Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, pictured here addressing commanders of Iran's armed forces. (Wikimedia Commons)

According to Reuters, Khamenei addressed his nation during a live New Year broadcast on television.

“We do not have nuclear weapons and we will not build them but in the face of aggression from the enemies, whether from America or the Zionist regime, to defend ourselves we will attack on the same level as the enemies attack us,” he said.

Addressing thousands at the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashad, he continued: “Americans are making a grave mistake if they think by making threats they will destroy the Iranian nation."

In the last several weeks, it's become increasingly clear that Israel has no qualms about attacking Iran if the country does not cooperate with nuclear weapon sanctions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed for a more aggressive handling from President Obama, who has warned against "loose talk" of war against Iran.

Bloomberg's Jeffrey Goldberg wrote Monday that Israel was growing more confident that a strike on Iran would solve the threat problem with few repercussions.

From Bloomberg:

After interviewing many people with direct knowledge of internal government thinking, however, I’m highly confident that Netanyahu isn’t bluffing -- that he is in fact counting down to the day when he will authorize a strike against a half-dozen or more Iranian nuclear sites.

One reason I’m now more convinced is that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are working hard to convince other members of the Israeli cabinet that a strike might soon be necessary.

But I also heard from Israeli national-security officials a number of best-case scenarios about the consequences of an attack, which suggested to me that they believe they have thought through all the risks -- and that they keep coming to the same conclusions.

Goldberg went on to detail what such a strike might look like.
One conclusion key officials have reached is that a strike on six or eight Iranian facilities will not lead, as is generally assumed, to all-out war. This argument holds that the Iranians might choose to cover up an attack, in the manner of the Syrian government when its nuclear facility was destroyed by the Israeli air force in 2007. An Israeli strike wouldn’t focus on densely populated cities, so the Iranian government might be able to control, to some degree, the flow of information about it.

Some Israeli officials believe that Iran’s leaders might choose to play down the insult of a raid and launch a handful of rockets at Tel Aviv as an angry gesture, rather than declare all-out war. I’m not endorsing this view, but I was struck by its optimism. (A war game held by the U.S. military this month came to the opposite conclusion, according to the New York Times: A strike would likely lead to a wider war that could include the U.S.)

Another theory making the rounds was that Obama has so deeply internalized the argument that Israel has the sovereign right to defend itself against a threat to its existence that an Israeli attack, even one launched against U.S. wishes, wouldn’t anger him. In this scenario, Obama would move immediately to help buttress Israel’s defenses against an Iranian counterstrike.

Some Israeli security officials also believe that Iran won’t target American ships or installations in the Middle East in retaliation for a strike, as many American officials fear, because the leadership in Tehran understands that American retaliation for an Iranian attack could be so severe as to threaten the regime itself.

This contradicts Netanyahu’s assertion, first made to me three years ago, that Iran’s rulers are members of a “messianic, apocalyptic cult,” unmoved by the calculations of rational self- interest. It also contradicts the results of the U.S. war game. But it does make sense if you believe that regime survival is an important goal of the ayatollahs.

President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu have yet to respond to the Ayatollah's threat.

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