Caroline Glick :: Time to plan for war.

Looming specter of conflict.

Al-Ahram Weekly | Region | War, this summer?.

War, this summer?

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According to Clinton, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is destabilising the Middle East. Meanwhile, Hizbullah’s acquisition of new weapons, especially long-range missiles, would threaten Israel’s security and destabilise the region. The smuggling of weapons to Lebanon was a violation of UN decisions, she said, referring to UN Resolution 1701 issued in August 2006.

Clinton’s remarks came only days after Israeli President Shimon Peres accused Syria of delivering Scud missiles to Hizbullah. Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, speaking in Washington last Thursday, said that Lebanon would be accountable for any future flare-up in the region. Addressing the American Jewish Committee, Barak said: “We make it clear once again that we see the government of Lebanon, and behind it the government of Syria, [as] responsible for what happens now in Lebanon. And the government of Lebanon will be the one to be held accountable if it deteriorates.”

The most vocal warning, however, came from Jordan where officials warned that the impasse in the peace process could lead to war by summer. Barak tried to play down the peril during his visit to Washington, stating that there is “no need” for war.

Still the accusations to Syria and Hizbullah are unlikely to go away, and they are taking a toll on Syrian-US relations. The US Congress has suspended the sending of an ambassador to Damascus after the US Department of Defense issued a report saying that Hizbullah has been armed to the level of 2006, or even more.

Remarkably, Israel is denying Syria’s claims that it is preparing for war. The denial is quite interesting, for in the past Israel used to encourage such claims, for they helped throw fear in the hearts of its enemies. The assumption back then was that Israel was able to choose the time of battle. This is no longer true. Israel seems to be apprehensive of war. It seems to recognise that things are different now. Iran, Syria and Hizbullah, taken together, seem to provide a counterbalance for Israel’s military might. Either that, or Israel is trying to divert attention from its own war preparations.

What is going on? In particular, what is the significance of Jordan’s warning of potential war? Is there another path other than war to be explored? Or have the roads leading to peace been blocked? Currently, it seems that hurdles are blocking the way in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

A SERIOUS CONUNDRUM: The general situation in the region is one of tension and ambiguity, and this goes for all major players. What is worse is that there are no initiatives or efforts made to defuse tensions or explore new solutions. It is hard, given current circumstances, to challenge the Jordanian claim that the current impasse is an open invitation for war.

Syrian-Israeli negotiations are at a standstill and unlikely to resume in the near future. Right now, the Syrians and the Israelis disagree on the nature of mediation. The previous mediator, Turkey, is no longer on good terms with the Israelis. The French offered to step in, but the Syrians turned them down. And the US, which has failed to bring the Palestinians and Israelis together, doesn’t seem to qualify for mediation between Syria and Israel.

Few expect the deadlock in negotiations between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel to end while the current Israeli government is in office. Reports concerning the early resumption of negotiations are hardly credible. In fact, Israel is engaging in brinkmanship and escalating its measures against the Palestinians. If anything, Israel’s attempts to Judaise Jerusalem may unleash a third Intifada.

Meanwhile, the PA seems to have run out of options. Any further concessions to the Israelis may undermine its remaining credibility. The deadlock is not expected to end anytime soon. One no longer hears of any mediation by the Europeans or initiatives by the Quartet, and the much-touted Moscow conference couldn’t get off the ground.

As for the conflict between Hizbullah and Israel, things are coming to a head. Hizbullah continues to ally itself with Iranian policy, thus making itself a player of some importance in the region. And as it continues to challenge Israel, Hizbullah’s regional status is likely to grow.

Hizbullah says that it is keeping Israel at bay, for it wouldn’t allow the latter to attack Lebanon with impunity. Still, observers note that Israel is constantly provoking Hizbullah and Lebanon. Israeli warplanes keep flying over Lebanon and Israeli troops make repeated incursions into Lebanese territories.

In Gaza, the situation seems to be getting worse. After the recent war, a period of relative calm ensued, with the Israelis staying out and the Palestinians refraining from firing rockets inside Israel. Now the Israelis are back to making incursions into Gaza and the Palestinians are firing rockets once more. Tensions are growing steadily, and there doesn’t seem to be a likely solution in the horizon.

