WarSclerotic

DEBKA.

Ehud Barak

Everything was set for the United States to move speedily towards new, stiff sanctions against Iran for its nuclear intransigence, when Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak arrived in Washington February 25 to tie up the last ends with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
The official cover for the Israeli minister’s trip was a lecture at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He had come straight from a general staff evaluation of the just-concluded five-day military command exercise staged by the IDF’s Northern Command February 21-25.
This exercise was invaluable in that it tested operational communications at the command level in a potential four-front conflict in which Israel might come under attack from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Iran. Many of the dislocations of Israel’s military confrontation with Hizballah in 2006 arose from communications failures between the Chief of Staff and the regional commanders. The latest exercise focused on correcting that fault and improving the operational links between the chief of staff and northern command heads.
With Clinton, Barak went over Washington’s steps for expanding the sanctions regime against Iran, DEBKA-Net-Weekly sources in Washington report.
Their discussion was grounded in the assumption that the US and Israel were fully synchronized on this policy and that the White House had decided to put in place the punitive measures compiled by a special State Department task force for Iran – without necessarily waiting for the Security Council to act.

Clinton speaks with deceptive clarity

As part of the joint planning, Israel sent its Minister for Strategic Affairs, Moshe Yaalon and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer to Beijing to try and persuade the Chinese into letting sanctions go through the Security Council without opposition, in other words, to withhold their veto.
Fischer is a familiar figure to Chinese officials from his years at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. He was able to advise them authoritatively that Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon capacity would push the world’s oil prices up by at least 30-50 percent, to the serious detriment of the Chinese economy.
Clinton laid out for Barak’s benefit the five Iranian elements targeted by the new sanctions her department had drawn up, made stronger if the US were to be joined by Britain, France, Italy, Germany and additional European governments:
They are listed here by our Washington sources:
1. All Iranian banks would be boycotted by the United States and its European allies – and not just a selected number as at present.
2. Participating governments would prevent investments going through for Iran, mainly by withholding government and banking insurance from investors.
3. Should a pump break down in one of its oil or gas fields, Iran’s energy industry would not be able to find any Western supplier for new equipment or obtain credit for a purchase and so eventually break down.
4. All the Revolutionary Guards Corps’ military, technical, financial and economic arms and interests within Iran and abroad would be subject to restrictive measures. In addition, individual senior commanders and business executives would be blacklisted, be hit by travel bans, their assets frozen and their overseas operations curtailed.
5. Third-party governments and business companies engaged in “re-export” activities on Iran’s behalf would qualify for punitive measures. Such steps would target non-Iranian firms, especially in Dubai and other parts of the Gulf as well as the Far East, who shop on world markets for the goods required by Iran, some of which are proscribed under three rounds of former UN sanctions against Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

Israel asks the US to “listen with Jewish ears”

When the Israeli minister asked Secretary Clinton when the fourth sanctions regime would be enforced, she said as soon as the first week of March, DEBKA-Net-Weekly sources report. They would be introduced gradually and be fully in place, she hoped, by the end of the month.
Clinton was so clear and definite that Barak did not question her about whether the Obama administration intended waiting for the Security Council to act, or give up and go through with the measures unilaterally.
A few hours after seeing Clinton, the Israeli minister arrived at the Pentagon to meet Secretary Gates for a conversation that was different in content yet complementary to the talks with the secretary of state.
It fell under two main headings.
In the first, Barak presented a list of weapons systems Israel needs urgently to stand up to a four-front assault, chiefly different types of missiles and electronic systems, according to our military sources.
The minister complained that the list was still unapproved although it had been submitted to Washington three months ago and the sand in the hourglass for war was running out fast. He stressed that all the requested systems needed to be present in Israel before any flare-up of hostilities – or at least present at the US emergency depot in the Israeli Negev.
Gates promised to review the list and send his reply in the coming days.
In the second part of their conversation, the US and Israeli defense officials discussed differences over the virtues of armed force against Iran.

