WarSclerotic

FT.com / Comment / Analysis – Middle East: Atomic agitation.

For all that, the moment of decision long dreaded by Washington has finally arrived. Mr Obama campaigned for the presidency on the idea of “engagement” with Tehran, and took office emphasising his willingness to negotiate without conditions over the nuclear programme and other issues. But he also said he would judge the effectiveness of his policy by the end of 2009. That time is now past: today the president is left contemplating the failure of his outreach and looking for a Plan B.

Today, while western fears mount about Iran’s intentions and condemnation grows of its internal repression, Tehran is closer to becoming a nuclear state. Direct talks have failed to produce results. Washington is nervous that any military attack – such as has been sporadically threatened by Israel – would be a catastrophe for the region.

As a result, officials throughout the Obama administration and its allies now agree: the time has come to put greater emphasis on sanctions, in an effort to make Tehran think again about its nuclear programme. “We want to keep the door to dialogue open,” Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, said this week. But she added: “We can’t continue to wait and we cannot continue to stand by.”

Published: January 7 2010 20:50 | Last updated: January 7 2010 20:50

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Just over a month ago, a group of veteran US and Israeli diplomats met at Harvard to play out scenarios for one of the most momentous issues facing the world this year – Iran’s nuclear programme.

In the simulation, as in real life, the stakes were high. If Iran comes within reach of a nuclear weapon – as Washington and its allies fear – the power map of the Middle East will alter, the rules that have held back atomic proliferation for decades may be damaged beyond repair and the US and Israel will see a bitter foe empowered as never before. Not least, US President Barack Obama will also have failed on a key foreign policy objective.

The result of the Harvard simulation was not promising for the White House. Tehran emerged the victor, ending 2010 closer to the bomb, with a western push for sanctions backfiring, and Russia and China talking to Iran behind their partners’ backs.

As Robert Gates, US defence secretary, caustically remarked recently: “There are no good options” on Iran.

As the push to enact sanctions intensifies, the problems are clear. The US is far from certain of attaining even the limited sanctions it and its allies seek, and is well aware that historically such measures have often failed to bring results.

Even now, Washington is trying to rein in far-reaching sanctions legislation already backed by the House of Representatives that it fears will do more to irritate allies – by threatening penalties on international companies – than it will hurt Iran.

Indeed the Islamic Republic is currently in turmoil, convulsed by fervent opposition demonstrations and the resulting bloody crackdowns. The nuclear programme is widely depicted as a symbol of national sovereignty. Both the government and the opposition insist that Iran is fully entitled to enrich uranium – the process that can yield both nuclear fuel and weapons grade material.

Dismissing calls for concessions, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, Iran’s president, recently said that if the west did not “correct” its attitude, “we will demand from them the Iranian nation’s historic rights”. Tehran does not look like it is is preparing to sit down at the negotiating table.

But with such big issues at stake the sanctions drive is becoming the focus of international policy.

Already Mr Obama’s Iran and national security teams are meeting to decide on “next steps”. At the United Nations, ambassadors from the permanent five security council members are preparing to negotiate a new round of sanctions, with the debate set to reach a head next month.

It is familiar territory. Three UN sanctions resolutions have been passed in recent years with little discernible impact on Iran’s nuclear progress. Russia and China, two veto-wielding security council members with significant economic interests in Iran, remain highly reluctant to agreeing punitive measures.

Zhang Yesui, China’s ambassador to the UN, said this week, that it was “not the right time or right moment” for sanctions, as diplomatic efforts were still under way. His comments underline the difficulties for the sanctions drive – not least because Beijing is chairing the Security Council this month. Western diplomats complain that Beijing prioritises its mercantilist interests, rooted in its growing trade with Iran, over efforts to restrain Tehran’s nuclear programme.

At the UN over the next few weeks, the US will ask other states to explore alternative measures that could hit Iran’s energy, financial and transport sectors. The European Union will also this month begin discussing how to reinforce UN action.

T op of the list of possible sanctions would be hitting Iran’s imports of refined petroleum. Although Iran sits on the fourth-largest oil reserves in the world, it has to import 40 per cent of refined petrol and 11 per cent of diesel for domestic use because of a historic lack of investment in its antiquated refinery infrastructure.

But China, which has investments in the Iranian energy sector, appears determined to stop measures that would affect the sale of refined petroleum to Iran, say diplomats. “Without Chinese support you can’t make any progress,” says a European diplomat. “Our own oil companies would simply come to us and say, ‘It won’t work – the Chinese are selling petrol to Iran by the back door’.”

A second possible area could be arms sales to Iran. Here, however, the problem is with Russia, which accounts for some 85 per cent of Iran’s arms imports according to European diplomats, and would oppose measures. “Russia exported $2bn in weapons to Iran between 2000 and 2007,” says the same European diplomat. “These are the kinds of figures that would make the Kremlin very reluctant to curb arms exports.”

The US and its EU allies are thus likely to look at a third series of possible measures, both at UN and at EU level. These would aim at targets such as investment in Iran’s petroleum sector, its shipping companies and the insurers that underwrite them.

As was the case with previous resolutions, sanctions could also hit banks connected to Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes, the increasingly powerful Revolutionary Guard, and goods and technologies that can have a dual military and civilian use.

