WarSclerotic

IRAN: Russia backtracks on S-300 missile systems for Tehran | Babylon & Beyond | Los Angeles Times.

After a mysterious delay and a public challenge by Tehran, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared to backtrack on Russia’s pledge to supply S-300 surface-to-air missile systems to Iran, telling  Moscow’s official state news agency on Wednesday that Russia “has never taken actions that could cause the destabilization of certain regions.”

“There are issues that need to be resolved before [the contract] is executed,” he said, referring to a deal that was signed in 2005. “We hope that all countries supplying arms, and not only defensive ones but also those that are killing our peacekeepers, will treat this issue in the same way.”

Russia has been under pressure by the U.S. and Israel not to sell weapons to Iran, which has been accused of supplying arms to militant groups abroad as well as posing an existential threat to Israel with its nuclear program.

The S-300 system is capable of hitting aircraft up to 90 miles away and tracking 100 targets at a time, and could be used in case of an Israeli air attack on Iranian nuclear sites.

But last week, Russia announced it would delay the shipment due to “technical problems” just one day after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow.

Lavrov’s latest comments suggest Russia is considering canceling the contract altogether rather than be seen as supplying weapons to Iran as the world powers contemplate stricter sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

The Iranians are losing patience and have begun to lash out at Russia in the press.

On Feb. 21, the reformist Iranian newspaper Ettemad ran a report under the headline “Russia’s contradictory remarks on delivery of S-300 to Iran,” in which the paper accused Russia of delaying the delivery for political reasons.

“We are not a nation to sit with fingers crossed if Russia fails to meet its obligations,” Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of Parliament’s Foreign Policy and National Security Committee, was quoted as saying Wednesday.

“We will resolve our problem by mastering the technology to produce S-300 missiles,” he told the Mehr news agency

The Russian-Iranian missile stalemate comes on the heels of a controversy over Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defense system, which critics say is ineffective and costly.

—Meris Lutz in Beirut

Barak in US to push Iran sanctions.

Photo by: Ariel Hermoni / Defense Ministry

By YAAKOV LAPPIN
24/02/2010 03:29

TAU institute: Teheran a year from nuclear bomb, if it wants.

The decisive factor – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Shoah memory will prompt Israel to strike Iran should all else fail

Ronen Bergman

The CIA man responded: That would have prompted both Russia and the United States to come out against you.

Mossad chief: After the UN inspectors were kicked out we entered a new phase. You need to know that this is your problem and not ours.

CIA man: Give us a good reason to stand by you. For example, if they fire at you.

Mossad chief: That’s not the point.

CIA man: If you attack, the US will deploy forces to defend the attacked state.

This meeting may be held next week, in the wake of information recently received by Israel regarding the major progress in Iran’s nuclear project. However, the meeting described above was in fact held 43 years ago between Mossad Chief Meir Amit and the CIA’s Israel representative John Hadden. Ultimately, the Mossad director headed to the US and received what he perceived as a green light to embark on the offensive that later became known as the Six-Day War.

The question of the green light which the US gives or doesn’t give Israel has been at the top of Israeli governments’ agenda ever since then in respect to several events. It would be reasonable to assume that the green light will not be given this time around.

So will Israel strike? Intelligence and government officials in most countries believe that Israel will not be striking. Some believe that should Prime Minister Netanyahu toy with the idea, such strike could be averted by exerting massive pressure on Israel.

Never again

Yet the European assumptions are fundamentally flawed and reflect deep lack of understanding of the collective Israeli psyche and Israel’s decision-making process.

It’s easy to come up with weighty arguments against a strike. The issue of damaging Israel-US ties is not the only one. In operational terms, this would be a highly complex strike (hidden sites, when even the known ones located underground and protected by missiles, the possibility of pilots being taken captive, etc.)

Moreover, even a successful bombing will not erase the knowledge stored in the minds of the nuclear project’s engineers, who operate in a country with a highly developed technological infrastructure. And we haven’t even mentioned the Iranian response, European fury, and the possibility of our ties with Russia and China being severed.

All of the above are serious considerations, yet in my view they will take the second, third, and fourth spot in Netanyahu’s priority list. This would be true for any other Israeli prime minister. The first and decisive factor will be Never Again. Never again will the Jewish people sustain another Holocaust.

