regime in Iran will be the same a year from now. There is an agreement between Washington, Beijing and Moscow that a nuclear Iran would destroy the current world order.”

Israel’s Channel 10 correspondent in Washington, Gil Tamari, reports that Washington instead plans to impose “targeted sanctions,” so as not to undermine the efforts of the popular uprising in Iran now gaining momentum.

Ben Caspit of Israel’s daily, Maariv, notes in a New Year’s eve column that the world’s intelligence community is eagerly awaiting a new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran.

The 2007 report concluded that Iran froze its active efforts to manufacture nuclear weapons in 2003. It also maintained that Iran would not have such a capability until at least 2012.

“The report caused a clear sense of shock among many Western intelligence agencies, including [Israel's] Mossad,” Caspit writes. He cites a prevailing view among Western intelligence officials that the NIE findings were altered “for political reasons.”

Caspit maintains that recent British revelations pointing to Iran’s efforts to test a ”neutron initiator” in 2007–the same year the U.S. released its findings, place the NIE report “in a ridiculous light.”

Caspit says the only remaining question is what method Iran will employ as it gets closer to arming a nuclear weapon.  “Will Tehran stop when it’s within each and wait for the right moment, or will it charge ahead until it reaches its goal?”