American Thinker: On AfPak, is Obama clever or stupid?.

By James Lewis

Ahmadinejad: Israel can’t do ‘damn thing’ against Iran – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Ahmadinejad: Israel can’t do ‘damn thing’ against Iran

Iranian president says International Atomic Energy Agency’s decision to rebuke his country over its disputed nuclear activity is ‘illegal.’ He rejects option that Jewish state could attack Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities

Reuters

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//	Ahmadinejad.

‘It’s 1938, and Iran Is Germany’: Israel’s Patience with Tehran Wearing Thin – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.

By Dieter Bednarz, Erich Follath and Christoph Schult

‘It’s 1938, and Iran Is Germany’

Israel’s Patience with Tehran Wearing Thin

Iran’s leaders continue to reject compromises over their nuclear program and are rebuffing the IAEA. The West is likely to respond with tighter sanctions, but that is unlikely to satisfy Israel, which has attack plans already drawn up.

Six men are sitting around a table, deciding the future of the world. The men, who represent the US, Russia, China, France, Britain and Iran, are considering questions such as: Is Tehran really building a nuclear bomb? Do sanctions work, and if they do, how should they be intensified? Will bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities end up being the only real solution, and what would be the consequences?

The men are not politicians, but scientists and diplomats involved in a role-playing scenario. They are all Israeli citizens. That doesn’t make the experiment, which took place two weeks ago at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, any less spectacular. The participants in this role-playing exercise, all of whom were very familiar with the issues involved, were capable of taking a completely different approach to what-if scenarios than politicians, because they cannot be held responsible for anything — good or bad — that results from their decisions.

The outcome of the experiment was supposed to be kept secret, but this much was leaked: The participant playing the United States emphasized negotiations and shunned confrontation for a long time, while “Iran” was convinced that it had excellent cards and viewed the risk of truly hard-hitting sanctions as slim. “Israel” initially pushed for international isolation and crippling economic sanctions by the United Nations, but then — as a last resort — threatened to attack.

Plans at the Ready

The results probably pleased Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, because they reflected the way he thinks. Although the premier is not yet prepared to deploy Israeli fighter jets to conduct targeted air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the military has plans at the ready.

Netanyahu has said often enough that he will never accept an Iranian nuclear bomb. He doesn’t believe Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he insists that Iran’s nuclear program is intended solely for civilian purposes. But he does take Ahmadinejad — a notorious Holocaust denier — at his word when he repeatedly threatens to wipe out Israel. Netanyahu draws parallels between Europe’s appeasement of Hitler and the current situation. “It’s 1938, and Iran is Germany,” he says. This time, however, says Netanyahu, the Jews will not allow themselves to be the “sacrificial lamb.”

But even politicians who normally take a less extreme view, like Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister of intelligence and atomic energy, are now realizing that the situation is coming to a head. A narrow majority of the Israeli population currently favors bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities, while 11 percent would consider leaving Israel if Tehran acquires nuclear weapons.

Meridor says that his counterparts in the US government are reporting a sharp increase in the level of concern among Iran’s moderate Arab neighbors. “Ninety percent of the conversations between the United States and countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia now revolve around Iran, while 10 percent relate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he says.

Decisive Stage

This concern is not limited to the region. In Washington and in the European Union — and, more recently, in Moscow –, the focus has shifted dramatically toward Iran. After years of maneuvering and deception, and after a long period of missed opportunities, including on the part of the West, the conflict is moving toward a decisive stage.

In a SPIEGEL interview in mid-November, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that she had no intention of taking the military option “off the table.” Her German counterpart, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, attended a meeting at the Israeli Foreign Ministry last Tuesday, where he was briefed on the latest Israeli intelligence about the Iranian nuclear program. The next day in Vienna, while standing next to Nobel Peace Prize winner and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohammed ElBaradei, who is leaving office this week after heading the UN nuclear watchdog agency for 12 years, Westerwelle said that the world community’s “patience with Iran” is “not infinite.”

Tehran played a cat-and-mouse game with the IAEA for a long time. However, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has both privileges — such as technical assistance in the civilian use of nuclear energy — and clearly defined obligations. The regime has repeatedly failed to live up to these obligations, despite many efforts to build bridges, particularly on the part of ElBaradei. This incurred the wrath of the administration of former US President George W. Bush, who even had ElBaradei’s telephone conversations tapped.