Washington maintains that Iran’s financial isolation is now greater than at any point over the past 15 years. This is partly because of an informal US campaign to lobby companies against doing business with Tehran and partly because of tougher US rules against transactions with Iran, which contributed in December to a $536m fine on Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank.

US officials also take heart in the fact that Dmitry Medvedev, president of Russia, has appeared particularly irritated recently at the way Tehran has rejected Moscow’s attempts to broker a deal on uranium enrichment.

Yet privately, there are doubts about what sanctions can achieve. Some diplomats wonder what the impact on international policy might be of the recent round of demonstrations against the Iranian leadership that have seen eight people killed. “There will be those who argue that at this very moment – just as Ahmadi-Nejad faces acute internal political pressures – the US and the west should not boost the regime’s allegations that they are the enemy,” says a European diplomat.

Iranian analysts also maintain that a fresh round of UN sanctions restricting travel on individuals and limiting purchases of nuclear- and military-related commodities would have little impact on the country’s nuclearpolicies.

Iranian businessmen say they have proven success in mitigating the effects of previous sanctions by re-arranging the way they do business. Israel has long warned the US that Iran uses Dubai as a channel through which it can bypass the international sanctions regime. As Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation in Washington puts it: “The sanctions path has more to do with providing a focus for American frustration and emotion than achieving a successful course of correction by Iran.”

F or the US, the problem is that it cannot afford to be ineffective. The past few months have brought a string of worrying developments, despite Tehran’s insistence that its purposes are purely peaceful.

Iran has now accumulated more than 1.5 tonnes of low-enriched uranium, more than enough, if further enhanced, for one nuclear bomb. It is pressing ahead with tests of ballistic missiles that could one day convey a nuclear warhead. Western intelligence agencies, meanwhile, are now robustly rejecting a US intelligence assessment that Iran stopped work on warhead design back in 2003.

Exactly when Iran could test a bomb is debated between intelligence agencies, although some experts say the programme is constrained by the out-of-date Pakistani nuclear technology obtained on the black market. Some western diplomats also argue that Tehran may hold back from going all the way for nuclear weapons – since it could lose out in any subsequent regional arms race in which neighbours, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, sought to catch up.

Still, US officials say they believe Iran is seeking, at the very least, to shorten the “lead time” for a bomb even if it has not yet made the final, high-risk decision to build a weapon.

There is also uncertainty over how Israel will respond if Iran’s nuclear ambitions fail to be contained in the next year or two. The assumption in some western capitals is that an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations remains highly unlikely. The Obama administration has repeatedly warned Israel against such an action – which, Mr Gates says, “would only buy some time, maybe two or three years” at the risk of inflaming the region.

“Iran would be able to inflict a heavy retaliatory strike on population centres inside Israel,” says a European diplomat. “That is the issue that weighs on Israeli thinking.” Still, Israel has never ruled out a sudden strike on what many Israelis see as an existential threat to their state.

As they enter a new phase of diplomacy on Iran, US officials recognise big problems ahead. “The dysfunctionality of the regime is a real problem,” says a senior US official, referring to Iran’s reluctance to accept a proposal in October that would have swapped most of its enriched uranium stockpile for isotopes for medical use. “They haven’t even been prepared to accept a proposal that everyone considers balanced. Whether they are unwilling or unable, the result is that they haven’t been prepared to engage.”

Back in June 2008, in the course of his presidential campaign, Mr Obama said he would “do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon – everything.”

The problem for him – and the world – is that “everything in his power” may not be enough.

ANALYSIS-Iran unlikely to risk blocking Strait of Hormuz.

Published: 07 Jan 2010 18:11:35 PST

* Iran cannot afford prolonged blockade of strait

* Oil could rise to $100 a barrel if waterway blocked

LONDON, Jan 7 – Iran is unlikely to risk blocking or mining the Strait of Hormuz if tension with the West rises, because it stands to lose vital oil revenues from closing the strategic waterway and lacks the military capability.

Iran has threatened to close the strait a vital route for world oil supplies, if it is attacked over its nuclear ambitions.

Some Iran watchers say Tehran could opt to block the strait if more severe sanctions are imposed. Western powers suspect Iran’s nuclear activities are aimed at developing atomic weapons, not generating electricity as Tehran insists.

Analysts believe the threat itself is enough to raise oil prices to well above $100 a barrel, potentially damaging a still fragile global economic recovery.

“Oil prices rose by around $12 a barrel when Israel went into Lebanon in 2006 and neither of those countries are even involved in oil production,” said Paul Harris, head of natural resources risk management at Bank of Ireland.

“You’d be looking at least double that kind of jump from an event on that scale in the region.”

Many analysts say Tehran cannot afford to risk a prolonged disruption of the narrow waterway, which borders Iran’s coastline at the mouth of the Gulf, and through which 40 percent of all seaborne oil trade, about 17 million barrels, passes daily.

Iran itself exports around 2.4 million barrels daily — most of it via the Strait of Hormuz.

“They would cut their own throats because two-thirds of the Iranian government‘s budget comes from exports from the same strait,” said J. Peter Pham, an adviser on strategic matters to U.S. and foreign governments.

“Iran gains more from the threat of closing the strait than actually closing it.”

“FRAUGHT WITH PROBLEMS”

The strait, just 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, lies between Oman and Iran. Neighbouring oil-producing countries, including Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, are dependent on its shipping lanes.

