Iranian Nuclear Crisis: Ex-Mossad Director Says Romney Making the Situation Worse

Responding to a recent op-ed by GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney, a former director of Israel's intelligence agency Mossad said the Republican candidate is making it more difficult for the U.S. and Israel administrations to contain Iran's nuclear weapons ambition.

In the op-ed, published Tuesday in the Washington Post, Romney promised that he will take every measure to check the evil regime of the ayatollahs. Slamming President Obama as America's most feckless president since Carter, he pledged to make clear that America's commitment to Israel's security and survival is absolute.

Efraim Halevy, who served as the director of Mossad in the early 2000s, responded to Romney's promises alleging that the article is effectively telling the Iranian regime to hurry up their atomic bomb building process, before the Americans elect a new president.

If I'm sitting here in the month of March 2012 reading this, and I'm an Iranian leader, what do I understand? I have nine more months to run as fast as I can because this is going to be terrible if the other guys get in, Halevy said in an interview with The Huffington Post. In the effort to demolish the president he is making the situation worse.

Romney's op-ed, which does a great job of appeasing the American Jewish community, proclaimed that Jerusalem will be the destination for his first foreign trip once he is elected President. I will demonstrate our commitment to the world by making Jerusalem the destination of my first foreign trip, he wrote. I will buttress my diplomacy with a military option that will persuade the ayatollahs to abandon their nuclear ambitions. Only when they understand that at the end of that road lies not nuclear weapons but ruin will there be a real chance for a peaceful resolution.

Halevy also criticized Romney's proposal to restore the regular presence of aircraft carrier groups in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf region simultaneously, to increase military assistance to Israel and improved coordination with all of our allies in the area.

Is that what we want -- to renew the Cold War in the Mediterranean? Is that what's going to help Israel? Halevy asked.

Israel's former top official said that the Republican presidential primary rhetoric, asking Americans not to trust the incumbent President unsettling and destabilizing adding, Everybody reads what he says, not only citizens of the United States.