What Petraeus did not know at first was that Israel had already told Bush that it planned to bomb Syria to destroy its fledgling nuclear reactor. Having Petraeus in full military uniform chatting with Assad in the days or weeks before then could send mixed signals. On September 6, Israeli warplanes swooped into Syrian airspace and destroyed the nuclear plant under cover of night. Israel kept quiet about the operation, calculating that Syria would rather absorb the blow in silence than suffer the humiliation of publicly admitting that the Jewish state had successfully raided its territory. The
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