“Closing the strait would reduce Iran’s leverage in the region as it would put Persian Gulf countries squarely in the camp of America,” Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar said, adding that it could tempt them into financing Iranian opposition movements.

Many analysts believe that, if Iran retaliated, it would choose to mine the strait’s sea lanes as it did during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

Military analysts believe Iran has three mine-laying ships and three mine-laying helicopters, plus three Russian-built Kilo class submarines.

“Military operations on the offence are fraught with problems,” said Eugene Gholz, professor of national security policy at the University of Texas.

“The Iranians would have to do it over and over again every day to maintain the disruption.”

Global intelligence company Stratfor said the strait’s cramped, shallow waters made submarine activity difficult.

“In any event, the Iranian navy does not have enough Kilos to have any confidence in its ability to sustain submarine operations for any meaningful period after hostilities began,” it said in a study.

REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS

Some analysts said double-hulled oil tankers were able to withstand damage from mines more than their single-hulled predecessors, which were targeted in the 1980s when Iran and Iraq fired on each other’s vessels during the “tanker war”.

John Dalby, chief executive of the maritime security company MRM which provides risk assessments and supplies former military personnel to ships in the region, said mines did not represent a real risk to tankers.

“Bearing in mind mines detonate under water, there is little risk of a spark-induced explosion,” he said.

Pham said Iran would have to sink three or four very large crude carriers daily, each holding up to 2 million barrels of oil, to have a significant effect on supply.

“This is nearly impossible,” he said. “They can cause a shock, they can cause psychological panic, but their actual capacity to do something is not there.”

Military analysts have not ruled out Iran using speedboats to attack tanker traffic.

The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence said in a study last year Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had control of smaller and faster boats which had “serious firepower” including torpedoes and the Iranian-made Kowsar anti-ship cruise missiles.

However, few believe Iran will take that course because of fears of severe retaliation by the West, given that the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based in the region.

“That would be far too provocative. It would unleash hell,” MRM’s Dalby said.

Israel and Iran: The gathering storm | The Economist.

Jan 7th 2010 | JERUSALEM AND TEL AVIV
From The Economist print edition

As Israel pushes for sanctions against Iran, it also mulls options for war

Getty ImagesRaiders of Osiraq

SHORTLY after four in the afternoon on June 7th 1981, the late King Hussein of Jordan looked up from his yacht off the port of Aqaba and saw eight Israeli F-16 jets, laden with weapons and external fuel tanks, streaking eastward. He called his military staff, but could not find out what was going on. An hour or so later, the answer became clear. After a ground-hugging infiltration through Saudi Arabia, the jets climbed up near Baghdad and bombed Saddam Hussein’s Osiraq nuclear reactor.

Zeev Raz, the squadron’s leader (pictured bottom right), still recalls every phase of “Operation Opera”: his constant worries about running out of fuel; the risky move to jettison tanks, while the bombs were still attached to the wings, to reduce drag; and the loss of a key navigational marker. He overshot his target and had to loop back. He later discovered that his deputy, Amos Yadlin (now Israel’s military-intelligence chief), had slipped ahead and, annoyingly, dropped the first bombs. Somehow the Iraqis were surprised. King Hussein’s tip had not been passed on. And even though Iraq was then at war with Iran, there were no air patrols or active surface-to-air missile batteries. The Israelis encountered only brief anti-aircraft fire. In the cockpit video of the last and most exposed plane, Ilan Ramon (top left), who later died in the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, is heard grunting nervously. Their mission completed, the jets flew home brazenly on the direct route over Jordan.

The Osiraq raid, condemned at the time, is often seen these days as the model for “preventive” military action against nuclear threats. It set back Iraq’s nuclear programme and, after America’s two wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Saddam never built nuclear weapons. Such methods were repeated in September 2007, when Israeli jets destroyed a suspected nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. Now that Iran is moving inexorably closer to an atomic bomb, will the Israeli air force be sent to destroy its nuclear sites?

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By Israel’s reckoning, Iran will have the know-how to make nuclear weapons within months and, thereafter, could build atomic bombs within a year. Even if Iran does not seek to realise its dreams of wiping out the Jewish state, Israeli officials say a nuclear-armed Iran would lead to “cataclysmic” changes in the Middle East. America would be weakened and Iran become dominant; pro-Western regimes would become embattled, and radical armed groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza would feel emboldened.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others could, in turn, seek their own nuclear arms. In a multi-nuclear Middle East, Israel’s nuclear arms may not ensure a stabilising, cold-war-style deterrent. “If Iran gets nuclear weapons, the Middle East will look like hell,” says one senior Israeli official. “I cannot imagine that we can live with a nuclear Iran.” For Israel, 2010 is the year of decision. Yet its ability to destroy the nuclear sites is questionable, and such a strike may precipitate a regional war, or worse.

Mr Raz, for one, thinks Israel cannot repeat the Osiraq feat. Iran’s nuclear sites are farther away; they are dispersed, and many are buried. The disclosure last year of a secret enrichment facility being dug into a mountain near Qom suggests that there are others undiscovered. “The Iranians are clever. They learnt well from Osiraq,” says Mr Raz. “There is no single target that you can bomb with eight aircraft.”

For Mr Raz, Israeli air power could, at most, set the Iranian nuclear programme back by a year or two—not enough to be worth the inevitable Iranian retaliation, which might include rockets fired at Israeli cities by Iran and its allies, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. A more thorough action would require ground troops in Iran, but nobody is contemplating that.