In its most recent internal report, dated Nov. 16, 2009 and marked “for official use only,” the IAEA has adopted an unusually sharp tone. According to the report, the Fordo uranium enrichment facility near the city of Qom in northwestern Iran, which the UN inspectors only discovered in September, was “clearly reportable,” because it had apparently been under construction for much longer than the Iranians had indicated. A possible military nuclear program, which the Iranian leadership has consistently denied, raises “alarming” questions, according to the report, while Tehran continues to refuse to permit unannounced inspections. In summary, the report states: “Iran has not fulfilled its obligations. Its behavior is not conducive to the establishment of trust.”

Just a Year Away from the Bomb?

Behind the scenes in Vienna, there are grave concerns over news that Iran could be well on its way to developing a Shahab-3 midrange missile that could be upgraded to carry nuclear weapons and could reach Tel Aviv. Iranian scientists are believed to have successfully simulated the detonation of a nuclear warhead. Detonation is one of the most technologically challenging problems in the construction of this type of nuclear weapon. Experts believe that it could take Iran as little as a year to acquire the expertise and a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium to build a real nuclear warhead.

Intelligence reports about a restructuring in the Iranian Defense Ministry are no less alarming. According to those reports, a “Department for Expanded High-Technology Applications” (FEDAT) is now under great pressure from the government in Tehran to push ahead with a military nuclear program. According to an organizational chart of FEDAT that SPIEGEL has obtained, the department is divided into sub-departments for uranium mining, enrichment, metallurgy, neutrons, highly explosive material and fuel supply (“Project 111”). FEDAT is headed by the mysterious Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, one of the key officials the IAEA wants to interview, although Mahabadi has so far refused to talk to the agency.

Repeated Overtures

US President Barack Obama has made many overtures to Iran. He has admitted to historical mistakes, such as the 1953 CIA-backed coup that toppled liberal Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. In a video message to the Iranian people coinciding with the festival of Nowruz, which marks the beginning of the Iranian new year, Obama spoke of the great civilizing achievements of the Persian nation. He abandoned Washington’s demand that Tehran give up uranium enrichment altogether, which had been a precondition to negotiations under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

And he proposed, together with other permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, a barter deal that would allow all parties to save face: Iran was to ship a large share of its low-enriched uranium abroad for one year, to Russia or Turkey, and in return would receive nuclear fuel elements processed by France.

The benefit for Tehran was that it would receive, for its research reactor, urgently needed radionuclides that are used in cancer therapy. The benefit for the international community was that it could be sure that the Iranians, during the period covered by the deal, would have no opportunity to pursue their own extensive enrichment activities needed to produce high enriched uranium, the material used to make bombs.

The Iranians seemed interested at first, but then they began setting conditions. In the end, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki rejected the offer, stating that Tehran would definitely not send fissile material abroad.

Clinging to Last Hopes

In an almost desperate appeal, ElBaradei then addressed the Iranian leadership directly, saying: “You need to engage in creative diplomacy, you need to understand that this is the first time that you will have a genuine commitment from an American president to engage you fully, on the basis of respect, with no conditions.” In his last few days in office, the IAEA chief is clinging to the hope that a final response is still forthcoming.

But Iran currently favors threatening gestures over compromises of any sort. The Iranians were so enraged over a resolution Germany presented to the IAEA board of governors last Thursday, which was supported by Washington, Moscow and Beijing, that they threatened to limit their cooperation with the UN. The resolution, which was accepted the next day by a large majority, is essentially nothing but a demand for assurances from Tehran not to maintain any further undeclared nuclear facilities. In one of the biggest military maneuvers in recent years, the Iranian leadership spent five days parading all of its available military equipment, almost as if it were preparing for the worst.

But the display of Iran’s tanks and fighter jets was not only intended to intimidate the “Zionist aggressor” and its allies. The mullahs also used the maneuver to demonstrate their resolve and capacity to take action on the domestic front, where the regime has been at odds with its detractors for the last six months. Since Iran’s presidential election in June, when the uncompromising Ahmadinejad deprived his reform-oriented challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi of victory through apparent election fraud, the opposition has been unrelenting.

Paying the Price

The regime takes the nightly protest chants of “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) and “Marg bar Dictator” (“Death to the dictator”) very seriously. In the months of the revolution, in 1978 and 1979, millions of Iranians used the same slogans in protest against then Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his brutal Savak intelligence service.