THE MISSILES CRISIS: Tensions are growing throughout the region. It is no longer a situation in which one country or one crisis is involved. Trouble in one area seems to be feeding trouble in another as the whole region descends into a feeding frenzy of instability.

For instance, the crisis of the Scud missiles came to exacerbate an already volatile situation. As Israel accused Syria of sending Scud missiles to Hizbullah, a much-awaited improvement in Syrian-US relations came to a sudden halt. One has to keep in mind that it was the Pentagon — not Israel — that first warned of the growing military power of Hizbullah.

The Pentagon said that Hizbullah had built up its military preparedness to the same level it had before the 2006 war. For all the talk about tensions between the Israelis and the White House, the Pentagon seems to be saying all the right things for Tel Aviv.

What the US and Israel are saying now is not just that Syria is giving Scuds to Hizbullah; they are saying there is a limit to what weapons Hizbullah is allowed to have. No wonder Hizbullah’s secretary- general is getting even more vitriolic than usual about Israel.

Syria has its own interpretation of what’s going on. Its officials believe that the accusations are but pretext for an attack. Indeed, there is a similarity between the accusations now being levelled against Syria, in terms of its supplying Hizbullah with weapons, and the accusations made about Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which was used as pretext to attack Iraq. Do we hear the same media drums? Do we see the same diplomatic wheels in motion?

The Jordanians warn that the current impasse in all tracks of the peace process may lead to war by summer. What is especially scary about this prediction is that it comes complete with timing: this summer.

And there is no denying that preparations for war are underway. Israel is conducting drills all the time, and Iran is not to be outdone. Hardly a month passes by without Iran declaring new manoeuvres on land and at sea. The Iranians are not acting on impulse. They have already received implicit threats from the US president and in January the US Department of Defense issued a memorandum detailing ways of dealing with the Iranian nuclear programme.

A few months ago, both the Russian president and his army chief made remarks to the effect that the US and Israel were planning for war on Iran. And they voiced fear that the conflict may turn into a nuclear war in which millions may perish.

Is war a definite possibility? Or is it all a show of multilateral brinkmanship? Is it perhaps that everyone is testing the nerves of their opponents, but no one really plans to go to war? And how long can this go on before someone loses patience and fires the first shot?

A SLIPPERY PATH: The region is sitting on a powder keg. We may not have war yet, but there is a flurry of intelligence operations going on in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, with buildings being blown up and men shot in the streets.

Meanwhile, the entire region is obsessed with war, not peace. Politicians speak of war every day, and the Iranians and Israelis are training as hard as they can for a possible military showdown. The propaganda keeps raining down on us non-stop, the recent bout involving the charge that the Syrians are smuggling missiles to Hizbullah.

A war wouldn’t be devoid of motive. The Israelis fear that they may lose the military superiority they equate with their own survival. The Israelis are ready to go to war to prevent another axis from rising in the region. They fear that the Iran-Syria-Hizbullah axis may match Israel’s power and thus end its long-held sway over the region. For years the US made sure that Israel was the region’s top military power, and now this guarantee may be coming to an end.

A review of all Israeli wars in the region shows that Israel only fights pre-emptive wars. Such wars are meant to prevent any Arab country from growing in military power to the point to which it may challenge Israel’s military superiority.

This situation is becoming more untenable with every passing day. Israel wants superiority, wants to prevent any country in the region from obtaining nuclear parity, and is ready to go to war to remain the region’s top power.

ANOTHER WAR: Today, Israel is afraid that it may not be able to win a war as convincingly as it used to do. Things are changing, as the recent meeting in Damascus between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar Al-Assad, and Hassan Nasrallah suggests. So Israel now wants to fight alongside Western armed forces, just as it did back in 1956. No longer is Israel willing to go it alone, as it did in 1967 and 1973.

In fact, Israel is quite nervous about its receding power. It may want to go to war alongside the US, but that’s not as good of an option as it seems. If the US participates in a war, everything has to be done the way the US chooses, and with primary concern given to US interests.

