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The visiting Chairman of the US Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, carried out a guided tour of Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip over the weekend. It was led by the IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and OCs Northern and Southern Commands, Maj. Gens. Eisenkott and Galant.

He was briefed on IDF tactics in a war on all these potential flashpoints in the context of a comprehensive conflict with Iran and then held long conversations with defense minister Ehud Barak and Ashkenazi.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that it is very unusual for the top American commander to carry out a close, on-the-spot study of Israel’s potential war fronts. It was prompted on the one hand by skepticism in parts of the US high command of Israel’s ability to simultaneously strike Iran’s nuclear installations and fight off attacks from three borders while, at the same time, Adm. Mullen showed he was open to persuasion that the IDF’s prospective tactics and war plans were workable.

Israel must destroy Iran’s nuclear program within the next 12 months or risk being attacked with an atomic bomb itself, the former head of the Mossad told the British Sunday Telegraph.

“As an intelligence officer working with the worst-case scenario, I can tell you we should be prepared,” Shabtai Shavit, who served as Mossad chief from 1989 to 1996, told the British paper.

“We should do whatever necessary on the defensive side, on the offensive side, on the public opinion side for the West, in case sanctions don’t work. What’s left is a military action.”

“The time that is left to be ready is getting shorter all the time,” Shavit told the Telegraph.

Shavit added that a victory by Democratic nominee Barack Obama in the November presidential election would significantly lower the chances that the U.S. would approve of military action against Iran.

“If [Republican candidate John] McCain gets elected, he could really easily make a decision to go for it,” Shavit told the paper. “If it’s Obama: no. My prediction is that he won’t go for it, at least not in his first term in the White House.”

Shavit told the Telegraph, however, that Israel would not hesitate to go it alone, with or without U.S. support.

“When it comes to decisions that have to do with our national security and our own survival, at best we may update the Americans that we are intending or planning or going to do something,” Shavit told the paper. “It’s not a precondition, [getting] an American agreement,” he said.

Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign minister said on Sunday he did not believe Israel was in a position to attack the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program.

“They know full well what the consequences of such an act would be,” Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki told reporters.

Speculation about a possible attack on Iran because of its disputed nuclear ambitions has risen since a report this month said Israel had practiced such a strike, prompting increasingly tough talk of retaliation, if pushed, from Tehran.

Mottaki said Israel was still dealing with the consequences of its 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon and was also suffering a “crisis of deepening illegitimacy” in the Middle East region.

“That’s why we do not see the Zionist regime in a situation in which they would want to engage in such an adventurism,” he said when asked about the possibility of an Israeli attack.

A senior Iranian commander says the country is digging some ’320,000 graves’ in its bordering provinces for future slain invaders.

Brigadier General Mir-Faisal Baqerzadeh, the Head of the Foundation for the Remembrance of the Holy Defense, said Sunday that the decision had been approved by Iran’s Armed Forces Headquarters.

“We will dig 15,000 to 20,000 graves in each of the border provinces,” he said.

“We do not wish the families of enemy soldiers to experience what Americans had to go through in the aftermath of the Vietnam War,” added Brig. Gen. Baqerzadeh, who is also the head of the search committee for missing soldiers.

The commander said the preemptive measures would decrease the time slain soldiers would be ’missing in action’.

“The burial of slain soldiers will be carried out decently and in little time,” he continued.