Dozens of supporters of the “Green Movement” have already paid for their protests with their lives, and at least 4,000 regime critics have been arrested. Although many were released after a few days, reports of torture and rape only increased the population’s loathing of the regime. The elderly Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who challenged the regime’s legitimacy and issued a fatwa declaring nuclear bombs to be “un-Islamic,” is under de facto house arrest once again.

‘The Enemy Is Everywhere’

The leadership has increased the pressure once again in recent weeks. It strengthened the feared Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, considered the regime’s most loyal supporters, by adding two units to “combat the psychological operations of the enemy.” Another new unit was established to monitor opposition Internet sites and combat “insults and the spreading of lies.” These units are under the command of the Tehran public prosecutor’s office, notorious for its show trials. The country is in a “soft war,” said Pasdaran General Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, “and the enemy is everywhere.” One of the targets of the latest government crackdown was Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, whose prize was confiscated by authorities.

Popular rage is not directed only at the “vote thief” in the presidential office. Many believe that Ahmadinejad is merely a puppet of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was previously virtually untouchable. He is the strong man, he appoints the highest-ranking judges, and he is in charge of the intelligence services, the armed forces, the Revolutionary Guards and the hated Basij militias. He determines the basic features of government policy and decides on Iran’s course in the nuclear conflict.

Willing to Compromise?

But to what extent is this leadership now capable of taking action? Will it accommodate the global community in the nuclear conflict, or does the regime see confrontation with the West as its opportunity to survive?

According to conservative sources in Tehran, President Ahmadinejad was most recently quite willing to make a compromise. He apparently hoped that he could spruce up his reputation, heavily tarnished as a result of the election disaster, at least internationally. This, say the Tehran sources, explains why Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili signaled a willingness to make concessions at the historic nuclear summit in Geneva in early October, a meeting at which an Iranian official came face-to-face with a senior representative of the “Great Satan” for the first time since the Iranian revolution. But in Khamenei’s eyes, the deal — uranium outsourcing in return for fuel delivery — was a non-starter. Ironically, opposition politician Mousavi agrees with him.

A key reason for the Iranian politicians’ self-confidence is that they do not believe that Israel would truly risk an attack on Iran. US experts also warn against the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. David Albright, head of the Washington think tank ISIS, believes that a “surgical strike” against the nuclear facilities would be completely impossible. According to Albright, no one knows how many nuclear sites Iran has, and the centrifuges in existing facilities like Natanz are apparently installed in tunnels so deep underground that even bunker-busting bombs could not destroy everything.

The Israelis, on the other hand, believe that Iran is merely playing for time. The Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has long had its capacities directed at Iran, and not just since Netanyahu came into office. Israeli envoys quietly visit European companies that export products to Tehran. When the agitated German executives insist that their products are intended purely for civilian purposes, the Israelis produce photos showing the European components installed in one of Iran’s nuclear plants.

Chances of Success

“The West approves UN sanctions by day and trades with Tehran by night, and Ahmadinejad takes advantage of this ambivalence,” Israeli Trade Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told SPIEGEL. Ben-Eliezer, a retired general, believes optimistically that Iran can be stopped, but that this would require a total embargo: “Nothing can be allowed in or out.”

With the Iranian economy weakened, the regime under internal pressure after the disputed elections and the Russians distancing themselves from Iran, the chances that sanctions will succeed have never been this good, say some diplomats in Tehran.

“The regime in Iran is not irrational,” says Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor. According to Meridor, only if possessing the bomb jeopardizes the regime’s survival, will Ahmadinejad decide against building the weapon.

Others, however, believe that the timetable of escalation is already as good as fixed, and that the conflict is coming to a head. They believe that tighter sanctions will start in the spring of 2010, followed by air strikes perhaps in the summer of 2010.

Meanwhile, a representative of the Iranian government has already issued precautionary threats: “If the enemy want (sic) to test its bad luck and fire a missile into Iran, before the dust settles, Iran’s ballistic missiles will target the heart of Tel Aviv.”

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Would Iran Provide A Nuclear Weapon to Terrorists? | Global Terrorism.

Winter 2009

The United States seeks to negotiate an end to Iran’s bid for nuclear weapons. U.S. and European officials have laid out scenarios whereby Iran could potentially threaten the surrounding Arab states, Israel, or even Europe with missiles equipped with nuclear warheads. But there is strikingly little discussion among policymakers about the possibility Iran might share nuclear weapons with one of the many terrorist organizations it supports.

Al-Qaeda?