One cannot understand Israelis and Israeliness without understanding the extent to which the Shoah’s memory beats in the hearts and minds of every person in this country, not as distant history, but rather as something that could happen again tomorrow.

In the last interview he submitted to in his life (and one which I had the honor to hold,) physicist Professor Yuval Ne’eman, among Israel’s top scientists and a partner in its nuclear project, recalled a conversation he had with David Ben-Gurion. During the meeting, the prime minister told Ne’eman that his most terrible nightmare is that he brought the survivors of the Holocaust from Europe to Israel only for them to sustain a second Shoah here.

Hence, the factor that will tilt the balance is the same one that prompted Prime Minister Begin to bomb the Iraqi reactor, and the same one that prompted the bombing of the Syrian reactor. This consideration is about not letting a state that calls for Israel’s extermination to acquire the means to do so. Should Israel receive information that Iran is close enough, too close, to a nuclear bomb, and should all efforts to thwart this prospect fail, PM Netanyahu – but also any other Israeli prime minister – will be taking one decision only.

The way to prevent the bombing is not through pressure on Israel. It won’t make a difference. Rather, the only way is to impose effective sanctions on Iran, so that Tehran realizes that it is precisely the continuation of the nuclear project that threatens the regime’s stability and very existence.

By C. Hart

via American Thinker: The Marriage of Terrorism and Nuclear Capability.

By C. Hart

Iran using Hezbollah as diversion from nukes – Haaretz – Israel News.

Does a Christian Phalange leader in Lebanon know something that Israeli newspaper readers do not know? In a statement published in Lebanon, Dr. Samir Ja’ja claims that Hezbollah may involve his country in a war in the near future. He also warned that the Lebanese home front is far less prepared than its Israeli counterpart for war and therefore the civilian population in his country will bear the brunt of any future round of fighting.

The unusual statements by Ja’ja, who is affiliated with the Christian-Sunni camp led by Prime Minister Saad Hariri, is only one of a series recently published in Lebanon that discuss a possible conflagration along the border with Israel.

His statements were published yesterday while a Saudi newspaper reported that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is due to arrive in Damascus for meetings with his Syrian counterpart, Bashar Assad, but also with Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and the Hamas politburo chief in Damascus, Khaled Meshal.

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Last week Ahmadinejad warned publicly that Israel was planning to attack Syria and Lebanon and vowed that Iran would stand by them. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to deny there was any truth to such warnings.

The reports of tension between Israel, Lebanon and Syria are coming at a time when there is a daily torrent of assessments, threats and forecasts concerning the progress of Iran’s nuclear program. The two subjects are linked. In view of the tension in the north, there had been consideration of possibly delaying a visit to the U.S. by Defense Minister Ehud Barak. In the end, Barak decided yesterday to travel to Washington and New York, where he will meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, among others. Syria and Lebanon will be at the center of his agenda in the U.S., as will the efforts to block Iran’s nuclear program and restarting the peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

So, what is happening on the northern border? Ahmadinejad warns of one scenario several days after U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones warns of an opposite likelihood. Iran, Jones argued, may try to divert international public opinion from the Obama administration’s initiative to step up sanctions against it through an attack on Israel via Hezbollah or Hamas. Along with the Iranian connection, Hezbollah is also providing cause for heightened Israeli alertness. In his speech last week Nasrallah reiterated his view on the balance of terror. He claimed he will attack Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion International Airport in response to Israeli attacks on Beirut and Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure.

A possible trigger to such confrontation, besides paranoia, is that Iran’s encouraging its partners is linked to the delivery of arms. Israel believes, in retrospect, it failed when it did not focus its efforts on preventing the transfer of arms from Iran and Syria to Hezbollah following the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006. UN Security Council Resolution 1701 may have declared an arms embargo, but it was never enforced along the border between Lebanon and Syria.

GOC Northern Command Gadi Eizenkot recently said in a lecture at Tel Aviv University that the Israel Defense Forces’ working assumption is that the advanced arms in the Syrian arsenal will also eventually make their way to Hezbollah.

Several times during the past two years Israel knew how to draw red lines, such as when it suspected Syria was about to make the mistake of passing on dangerous weapons. It’s possible the issue of red lines will reemerge in the near future.