Though he now works for a defence-electronics contractor and lives comfortably in a flat with a commanding view over Israel’s narrow coastal plain, Mr Raz exudes gloom. His four children, all adults, are applying for foreign passports—German ones, of all things. His eldest daughter, a mother of two, “does not think Israel is safe any more”—not just because of the prospect of a nuclear Iran, but because years of suicide-bombings and rockets have sapped belief in peace. Her siblings, he says, were persuaded to apply too.

This is a surprising admission, particularly from a kibbutz-bred former fighter pilot. Most Israelis still believe in the mystique of their air force. And for much of the past year Israel has been unusually calm. Palestinian suicide-bombings are very rare, and the morale-sapping showers of rockets have all but stopped.

In Israel’s view this is thanks to the tough security measures it has taken, among them the contentious security barrier in the West Bank, and its willingness to go to war against Hizbullah in 2006 and against Hamas a year ago. “Deterrence is working wonderfully,” says one defence official. But both militias are rearming, partly thanks to help from Iran, with missiles of even greater range that could reach the crowded Tel Aviv region from either Gaza or Lebanon. And the lull has been bought at a serious cost to Israel’s diplomatic standing. An inquiry commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council and headed by a South African judge, Richard Goldstone, found that Israel (and to a lesser extent Hamas) may be guilty of war crimes in Gaza. Europe is regarded as increasingly hostile, a region where Israeli government and military officials travel warily to avoid war-crimes lawsuits.

There are doubts even about Israel’s great ally, America, after a spat over Jewish settlements in the West Bank. President Barack Obama may be clever, Israelis say, but he lacks the empathy with Israel shown by his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George Bush. One minister, Limor Livnat, recently said that Israel had “fallen into the hands of a horrible American administration”.

Israel thus finds itself in a paradoxical state: more secure for now, but acutely anxious about the future; closer than ever to some Arab regimes because of a perceived common threat from Iran and its radical allies, yet more demonised by its Western friends. Israelis see a global campaign of “delegitimisation” akin to efforts to isolate white-ruled South Africa. “I’m sure the Afrikaners felt like we feel now,” says Mr Raz.

For many Israeli strategists, the decision over whether to bomb Iran is the most important in decades—some say since the birth of the Jewish state in 1948. The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu—the son of a staunchly nationalist professor of Jewish history, and the younger brother of Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, who died leading the famed rescue of hostages from Entebbe in 1976—is said to feel the weight of history. His office is adorned with portraits of two of his political idols. One is Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. But the other, Winston Churchill, is unusual in a country that regards Britain as having betrayed the Zionist cause when it ruled Palestine.

Bibi as Winston

Mr Netanyahu draws inspiration from the British wartime leader for reasons both tactical and strategic. Political courage in Israel is often deemed to mean willingness to surrender, after decades of colonisation, the territories captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; to act like Charles de Gaulle, who gave up Algeria. By holding up Churchill, Mr Netanyahu is saying that courage consists of holding tenaciously to one’s beliefs, regardless of popularity.

This model carried special force on the question of Iran. As opposition leader, Mr Netanyahu recalled Churchill’s efforts to awaken the world to the danger of Nazi Germany. “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” he said in 2006. Now that he is in power, pundits ask, might Bibi see himself as the Churchill of the Battle of Britain, fighting alone against Hitler and desperately trying to draw America into the war?

Iran is central to Mr Netanyahu’s thinking. It helps explain his surprisingly strong partnership with Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labour Party (and a former army chief of staff and prime minister), trusted as the only man able to handle the big security issues. It helps that he served in Sayeret Matkal, the elite commando unit once led by Mr Barak—and by brother Yoni.

Iran affects Mr Netanyahu’s calculations on the Palestinian issue too. He came to office convinced that tackling Iran was a bigger priority than peacemaking with Palestinians. This may have been a convenient argument for a sceptic of the “peace process”. In truth, a peace deal has been difficult ever since the Palestinian movement split violently in 2006 between the Islamists of Hamas who seized Gaza, and the more secular Fatah faction that clings on to bits of the West Bank (with Israeli and American help) under President Mahmoud Abbas. Mr Netanyahu argued that even if a deal were possible, a nuclear-armed Iran would unravel any agreements. But in the view of prominent Palestinians such as Ghassan Khatib, a former planning minister, peacefully resolving the nuclear stand-off would help push Hamas into more moderate positions.

Under pressure from Mr Obama, who argued that progress on the Palestinian issue would help galvanise an Arab coalition to confront Iran, Mr Netanyahu has since adjusted his positions. He belatedly accepted the idea of a Palestinian “state”, albeit a demilitarised one. And having upset the Obama administration by rejecting its demand for a complete halt to settlement-building, he later announced a unilateral, partial, ten-month suspension.

Something is now stirring. During a recent trip to Cairo, Mr Netanyahu seems to have offered enough to win praise from Egypt and start a new flurry of diplomacy that may yet lead to new peace talks. Mr Netanyahu’s aides now speak in Labour-like aphorisms: “We must make progress with Palestinians as if there is no Iran, and confront Iran as if there is no Palestinian issue,” says one. Perhaps there is a bit of de Gaulle in Mr Netanyahu after all. Or perhaps, as one Haaretz columnist, Aluf Benn, noted, the parallel is that Churchill brought America into the war, but lost the empire.