When this worst-case scenario is raised, analysts usually focus on Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite terrorist group founded in the early 1980s by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. However, al-Qaeda has a far more extensive history of seeking to acquire these weapons, and as the 9/11 Report stated, Osama bin Laden’s network retains nominal yet murky ties with Iran.

Despite a history of distrust and feuding between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Tehran and al-Qaeda share common enemies in the United States and Israel. This has yielded cooperation in recent years.

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted some of the major U.S. terror cases of the 1990s, outlined in detail in National Review Online the cooperation between Iran and al-Qaeda. McCarthy points to the case of Ali Mohamed, a shadowy Egyptian who eventually immigrated to the United States and served in the U.S. Army. Unbeknownst to U.S. intelligence, Mohammed was also a senior al-Qaeda trainer and served as bin Laden’s personal bodyguard. At bin Laden’s direction, Mohammed conducted surveillance of various potential bombing targets including the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

When he pled guilty in 2000 to participating in al-Qaeda’s war against the United States, Mohammed cited the existence of “contacts between al-Qaeda and al-Jihad organization [Egyptian Islamic Jihad, headed by Zawahiri], on one side, and Iran and Hezbollah on the other side. I arranged security for a meeting in the Sudan between [Imad Mugniyeh], Hezbollah’s chief, and bin Laden.”

Mohammed further stated that Hezbollah provided explosives training for al-Qaeda and al-Jihad. Iran, in turn, supplied al-Jihad with weapons. Iran also used Hezbollah to “supply explosives disguised to look like rocks.”

Mohammed’s disclosure should not have come as a surprise. When the U.S. indicted bin Laden in 1998, the Justice Department charged that he had called for al-Qaeda to “put aside its differences with Shi’ite Muslim terrorist organizations, including the government of Iran and its affiliated terrorist group Hezbollah, to cooperate against the perceived common enemy, the United States and its allies.”

The indictment added, “Al-Qaeda also forged alliances… with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.”

When it released its final report in 2004, the 9/11 Commission noted that, “senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993, another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as intelligence and security.”

That instruction at Hezbollah facilities included al-Qaeda’s top military committee members. One of those who received training from Hezbollah, McCarthy noted, was Saif al-Adel, al-Qaeda’s chief of military operations and a “driving force” behind the 1998 Africa embassy bombings. He was also tied to the U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000, and was believed to have trained some of the September 11 hijackers.

Al-Qaeda’s Record

Now that the relationship between al-Qaeda and Iran has been established, it is important to understand that al-Qaeda has stated clearly that it seeks to use weapons of mass destruction on the United States.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative (www.nti.org), a group headed by media mogul Ted Turner and former Georgia Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, notes there is evidence dating back to the early 1990s of al-Qaeda’s effort to obtain a nuclear device and recruit people with nuclear weapons expertise. For example, the U.S. government’s indictment of bin Laden for the 1998 Africa embassy bombings alleges that at various times dating back to 1992, the al-Qaeda boss joined with a senior aide, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, and others “to obtain the components of nuclear weapons.” The document also charges that in 1993 the group attempted to purchase highly-enriched uranium in Sudan.

Al-Qaeda continued its efforts to obtain WMD and nuclear know-how throughout the 1990s. Then, in 2000, a Russian National Security Council official announced that al-Qaeda’s Taliban allies had sought to recruit a nuclear expert from a Russian facility.

Shortly before September 11, bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri met with two senior Pakistani nuclear weapons experts who were Taliban supporters. Although they denied providing bin Laden with any useful information, the Pakistani experts admitted to The Washington Post in December 2001 that they provided detailed technical information in violation of Pakistani security laws.

Even after being driven from his base in Afghanistan, bin Laden has continued his quest for nuclear weapons. In 2004, captured al-Qaeda operative Sharif al-Masri told interrogators that al-Qaeda seeks to acquire nuclear materials in Europe and move them to Mexico, and from there, across the border into the United States. In 2005, two jihadists were arrested in Germany trying to obtain uranium. One of them was an Iraqi who had trained in al-Qaeda’s camps and was associated with September 11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh.

While we do not know the extent to which bin Laden’s network has achieved success, the Obama Administration is on record as stating that al-Qaeda continues to try to acquire nuclear weapons technology and know-how.

“Al-Qaeda is still there in the region, ever dangerous and publicly asking people to attack the U.S. and publicly asking nuclear engineers to give them nuclear secrets from Pakistan,” Richard Holbrooke, the Special U.S. Representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, said on September 16.