We need to take the statements Secretary Clinton made at the American Jewish Committee very seriously. She made it clear that the US agrees with Israel’s assessment of the situation. What this means is that the Americans may consent to a regional war that may alter the regional balance of power. Pro- Israeli diplomacy doesn’t seem to be doing much to change that balance. Therefore, military action cannot be ruled out.

Iran hosts dinner seeking to avert UN sanctions – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Japan’s UN ambassador says after rare meeting, ‘We had very frank exchange of ideas…We want Iran to work harder’

Associated Press

Shalev: Iran sanctions will be ‘diluted’.

Envoy to UN fumes at “dirty hand” in Hizbullah arms supply.

NEW YORK – Sanctions against Iran are likely to be a “watered down” and “diluted” version of the punitive measures Israel envisioned, according to Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gabriela Shalev.

With a month-long conference on nuclear nonproliferation under way at the United Nations, Shalev, in an interview this week at her office near the UN, defended Israel’s refusal to accede to the nonproliferation treaty and focused on the Iranian threat.

“Unlike our expectations and hopes, the sanctions are not going to be crippling… They’re not even going to be biting,” she said. “They’re going to be moderate, watered down, diluted.”

But Shalev added, “They will be achieved under the umbrella of the P5, the five permanent members of the Security Council, which is going to be a big achievement.”

During the 50-minute interview, Shalev reflected on a difficult year that saw Lebanon join the Security Council, Israel slammed by the Goldstone report, and escalating pressure to crack down on the Iranian nuclear program.

Indeed, the US came into the NPT review conference pushing for sanctions against Iran following months of negotiating with other members of the Security Council.

“China is still trying the diplomatic track,” Shalev noted.

As negotiations continue, several non-permanent members of the council are likely to raise objections, including Lebanon, Turkey and Brazil. Shalev said she hoped that once a consensus was achieved on moderate sanctions, the US and European countries would pass their own sanctions.

Israel hoped for punitive measures sooner, she said, as early as February. Now, she hopes they will be announced this month or next. Of course, there is the question of whether Iran will cooperate.

“This is going to be the fourth round of sanctions, and until now [Iran] was mocking the international community,” she said. “Ahmadinejad is trying to divert the attention of the international world, especially the United Nations, to other issues, while of course at the same time, we know he is developing nuclear capabilities.”

I met Shalev at her office, where the former law professor was listening to classical music in the background, on the second day of the month-long NPT Review Conference. Only three countries are not party to the treaty, including India, Pakistan and Israel, which is widely believed to possess a nuclear arsenal. By the start of the conference, Arab states were pushing for the implementation of a 1995 resolution establishing a nuclear-free Middle East. The resolution calls on Israel to sign the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state.

However, Shalev said Israel’s accession was not the main issue; rather, it was a distraction from the Iranian threat.

“The global threat now, not only to Israel and not only to the Middle East, is the Iranian race to reach nuclear capabilities,” she asserted. “Once the Middle East will be an area where there will not be any threat to Israel… then we can re-discuss the NPT.”

Days after our meeting, proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinians were set to be announced. But several weeks back, there were rumors at the UN that the Palestinians might unilaterally declared statehood. Shalev said unequivocally that such a move would be a “big mistake.”

“The only way to reach an agreement and some kind of peace in the Middle East is through bilateral negotiations,” she said. “At the end, we have to sit together with our Palestinian colleagues, neighbors, friends and reach an agreement.”

Indeed, she characterized the proximity talks as a “corridor” heading toward bilateral negotiations, thanks to US intervention.

“The US is a good friend, and I think the US is now perceived, not only by us, but also by the Palestinians, as an honest broker,” she said.

Since Netanyahu’s government came to power, there has been a stalemate, she went on.

“Proximity talks is probably the only way to bring the Palestinians to the table,” she said, and quoted an Arabic saying: “In the mere movement there is a blessing.”

Yet recent weeks have seen an escalation in regional tension, particularly with Syria and Lebanon.

“Regarding Syria and Lebanon, we see the dirty hand of Iran, which we know for sure is supplying arms, weapons, missiles to Hizbullah via Syria,” Shalev said. The fact that Lebanon, where Hizbullah members are part of the government, is a member of the Security Council is nearly unbelievable, she said. “We are very, very concerned.”

But she dismissed the notion of a third war with Lebanon. She paused for a moment and removed her diplomatic hat.

