Monday, August 14 2006 18:30 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New York: The Bush Administration was closely involved in planning Israeli attacks on Lebanon's Hezbollah outfit even before the July 12 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers as it felt the strikes could ease Tel Aviv's security concerns and serve as a prelude to a potential US preemptive attack against Iranian nuclear installations.

In a report published in the New Yorker magazine, prize-winning Pulitzer journalist Seymour M Hersh quotes current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials as saying that President George W Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney supported this line of thinking.

But Israeli military and intelligence experts, the report says, emphasized that the country's immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted.

Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel's foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, was quoted as saying, "We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America's requirements, that's just part of a relationship between two friends".

"Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it," he said.

The report quotes an unidentified Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. Governments, as saying Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah and shared it with Bush Administration officials well before the July 12th kidnappings.