Mr Netanyahu has gone along with the Obama administration’s decision to talk directly to Iran. In contrast with the threats issued by the government of his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, his cabinet has been told to keep quiet about military planning, saying only: “All options are on the table”. As one aide puts it: “Those who know will not speak; and those who speak do not know.”

Clues in the wind

The few public signals seem contradictory. Mr Netanyahu has boosted the defence budget, and the army is planning to distribute gas masks to all citizens next month. Joint missile-defence exercises were held with America in October, and a simulated biological attack is to be rehearsed this month. Despite all this, Mr Barak seemed to recognise the difficulty of curbing Iran’s nuclear programme last month when he told a closed meeting with members of parliament that the Qom site “cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack”.

Two war games run recently by academics add to the despondency. In one, played out at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, America was ready to live with a nuclear Iran through containment and nuclear deterrence, and exerted strong pressure on Israel not to take military action. In another war game, held at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies and designed to explore diplomatic options, Iran continued to build up its stock of enriched uranium—even after a simulated Israeli commando raid on one facility under construction.

All this suggests that Israel is drawing up military options to attack Iran, but none of them is very appealing. This may explain Israel’s enthusiasm for sanctions. The emergence of an Iranian protest movement raises hopes that the regime could be restrained, perhaps even toppled, by stoking internal pressure.

America is rethinking the wisdom of targeting Iran’s most obvious vulnerability: its dependence, because of inefficient refining capacity, on imports of petrol and other fuels. Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, now says America will seek to impose penalties on the increasingly powerful Revolutionary Guard, “without contributing to the suffering of the ordinary [Iranians], who deserve better than what they currently are receiving.”

Mr Netanyahu’s lieutenants seem inclined the other way. They say ordinary Iranians will blame their government, not the outside world, for any sanctions; so the embargo should be as crushing as possible. Domestic instability should be encouraged. Only a direct threat to the survival of the regime, they believe, will make it think again about seeking nuclear weapons. It is a harsh view, but for Israel the alternatives are even worse.

NTI: Global Security Newswire – China Rejects Call for More U.N. Sanctions on Iran.

Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2010

Israel completes testing a high-tech defense system that intercepts incoming rockets – baltimoresun.com.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel has successfully completed testing a high-tech rocket defense system designed to protect its civilians from attacks by militants in Gaza and Lebanon, the Defense Ministry said Wednesday.

The Iron Dome system successfully “intercepted multiple threats at the same time,” the ministry said in a statement. “All the (rockets) were shot down by the system with total success.”

It said the system will be delivered to an anti-aircraft regiment in the air force soon, but did not give a date for when it becomes operational. Channel 10 TV said the first battery would be deployed in May.

The system is effective against short-range rockets like those used by Gaza and Lebanese militants.

The Iron Dome system uses cameras and radar to track incoming rockets and shoot them down within seconds of their launch, according to the Defense Ministry. The system can change its calculations to account for weather or other conditions in fractions of a second. It then fires a hailstorm of projectiles that home in on the rockets, detonating them in the sky.

Gaza militants have fired thousands of rockets into southern Israel over the years and the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah bombed northern cities with rocket barrages from Lebanon during fierce fighting in the summer of 2006.

Millions of Israeli civilians are within range of the Hamas and Hezbollah rockets, and the Israeli military have been unable to stop the attacks up to now.

Israel has been looking at anti-rocket systems since 2003 but intensified the search after the 2006 war.

Developed at a cost of more than $200 million, the Iron Dome system is intended to eventually be integrated into a multilayered defense umbrella to meet all missile threats.

To defend against long-range threats, like an Iranian attack, Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. and Chicago-based Boeing Co. are producing the Arrow missile, which has been successfully tested and deployed.

The most advanced version, the Arrow II, was specifically designed to counter Iran’s Shahab ballistic missile, which may be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

The Shahab-3 is said to have a range of up to 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers), putting Israel well within striking distance.

Israel views Iran as its biggest threat because of its nuclear program and long-range missiles. Those fears have deepened by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s repeated references to the destruction of the Jewish state.

via Vail Valley Voices: Russia the fly in the ointment with Iran | VailDaily.com.

I’m not a foreign relations expert, but I can recognize a serious diplomatic problem when I see one. And the Iran nuclear crisis is a dangerous situation.

Russia has, for all intents and purposes, vetoed any serious sanctions by the United Nations against Iran. President Obama had hoped these sanctions would temper Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The reason for Russia’s seemingly inane response to Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb is historically motivated. The most significant American diplomatic achievement since World War II occurred during the Cold War when Ronald Reagan effectively caused the Soviet Union to dismantle itself.

Russia’s ultimate ruler, Vladimir Putin, a one-time KBG chief and die-hard nationalist, has been dreaming about the old days when his country regularly interfered with American global leadership.

Spurred economically by a spike in oil prices, Putin decided to assert Russian influence even while pretending to be an ally of George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama. Higher oil prices filled Russian foreign exchange coffers, giving Putin a false sense of economic prowess. He responded by causing problems in nearby former Soviet provinces.