“I don’t think any party has an interest right now,” she said. “I say it as an Israeli who knows what the cost of war is.”

Resuming the posture of an Israeli ambassador, she urged moderate Arabs to see the value in achieving diplomatic ties.

“The Middle East is really now the epicenter of so many conflicts,” she said, noting that Iran was a threat not only for Israel but also for many Arab countries.

As of early May, Shalev had four months left as ambassador, having served most of a two-year term that ends in August.

“The clock is ticking. Not only the Iranian clock,” she said.

She declined to comment on the political wrangling over her successor; recent reports said Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz had turned down the job.

“I hope there will be somebody good, that I can rest assured that once I go back to Israel, Israel will be represented by the best person,” she said.

Shalev, 68, an expert in contract law, assumed her post in September 2008, becoming the first woman to serve as Israeli ambassador to the UN. As she had no diplomatic background, pundits expressed concern, but Shalev brought impeccable academic credentials. The author of 10 books, she was a professor of contract law at Hebrew University and later served as president of the Academic Council and rector of Ono Academic College. In 2003, Shalev received the Israel Bar Association prize, honoring her for academic legal research.

“When I was first appointed, people raised their eyebrows and said, ‘Who is this lady… what are her capabilities or qualities that enable her to represent Israel?’” she recalled.

Shalev soon established herself as a moderate voice at the UN, not prone to dramatic speeches, but apt, as she has done, to quote Shakespeare during a meeting of the Security Council.

“I think you should speak more rationally than emotionally,” she said. “This is me… I can’t just bring myself to a different kind of rhetoric.”

Though she is convinced she has earned the respect of her colleagues, the new ambassador will face a hostile UN.

“As an Israeli ambassador, I feel the tension, and it’s not very pleasant to sit at the Security Council and to watch and to listen to the kinds of accusations and vile speech regarding Israel,” she said. “Sometimes, I must tell you that my heart breaks when I hear the way that our democracy and our judiciary and mainly our army, our soldiers, are attacked as war criminals.”

The Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of potential war crimes during Operation Cast Lead, was published in September 2009, sending the Israeli public, American Jews and human rights groups reeling. Israel did not cooperate with the fact-finding mission that published the report, charging a biased mandate from the UN Human Rights Council.

“I know that some people think that we, Israel, should have cooperated,” she said, but “I think if we would have cooperated, it would not change very much.”

Still, the report prompted months of hostility toward Israel. The report caused “a lot of damage,” Shalev admitted. “Not only public opinion, but moral damage because the Goldstone report is now channeling all kinds of anti-Israelism.”

She described the vitriol as a new kind of “politically correct” anti-Semitism. “They call it anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism, and it became just a label, a name for a lot of bashing Israel,” she said.

Of course, Israel is itself investigating the IDF’s actions during Cast Lead.

“We are not doing it as a reaction to the Goldstone report. We are doing it because this is our moral and ethical and legal standard; after every operation, the army is looking into its behavior and the events that took place, and this is the same,” Shalev said.

Though some have called for an independent committee to investigate, Shalev defended the Military Advocate-General’s Office in charge of the probe.

“He is the top legal authority in the army,” she said. “It’s not as if it is an army officer who is looking into his peers.”

What’s more, that is the standard practice among Western countries. “So why should we be different?” she asked.

Yet the fallout from Goldstone continues.

“It’s not over. Now, it’s a little reduced,” Shalev said. She quoted President Barack Obama’s senior foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, and said the report was like the game “whack-a-mole,” where you hit one puppet and another pops up.

“It started out at Geneva, it went to New York, it went back to Geneva. Now they are going to have some kind of panel; there is the universal jurisdiction that is still hovering, like a cloud, over our leaders,” she said. “It did cause us damage, and I hope that it will sink over time.”

DEBKA.