How far is Washington reconciled to a nuclear-armed Iran?

Referring to the internal debate in the Obama administration, Barak said he was aware of a school of thought developing in Washington which said America could live with a nuclear Iran. He used the term ‘”mitigate and contain a nuclear Iran’. As they talked, the minister spoke of a “semi-nuclear Iran,” in reference to the willingness of parts of the administration to accept an Iran able to build a nuclear weapon but not yet having done so.
I do not share this willingness, said Barak. I am therefore asking you (Gates) for one favor: Ask your president to instruct your Iran experts and analysts to listen to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad “with Jewish ears,” so as to understand what is going through Israeli heads when they hear him.
He made the request on Feb. 25, little knowing that three days later, on Feb. 28, the Iranian president would lay bare his anti-Israel doctrine in the mostly shockingly vicious anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli terms, beyond even the preaching of the most extreme anti-Semitic and radical Muslim circles.
(More about this in separate items on US Syrian policy and Ahmadinejad’s purpose in Damascus)
Gates offered no direct answer to Barak’s appeal.
They parted with a decision for Barak to return to Washington for another meeting with Gates at the end of March, by which time the fourth round of US and European sanctions should have gone into effect.

Uranium is important, but not the ultimate issue

Taking that as a given, Barak delivered his lecture at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, sharing with his audience for the first time certain revealing details of Iran’s military nuclear program.
Our sources have obtained the lecture’s pre-edited content:
I think that the last report of Amano, the new head of the IAEA, is highly important because it shows that the international agency can, if the will is there, call a spade a spade and stop all these verbal gymnastics about what the Iranians are really doing.
If they develop neutron sources, if they make an implosion, experiment on heavy metals with an array or arabesques of simultaneously activated detonators and if they are working so intensively on two hemispheres with (a sizeable quantity there ?), it means that they are not just trying to create a Manhattan Project-like crude nuclear device. They are trying to jump directly into the second- or second-and-a-half generation of nuclear warheads that could be installed on top of ground-to-ground missiles with ranges that will cover not just Israel but Moscow or Paris for that purpose.
And I think that we can like it or not. I believe that most of us do not like it, but we cannot close our eyes to what’s really happened in such a delicate corner of the world. If Iran will not be stopped from moving there, it will reach at a certain point nuclear military capability and one can close his eyes and see what it means.
A nuclear Iran means the end of any nonproliferation regime because Saudi Arabia and probably another two or three members of the Middle Eastern community will feel compelled to reach nuclear capability as well. And it will open the door for any third-rate dictator who has a nuclear ambition to understand that if he is strong enough mentally to defy any kind of threats from the world, he will reach nuclear military capability.

Clinton’s shocker en route to Buenos Aires

Barak’s message was tailored to his audience of key political, intelligence and military figures in the US establishment, some of whom are active in Iranian policy-making. He was telling them that “you” may be fixated on the uranium enrichment controversy but, however important this issue may be, it is less critical for the big picture of Iran’s nuclear activities. What really counts today is that Iran has moved on to developing neutron sources, creating an implosion, and carrying out experiments on heavy metals with an array or arabesque of simultaneously activated detonators – these are the truly important issues.
Upon his return home, Sunday, February 28 to Israel, Barak lost no time in briefing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on his Washington talks. They agreed that, as far as Israel was concerned, American and possibly European sanctions were finally on track.
They were startled two days later to hear Clinton telling reporters during her flight to Buenos Aires:
“We are moving expeditiously and thoroughly in the Security Council,” she said. “I can’t give you an exact date, but I would assume sometime in the next several months.”
Israeli leaders realized with a sinking feeling that the Obama administration had no intention of launching any tough sanctions any time soon, without or without European cooperation, except in the unlikely event that they could survive Russian-Chinese opposition intact at the UN Security Council.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly sources note that this is not the Obama administration’s first success in stringing Israel along. In the winter of 2009, the White House promised Netanyahu and Barak sanctions would go into effect by the end of December.
The end of December came and went without any real progress towards sanctions – then as now. US officials insist that the administration is standing by its sanctions policy despite difficulties with a Security Council motion. They have no answer when asked why the US is not going ahead unilaterally.