The Calculus

Terrorism analysts in Washington need to be asking: Under what circumstances might Iran decide to up the ante and transfer WMD technology to terrorist organizations?

Diplomats typically dismiss the possibility. They acknowledge that this would be a terrible thing, but express doubt that Iran would take such a drastic step for two reasons.

First, they argue that Tehran itself is uncomfortable at the prospect of terrorists acquiring such weapons. Second, they argue that the Iranian leadership understands that if a nuclear weapon is transferred to al-Qaeda and used to attack the United States or any of its allies, the retaliation would be overwhelming.

To be sure, analysts should not underestimate the importance of American power as a deterrent. But it is equally important to understand that, with Iran, deterrence has its limits. No nation today has as extensive a record of supporting terrorism as Iran, and Western policies in place until now have utterly failed to deter Iran from facilitating terrorism using conventional weapons.

U.S. deterrence has been eroded by Iran’s perception of American weakness, and by the fact that the Iranian regime has been able to foment terrorism and violence against the United States and the West for more than 30 years and get away with it. Deterrence is further weakened by the instability of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who seems not to fear conflict with the West.

The Hezbollah Scenario

Iran could also provide a nuclear weapon to any of its proxy terrorist organizations in conflict with Israel. Indeed, Iran could see this is an insurance policy. In the event that Israel launches a preemptive attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, Tehran may conclude that it has nothing to lose by turning nuclear technology over to terrorists-notably Hezbollah.

Iran already has smuggling routes to the group. Recently, it smuggled massive quantities of weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, in an attempt to help it to rebuild the weapons arsenal destroyed by Israel during the 2006 war. As a result of that smuggling, Hezbollah now has more than three times the number of missiles it had at the start of that war. Israeli military officials acknowledged in November that Hezbollah now has Iranian-made Fajr rockets that reach Tel Aviv and possibly Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona.

The Israelis are doing their best to stop the flow of weapons. On November 3, Israeli commandos intercepted an arms shipment on its way from Iran to Hezbollah. The weapons were transported aboard the MV Francop, a cargo ship flying the Antiguan flag. Hidden aboard the civilian vessel were three-dozen shipping containers holding weaponry for Hezbollah. At 500 tons, the Francop was carrying a quantity of armaments at least 10 times as large as that aboard the Karine-A, a ship that Iran loaded up with 50 tons of advanced weaponry for Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in Gaza. It was captured by Israel in January 2002.

In the Francop case, the weapons seized aboard the ship included 3,000 recoilless gun shells, 9,000 mortar bombs, and more than half a million rounds of small-arms ammunition. Also found aboard the ship were 2,800 rockets. English- and Farsi- language markings on the polyethylene sacks containing the munitions proved that Iran’s National Petrochemical Company produced the sacks.

In January 2009, Cypriot authorities captured a shipment of anti-tank weapons, artillery and rocket-manufacturing materials for manufacturing rockets on a Cypriot ship leased by an Iranian firm. Intelligence officials believe the weaponry was bound for Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.

In May 2007, the Kurdish PKK terror group derailed an Iranian train in southeastern Turkey carrying rocket launchers, mortar shells, and light arms to Syria (possibly destined for Hezbollah.) In December 2003 and January 2004, after humanitarian assistance was flown into southern Iran for earthquake victims, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards used the return flights to Damascus to smuggle arms to Hezbollah.

These are the instances in which weapons were captured. There are untold numbers of Iranian shipments that get through. The question that analysts must now answer is: could a nuclear weapon get through, too?

The late Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, took this possibility seriously. Under the right circumstances, Tehran might attempt to transfer WMD to Hezbollah, or perhaps other terror groups, such as Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In interviews with The Washington Times and The New York Times not long before his death in 2007, Leventhal said it was not beyond the realm of possibility that Hezbollah could try to smuggle a crude nuclear device via a ship or truck and deliver it to a highly populated Israeli city. According to Leventhal, if the fissile device functioned poorly, it would result in an explosion with the power of 1,000 tons of TNT, resulting in radiation contamination and a “catastrophic” number of casualties. If such a device functioned properly, it could result in an explosion with the power of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT-roughly equivalent to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945.

The Iranian Nuclear Threat

The dangers of an Iranian nuclear weapon are many. While the dangers of the conventional missile threat have been made clear, the danger of an Iranian bomb in the hands of terrorist organizations requires further analysis. The free world dismisses such threats at its own peril.

Column- The consequences of America’s actions – Holland, MI – The Holland Sentinel.