Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Top General Calls Strike on Iran ‘Premature’

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in an interview that an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be “destabilizing.”

“It’s not prudent at this point to decide to attack Iran,” Gen. Martin Dempsey said in an interview on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS which will be aired Sunday morning.

“I think it would be premature to exclusively decide that the time for a military option was upon us,” he said in clips of the interview aired on the CNN website.

The United States and the international community have been urging Israel to hold off on a preemptory strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to prevent the production of a nuclear weapon, asking Israel to give tough sanctions an opportunity to work.

“I think that the economic sanctions and the international cooperation that we have been able to gather around sanctions is beginning to have an effect. I think our diplomacy is having an effect,” Dempsey said.

“A strike at this time would be destabilizing and wouldn’t achieve their long-term objectives,” Dempsey said according to Bloomberg, citing an e-mailed transcript of the full interview. “I wouldn’t suggest, sitting here today, that we’ve persuaded them that our view is the correct view and that they are acting in an ill-advised fashion.”

Also on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with U.S. National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, to discuss Iran. He is also scheduled to meet other Israeli officials on his visit, which will end on Monday.

Donilon, who was named to the post in October 2010, will be visiting Israel for the first time.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.