US pressuring Israel not to attack Iran – Arab News.

By BARBARA FERGUSON | ARAB NEWS

Published: Mar 4, 2010 10:53 PM Updated: Mar 4, 2010 10:53 PM

WASHINGTON: Concerned that Israel may launch a surprise attack against Iran, the US has increased pressure on Tel Aviv while extending its deadline for stronger sanctions against Tehran.

American officials said this week that sanctions, both international and domestic, which were previously expected by February, would not be achieved until late April. If indeed a UN resolution on international sanctions is passed sometime in April, the decision will be in place in time for the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, scheduled for May.

Meanwhile, Obama has sent high-ranking officials to Tel Aviv, in efforts to reassure Israelis that sanctions against Iran are being put into place, and urging Israel not to launch an airstrike aimed at Iran’s nuclear sites.

Vice President Joe Biden will visit Jerusalem as part of his Middle East tour next week of March. Biden is the most senior American official from the Obama administration to visit Israel. His trip tops several weeks of high-profile visits that have included Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, National Security Adviser Jim Jones and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Most of these officials kept their talks with Israelis behind closed doors. But Mullen took the unusual step of convening a press conference upon his arrival in Jerusalem on Feb. 14 and sending a clear message to the Israeli public: An Israeli strike against Iran would “be a big, big, big problem for all of us, and I worry a great deal about the unintended consequences of a strike.”

Some visits, however, had a much lower profile. Such a trip was the one the CIA’s director, Leon Panetta, made to Israel in late January, and another was the visit of senior Israeli defense officials to Washington a week later.

“Netanyahu is playing poker and hiding his most important card: the Israel Defense Forces’ true capabilities to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations,” Haaretz said Thursday.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who is functioning as a super-adviser to Netanyahu for national security affairs, told reporters this week that “the clock for the Iranian regime’s downfall is ticking.”

Between the key players:  Iran, Israel and the US, Obama, holds the weakest hand, Haaretz noted.  “This is so because of domestic political weakness and because he can’t seriously threaten (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad or Netanyahu. Obama doesn’t want to attack Iran himself and will find it hard to restrain Israel at the moment of truth.”

“Currently, the feeling in the US is that you can no longer count on Israel to see the broader picture and you can no longer take Israel’s cooperation for granted,” Yoram Peri, director of the Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland, told reporters. “Israel’s politics became more extreme, and its sense of besiegement is stronger, and that gave power to more extreme voices in the country’s leadership.”

Meanwhile, Iran came under renewed attack this week for its decision to make a higher grade of enriched uranium, a move that weapons experts say would dramatically shorten the country’s path to nuclear weapons.

The United States and several European allies took turns denouncing Iran’s behavior at a board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, and a US diplomat warned that new UN sanctions may be inevitable.

“Iran seems determined to defy, obfuscate and stymie,” said Ambassador Glyn Davies, head of the U.S. delegation to the UN nuclear watchdog.

A highly critical report on Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency last week has led to stepped-up calls from the United States and Europe for a fourth round of UN sanctions against Tehran. The West still faces a strenuous battle to win over China, which has insisted on the need for further negotiations aimed at persuading the Islamic republic to place its nuclear program under greater international control.

Despite the diplomatic assault, the prospects for securing international support for tough sanctions against Iran remain uncertain. An attempt by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to win Brazil’s backing appeared to fizzle Wednesday; after a meeting with Clinton in Brasilia, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told a news conference it was not wise “to push Iran into a corner.”