But now, Russia is ready for prime time. Even after serious conversations with American diplomats about a proposed anti-missile defense system in Eastern Europe and assorted other less important issues, Russia has openly defied an effort by Obama to build a consensus against Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The illogic of this decision is overwhelming. Why would Russia condone the development of a nuclear weapon by one of its most unstable neighbors, which happens to be ruled by a maniac who is responsible to a group of religious zealots intent on destroying Israel?

Some have said the reason is economic in that Russia has several important projects under way in Iran. That may be partially true, but Iran’s proximity to former Soviet provinces and Russia should be the most important consideration. If a war breaks out, bombs will be exploding dangerously close to Russian soil.

Is Putin prepared to look the other way just because he wants to take on the U.S. diplomatically? What are the odds that Iran ultimately produces a nuclear weapon? I put them at zero, but not because the U.S. will invade Iran (Americans wouldn’t support another war in the region).

Rather, Israel won’t allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Israel’s leaders look at this situation as a matter of life and death for their country. The reaction to an Israeli strike wouldn’t be what some might think. Not one Arab country really believes that a nuclear Iran is in its best interests.

Superficial outrage to an Israeli strike would be prevalent, but I believe most Arabs would be relieved if Iran were to be neutered. And keep in mind that Iran stands ready to use its might and influence against Sunni Arab regimes.

So you can just imagine how Saudi Arabia (a Sunni regime) feels about this situation. Israel will attack because it has no choice. Its intelligence is second to none (so it will know when a deliverable bomb has been developed); it has the conventional firepower to destabilize Iran’s nuclear program; and no country will act against Israel, not even Russia.

Russia is playing a dangerous diplomatic game by not supporting the U.S. effort to thwart Iran’s nuclear program. All nations should work together for a peaceful settlement of this crisis.

But Russia, for glory’s sake, may make a peaceful reconciliation impossible.

Sal Bommarito is a novelist and frequent visitor to Vail over the past 20 years.

Underground Tunnels Connect-Iran-Lebanon-Gaza – Defense/Middle East – Israel News – Israel National News.

by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

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(IsraelNN.com) The Iranian-Hizbullah-Hamas axis is connected through a common use of deep underground tunnels that hide Tehran’s nuclear facilities, where enriched uranium can be used to manufacture a nuclear weapon.

Iran recently admitted that it has been building a previously unknown reactor in the area of Qom, a confession that was made only after foreign intelligence experts reported on the new facility. The discovery that the plant is located inside a mountain duplicates Iran’s use of a network of tunnels to hide other parts of its growing nuclear infrastructure, according to The New York Times.

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The American policy of threatening sanctions and leaving open the diplomatic option has given Iran enough time to build the tunnel system, leaving behind the near-impossibility for the Western world, including Israel, to know the exact location of the nuclear plants and then be able to bomb them through underground rock and thick man-made concrete.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak last month implied that the Western world has put itself in a tight corner. He told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee that the Qom plant is “located in bunkers that cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack.”

One possible offensive weapon for the Western world is a tunnel-busting bomb, which still is in the development stage in the United States as the race against the nuclear clock counts down to zero. The American government has ordered a speed-up for delivery of the huge bomb, which contains more than two tons of explosives and weighs around 15 tons.

Iran’s of using a complex web of tunnels goes back more than a decade and may be the source for the construction of a similar network by Hizbullah in southern Lebanon and by Hamas under the border between Egypt and Gaza.

Underground bunkers and tunnels gave Hizbullah a decisive edge over the IDF in the Second Lebanon War, when soldiers were surprised to discover that bushes in southern Lebanon began to move. The vegetation was a camouflage that stood over the entrances to huge tunnels, which hid rocket launchers, missiles and full-fledged communications headquarters and escape routes.

Underground tunnels may have been used by Hizbullah in the kidnapping of soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev while the Israeli Air Force conducted aerial bombings in an effort to cut off above-ground escape routes.

The tunnel system was built since 2000, when Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who then was Prime Minister, ordered a sudden withdrawal of the IDF from the security zone in southern Lebanon, leaving Israel without an intelligence system to report on the terrorist organization’s massive preparations for war.

In southern Israel, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and the Hamas terrorist faction which succeeded it in elections nearly three years ago, have used hundreds of tunnels to smuggle into Gaza hundreds of tons of explosives as well as advanced anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, many of them made in Iran.

The technical knowledge and advances for building tunnels was advanced by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is a former transportation engineer and who has been personally involved in developing the tunneling industry in Iran. He has brought into the country huge machines that can quickly dig through hard rock, some times for civilian purposes, such as subways, and often for military purposes, such as nuclear reactors.

Some of the tunnels also may be bogus, a tactic to confuse would-be attacks on the nuclear reactors.

Report: Syria will support Hizbullah if Israel attacks | Middle East.

If Israel were to attack Hizbullah in Lebanon, Syria would respond and not sit idly by, the Katari Al Watan newspaper quoted Syrian sources as saying in a report published Wednesday.

A Hizbullah supporter holds a poster of Nasrallah during a rally to mark the third anniversary of the Second Lebanon War in a southern suburb of Beirut.
Photo: AP

The sources reportedly added that Damascus considered any threat to Lebanon’s security and stability as a threat to Syria’s security.

The paper reported that Damascus was worriedly taking notice of “Israeli deployment and maneuvers along the northern border,” and that Syrian leadership assessed Israel was planning a military operation in Lebanon in May.

US officials have notified the Lebanese government that if it does not manage to unarm Hizbullah, “Israel plans to invade the country all the way to Beirut,” the Syrian sources told the newspaper.

