The United States “dodged a bullet in Syria… all courtesy of the Israelis,” former US Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser asserted on Monday. John Hannah, a senior fellow at the DC-based think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, was referring to Operation Orchard, Israel’s September 6, 2007 bombing of the North Korean-built, plutonium-producing nuclear reactor in the town of Al-Kibar, in the desert east of Damascus.

“Not only did (the Israelis) discover (it) in the nick of time,” Hannah wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs. “They also carried out the attack that was almost certainly the only means of ensuring the reactor never went hot.”

In his piece, titled “It’s the Proliferation, Stupid,” Hannah recounted the day he received an urgent call from Cheney “to drop everything and get over to his White House office. The head of Israel’s Mossad, the late Meir Dagan, had just been in to brief Cheney and President (George W.) Bush. What he revealed was chilling: “compelling evidence” that North Korea was covertly building in Syria “more or less a replica” of its own reactor at Yongbyon – and that it was “perilously close to completion.”

“Options for getting rid of it would narrow considerably once operations began and the reactor went ‘hot,’” he continued. “At that point, any effort to destroy it through military strike or covert action would run a high risk of dispersing deadly radioactive materials that could poison thousands of innocent civilians.”

Calling the Syrian civil war a “strategic catastrophe” — after raking the US intelligence community over the coals for having “totally missed Al-Kibar” and being “completely taken aback by Dagan’s stunning revelations” — Hannah added, “Just imagine the nightmare that the world would have faced if, on top of everything else, we were also dealing with the nightmare of the Islamic State getting its hands on a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor.”