On Capitol Hill, legislators are also at odds on the Iran-Israel conundrum.  Some believe that peaceful diplomacy is the best way for the United States to deal with Iran and its potential development as a nuclear power, while others say Iran wouldn’t hesitate to use a nuclear weapon on Israel and perhaps elsewhere.

Hamas, Hezbollah Could Push Israel To War | AVIATION WEEK.

By David Eshel
Tel Aviv

Israel is always on high alert when it comes to the potential for war with its neighbors, particularly the two groups viewed as proxies of Iran and Syria: Hamas and Hezbollah. Though neither seems particularly eager for a full-blown conflict with Israel at present, defense analysts see a number of developments that could lead to another war with one or both, perhaps as soon as this year.

One reason for this view is that Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon continue to be supplied with ordnance from Iran. Thousands of Hezbollah rockets are poised to strike Israel again, though for almost four years the border between Lebanon and northern Israel has been remarkably quiet. One reason may be that 11,000 soldiers from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and 15,000 Lebanese army troops are more effective at keeping Hezbollah’s Shiite militia at bay. The tranquility may be illusory—Tehran and Damascus could encourage Hamas and Hezbollah to attack Israel in furtherance of their regional aims. Iran has also threatened retaliation if Israel attacks its nuclear program; and with popular unrest a constant threat to the leadership in Tehran, a war with Israel, fought through Hamas or Hezbollah, could be one way of diverting Iranian public attention away from the regime.

Other developments are raising tensions as well. In the year since the Gaza incursion called Operation Cast Lead ended, Hamas has made a major effort to restore its internal security forces. The military/terrorist wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has been rebuilt to its previous strength with its military capabilities substantially expanded. The smuggling of weapons into Gaza has accelerated beyond expectations, in spite of Israel and Egypt sealing their respective borders with the area and Israeli interception of arms shipments at sea and in Africa. Much of this weaponry originates in Iran, whose rulers are eager to extend their regional influence to the Mediterranean. Restoring Hamas’s arsenal with advanced ordnance is a major part of Iran’s strategy of targeting Israel from Lebanon and Gaza.

The Hamas weapons inventory has grown enormously in the past year. Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet internal security agency, told the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee last month that Hamas’s current capabilities are “better than they were on the eve of Operation Cast Lead.” Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups “will continue to grow stronger in 2010,” he added. Diskin said Hamas will continue efforts to smuggle rockets into Gaza that have a range exceeding 50 km. (31 mi.), along with “antiaircraft missiles, antitank missiles and . . . other . . . weapons.” Last November, the head of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, told the committee that Hamas had conducted a successful trial launch of a rocket with a 60-km. range, which could endanger the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.

Writing in the Beirut daily newspaper Al-Akhbar, Ibrahim al-Amin, who is affiliated with an Islamic militant group, warned that Hamas and other Palestinian factions have been training for a year with antiaircraft missiles and with large explosives that could blow up an armored vehicle the size of a Merkava tank—a 65-ton vehicle. According to al-Amin, the groups also practiced firing medium- and long-range missiles, as well as targeting Israeli communities “up to 100 km.” from Gaza. Israeli experts believe this last claim is, however, overstated. Nevertheless, with more accurate rockets, Hamas could attack airfields in southern Israel, which they attempted but failed to do during Operation Cast Lead. Hamas is also believed to have acquired Russian RPG-29 antitank grenade launchers and Kornet antitank missiles, which were used successfully by Hezbollah against Merkava tanks in the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

Adding to these concerns are signs that another war could be triggered by the Al Qaeda offshoots that are spreading across southern Gaza. Worries about Al Qaeda are not new in Gaza. Shin Bet noted in its 2009 annual report that operatives from a range of groups in the global jihad movement have appeared in the region during the past year. Dozens of terrorists have joined new military factions in Gaza such as the Salafist group Jaljalat (thunder in Arabic) and Jund Ansarullah. Far from welcoming them, Hamas leaders are aware of the threat these groups pose to their control, and have taken brutal measures to suppress them. Tensions climaxed last July when Hamas clashed with global jihad operatives who were using a Rafah mosque for a rally. During the battle, many global jihad commanders were killed or wounded. Nevertheless, the incident did not prevent survivors from continuing their clandestine activities, and the movement is taking hold among the masses in Gaza.