According to Al Watan, the sources said that “this is a message to both Syria and Lebanon.”

On Sunday, a senior Beirut-based Hamas official that his group would work side-by-side with Hizbullah in the next war against Israel, Army Radio reported.

“Israel should know that if it decides to attack, we won’t be able to sit on our hands, and we will assist our brothers against Israeli brutality,” the official said.

He was speaking at a memorial ceremony for two Hamas operatives who were killed in a Beirut explosion some two weeks ago.

Israel, Adept at War, Fails at Public Relations – Michael Hirsh – Newsweek.com.

Israel’s PR Problem

The Jewish state is good at many things, like war and technology, but inept at promoting itself. It needs to get better, soon.

Though he lacks all credibility—even in his own country these days—Western journalists never seem to tire of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The feeling is obviously mutual. As the ’00s wound down, the Iranian president sat smugly for yet another series of interviews with America’s media big shots. As always, he appeared eager for a fresh round of “debate” over Israel’s right to exist, 60-plus years after its founding. Featured on Larry King Live last fall, Ahmadinejad trotted out his favorite argument: even if the Holocaust happened—a fact he won’t quite concede—it wasn’t any justification for plunking down a Jewish state in the middle of Palestine in 1948. Why that place in particular, asked the former “university professor” (as Ahmadinejad referred to himself), sidestepping 4,000 years of history and the 1917 Balfour Declaration with a smirk. Still smiling, Ahmadinejad answered his own question: “Because the Holocaust happened, they said, and the Jewish people were oppressed, and the Jewish people need an independent government. And where in the world? In Palestine. And we’re saying, well, what exactly does this have to do with Palestine?” Larry King’s response? “Well, I understand that, intellectually understand that.” On to the next subject, right after this break.To be sure, few intelligent people have ever taken Ahmadinejad seriously. But by endlessly repeating such propaganda on prime time, courtesy of untutored TV anchors, high-profile enemies of Israel like the Iranian leader have been sowing seeds of existential doubt about Israel for far too long. And for far too long, Israel has been permitting this sort of nonsense to go unanswered in an effective way. It’s not that Israelis don’t respond to the propaganda; it is that Israelis tend to do so defensively and reluctantly, and therefore incompetently.

Even Benjamin Netanyahu, an eloquent English speaker who may be the most effective communicator ever to serve as Israeli prime minister, played into Ahmadinejad’s agenda when he devoted most of his speech at the U.N. last fall to defending his country against the Iranian leader’s “rants.” Bandying accusations with Ahmadinejad, he waved a copy of recently acquired original blueprints for Auschwitz and the actual minutes of the infamous 1942 Wannsee Protocol, which detailed the Nazi plan for the Final Solution. “Is this protocol a lie?” he asked. The same sort of querulous defensiveness characterized Israel’s response to the release of the U.N.’s Goldstone Report, which alleged atrocities by Israeli troops in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in late 2008. Israeli officials denounced the report as wrong and unfair but stinted on producing their own counterevidence of just how much effort their military put into avoiding the deaths of innocents in that extraordinarily difficult operation. (Among the evidence I’ve seen: video footage showing Hamas operatives snatching Palestinian children from the street and using them as shields to successfully prevent Israeli fire, thereby banking on the very humaneness that Israel’s critics

This won’t do. To survive in the long run, Israel must get better at fighting for itself on the “new battlefield” of world opinion, as a just-released study calls it. The only way to do so is to develop a long-term strategy and to go on the offensive. Israel is fiercely effective at taking the offensive militarily as well as technologically—as Dan Senor and Saul Singer point out in their new book, Start-Up Nation—but somehow it remains chronically inept at promoting its interests aggressively. The Israeli government continues to see this issue as a secondary matter of little substance. Its attitude seems to be: Why bother? The world isn’t with us anyway. Never will be.

Hence, during the 2006 Lebanon war, then-P.M. Ehud Olmert never bothered to hold a news conference explaining himself in English. And in the middle of the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, when Israeli soldiers had to uproot whole towns of anguished Israeli citizens, the government failed to develop a PR campaign to win global sympathy. “When I asked them about their ‘press strategy,’ they just sort of looked at me. They didn’t have one,” says Senor, who served as communications strategist for the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq. “Whether it’s tactics or strategy, they’re terrible at it. Their attitude is, they’re busy in a knife fight and don’t have the time.” On a recent trip to Israel, I heard exactly the same complaints about the government’s lack of PR savvy—even from some Israelis.

That dismissive attitude is no longer an option. Sometime in 2010 Israel may undertake the most sensitive military operation in its history—an attack on Iran—and if it does, it will need every ally it can get around the world. Beyond that, however, Israel’s future fight for its existence is far more likely to take place in the realm of world politics than regional military threats, and it has to gear up. Setting aside the Iran nuclear issue, Israel is militarily secure; no rival nation’s military can come close to challenging it, and the security fence as well as improved intelligence gathering in the West Bank have reduced suicide attacks to a new low. Politically, however, things are looking shakier than they have in a long time. With the Palestinians hopelessly divided, and Netanyahu resisting a total freeze on settlements, a negotiated two-state solution seems as remote as it ever has. Israel’s unilateral efforts to promote a separate Palestinian state—the heart of the strategy that led to the Gaza pullout—have failed irretrievably with Hamas’s violent takeover of the territory. U.S. envoy George Mitchell is headed back to the region shortly in a quixotic bid to restart talks with what remains of the Palestinian government. But in the absence of meaningful peace efforts, there is a new campaign emerging around the world to raise fundamental questions about Israel’s legitimacy as a purely Jewish state.

As the dream of peace appears to be dying, in other words, the old question at the heart of the West Bank occupation is alive and healthier than ever: how can Israel retain its Jewish identity if it intends to rule territorially over millions of Palestinians into the indefinite future? “The recent assaults on the state’s legitimacy threaten to push Israel towards the status of a pariah state and therefore pose a real threat,” wrote Eram Shayshon of Tel Aviv’s Reut Institute. The Israeli think tank has published a study concluding that Israel’s hardest struggle may now come in a war of words. The battlefields, the study says, will be “hubs of delegitimization” based in such cities as London, Toronto, Brussels, and Madrid.

Ahmadinejad-like challenges to Israel’s basic right to exist are beneath comment. But as long as all those Arabs and Palestinians remain in its midst, their political status unresolved, critics from all sides will keep questioning how long Israel can endure as both a Jewish state and a democracy. Why not organize a well-funded PR strategy, complete with eminent proxies (retired statesmen of the kind TV producers love to book), to begin to address those questions now? Go on the offensive: a case could be made that, as the only Mideast state actually approved by a vote of the U.N. General Assembly (Resolution 181 in November 1947, partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab sections; Jews embraced it, and Arabs went to war over it), Israel has the right under international law to retain its identity as a Jewish state. By contrast, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon were merely patched together by treaty bureaucrats at around the same time—hardly a global imprimatur.

Don’t simply parry, in other words; thrust as well. Strike preemptively for hearts and minds. Develop long-term strategies. Lay the groundwork for future challenges so that you’ve got camera-ready allies in high places, and the Larry Kings of the world are gradually and subtly “educated” in how to respond to obvious misstatements of fact. Plan and organize a lot more tours and private briefings for journalists and think tanks—the kind that Jewish groups and U.S. senators and congressmen now routinely get, to great effect. Embed foreign journalists and others in more operations. Take the doubters down into the archeological tunnels well below the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to show people, again and again, that the Jews were at the Western Wall first. You can then remind them that, for all the accusations of brutality and insensitivity hurled at Israel, Israelis still restrain themselves today from worshiping at the holiest site in Judaism—the “foundation stone” of the Ark of the Covenant 250 feet away from the wall—so as not to ruffle Muslim sensitivities (it sits underneath the more recently built Dome of the Rock).

Winning good will means an endless siege on world opinion, but Israel can no longer disdain the war that awaits it on this new battlefield. To survive, it must make better use of its talent and ingenuity to make its case.

IDF to blanket Israel with gas masks – Haaretz – Israel News.

The Home Front Command is planning to begin distribution of individual protection kits, i.e. gas masks, to every citizen starting in late February, according to a cabinet decision taken last week.

Originally, just over 60 percent of the population were to receive kits, but a decision to extend that protection to the whole country means the production of the necessary equipment has been stepped-up, and another billion shekels is needed to fund to the endeavor.

The plan is to distribute protective kits to each of the nearly eight million citizens (in line with a population estimate for 2013), over a period of three years.

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Debate over how to appropriately defend against chemical and biological warfare has been ongoing at both the political and professional levels for more than a decade. Both the defense establishment and the Israel Defense Forces have been involved in discussions.

Individual protection kits, in the form of gas masks, were used during the first Gulf War in 1991.

The country was again ordered to prepare kits for possible use during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Following that ground invasion, and as a result of the assumption that a large portion of the gas masks were no longer useful because of the amount of time that had passed since their production, a decision was made five years ago to collect them.

Two years ago, during the Olmert government, a decision was made to redistribute the gas masks, but money for the project was scarce. The Home Front Command estimated it could only provide 60 percent of the population with working gas masks, and a decision was made to provide them to the citizens of the areas most likely to come under attack: the Dan region and northern Israel, among others.

The Israel Postal Company, the national postal service, won a Defense Ministry tender to distribute the kits directly to homes starting in late February.

However, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and MK Matan Vilnai, who is manages the Home Front, argued recently that the planned distribution program – 4.5 million kits in three years – fell short. Legal advisers pointed out that it would be difficult to defend a policy that did not account for the personal safety of all citizens equally.

An additional billion shekels was needed, on top of the two already invested, to produce the necessary gas masks at the two factories. Five hundred million shekels will be provided by the Defense Ministry, by diverting funds from other projects, but it is still unclear who will provide the remainder.

Barak and Vilnai both made decisions based on strategic assessments which say there may be an escalation of tensions in the coming years, including the firing of rockets and missiles against Israel.

Extreme scenarios have Israel also being hit with chemical weapons.

Security sources told Haaretz that under such circumstances the state is obliged to behave thoroughly and address the improvement of security to the citizens seriously. Broadening the distribution network of the gas masks is part of the efforts to seriously improve the preparedness of the Home Front in emergencies.

“Many things have been done since the Second Lebanon War. The cabinet decision last week is another step in this direction,” a security source said. “It is not a sign of fear but of greater preparedness. Whoever is planning to fire missiles at Israel should know that we are ready to protect our population.”