A senior White House terrorism expert warned recently that the Al Qaeda networks in Gaza could become as dangerous and menacing as the jihadist strongholds in Yemen. This threat may also have prompted Egypt to crack down on the Gaza border. Jihadi access to the Sinai, which Egypt controls, would not only imperil the peninsula, but might well spill into Egypt, emboldening the antigovernment Muslim Brotherhood.

While Hamas has virtually stopped firing Qassam rockets into Israel since Operation Cast Lead, the situation along the border remains explosive. The Israeli offensive severely damaged Hamas’s military, security and administrative operations in Gaza. Civilian infrastructure is virtually nonexistent, and much of the housing remains in rubble. The Gaza Strip is almost entirely sealed by Israel, and lately by Egypt, which is building the deeply dug “Mubarak Wall” along the Rafah border, formerly the Philadelphi Route. The objective is to severely disrupt the smuggling carried out in an extensive network of tunnels under the border. The wall is formidable, composed of bomb-resistant steel that is virtually impossible to dismantle or destroy, at least by smugglers. Though it will not end tunneling, it is expected to stem most of the smuggling, which has been a key source of arms and revenue for Hamas.

Cairo also plans to build a harbor along its sea border with Gaza, for use by navy patrols to monitor the Egyptian side of the Rafah shore. The harbor dock would be 10 meters (33 ft.) deep and extend for 25 meters from shore. The harbor would further restrict Palestinian fishermen who are already subject to actions by the Israeli naval blockade.

Although Israel maintains a strict naval exclusion zone off Gaza, Palestinian militants recently launched a new seaborne weapon at Israel’s beaches—floating barrels filled with explosives and attached to foam buoys, which resemble those in use by Gaza fishermen. Militant groups in Gaza have claimed responsibility for the barrel barrage, saying it was in retaliation for the murder of a Hamas leader in Dubai. The militants accused Israel of planning the killing; Israel responded that it had no part in the murder, though recent evidence suggests otherwise.

The idea of floating bombs to shore may go back to January 2002, when a ship filled with a load of weapons for Gaza was seized by Israel in the Red Sea. Naval experts discovered floatable waterproof containers on board that were made in Iran. Equipped with mechanisms that keep them submerged at a specific depth, the containers were intended to drift underwater with the current toward shore out of sight of Israeli patrol boats. The containers were big enough to transport large weapons that could not be smuggled through the tunnels. The tactic may be continuing: Container ships from Iran have been sighted in the eastern Mediterranean for months. Israel and the U.S. Navy have apprehended some, but others could have reached Lebanon and Syria. Dropping the containers beyond the exclusion zone off Gaza, they could have drifted submerged toward shore, escaping detection by Israeli radar.

The IDF is preparing for the possibility that in a conflict with Hamas, it will be ordered to retake the Philadelphi Route, focusing on Rafah, the lifeline of Hamas’s arms-smuggling activities. Plans for such an operation have been worked out and will likely include long-term deployment of several units in Rafah, where troops will go house-to-house searching for tunnels and destroying them.

Such a plan was presented to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government ahead of Operation Cast Lead. At the time, the government deemed the operation too costly in terms of casualties. In a recent interview with Israel Radio, Maj. Gen. (ret.) Yom-Tov Samia, former head of the IDF’s southern command, hinted at the possibility that the army will retake the Philadelphi Route, saying, “We must create a situation in which Hamas runs out of oxygen.”

Many experts believe that Israel should have targeted Rafah during Operation Cast Lead instead of deploying troops to Gaza City, a move that might have kept the threat of future conflicts farther in the future.

Photo: Israel Defense Forces