More Terrorist Attacks Expected in American Cities

Faisal Shahzad

The failed attempt to blow up a car bomb in Times Square at the heart of Manhattan, New York, Saturday night May 1 was the fourth time in seven months that America’s intelligence and security agencies had missed thwarting a terrorist operation.
It also represented an operational and intelligence breakthrough for the Pakistan-based Al Qaeda-Taliban terror machinery in its first moves to terrorize the United States on American soil.
On November 5, 2009, U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot dead 13 US military and security personnel and wounded another 30 at the world’s largest military base, Fort Hood.
That was the first miss. US Army and intelligence authorities knew all about the major’s radicalization, his contacts with al Qaeda in Yemen and the plan he was entrusted with for a jihadi operation inside the United States, but nothing was done to stop him carrying it out.
A month later, on Christmas Day, the 24-year-old Nigerian, Umar Abdul Mutallab, tried and failed to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear as his Northwest Airlines Flight 253 came in to land at Detroit, Michigan.
Mutallab’s journey started in Somalia. He collected the explosives in Yemen. From there, he flew to Accra, Ghana, connecting to Lagos international airport in Nigeria and on to Amsterdam, where he boarded the US-bound flight.
Although the US embassy at Lagos had been alerted, Abdul Mutallab waltzed through the full array of security and intelligence checkpoints positioned at the airports he passed on three continents. Like in Time Square, it was only the malfunctioning of the detonator he carried which averted a major calamity.

From failed Xmas bombing to assassination of CIA agents

Five days after that near-miss, on December 30, 2009, the Jordanian physician Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a double agent acting for the CIA and serving the Pakistani Taliban, showed his true colors too late by blowing himself up among a group of senior Central Agency operatives stationed in Afghanistan when they met at their Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost – Eastern Afghanistan. Seven elite American agents and a Jordanian officer were killed.
The American agents neglected to take the must rudimentary precautions necessary when interviewing a double agent. The result was the deadliest attack the CIA had suffered in a quarter of a century.
Again, like the Time Square incident, the Khost attack could have been foreseen and forestalled, because the writing was on the wall, or rather, its virtual version was – on the Internet.
Fifteen months earlier, on March 28, 2009, Baitullah Mehsud, at 35, supreme commander of Taliban- Pakistan (Tehrik-i-Taliban – TTP), gave interviews to Pakistani news outlets and international wire services claiming credit for a string of terrorist attacks – one in Lahore, in which 30 police recruits were killed, and suicide bombings against security forces in Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Bannu.
Mehsud said these attacks were the Taliban’s revenge for the US drone strikes in the tribal areas of Waziristan, adding to an AFP interviewer: “There will be more such attacks, including strikes inside the US. Very soon we will take revenge from America, not only in Afghanistan but in Washington, which will amaze the entire world.”

Pakistani Taliban dismissed as having no global interests

Almost two months later, 13 months before the attempted attack in Times Square, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 396 of May 15, 2009, wrote under the heading: Taliban Spreads its Wings outside Afghan-Pakistan Theater:
In the view of DEBKA-Net-Weekly counter-terrorism sources, a secret directive from Osama bin Laden to start training groups of Taliban fighters, under the supervision of (Ayman) Zawahiri, for operations in countries outside Afghanistan and Pakistan, has only recently come to light.
At the time, American security sources said they knew of no such Taliban capability.
But some weeks later, US and Western security elements involved in the undercover war on al Qaeda and its offshoots, discovered that around February and March, bin Laden’s instructors had begun running courses for small elite Taliban groups to operate in countries outside their home terrain of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
They were being drilled for the same sort of massive attacks as Lashkar e-Taibe carried out in Mumbai, India, last November, in which 166 people were killed.
The Western intelligence working hypothesis, that Taliban was a local movement with no interest in al Qaeda’s global offensive, no longer holds true, said our sources. The fanatical rulers of Afghanistan, which the US-led anti-terror offensive ousted in 2001, today pose a major menace to Pakistan and are branching out as a senior partner in al Qaeda’s international jihad.
Washington initially rejected this development and said there was no evidence of any Taliban capability for carrying out attacks inside the United States.

Crossing the Atlantic from Barcelona

But they had conveniently forgotten at least one instance of the TTP’s proven covert capabilities in West Europe.
On Jan. 19, 2008, twelve of its operatives were arrested in Barcelona, Spain for conspiring to blow up the city’s subway system. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at the time: “The Barcelona cell appears to have ties to a terrorist training network run by Baitullah Mehsud.”
So why were American security authorities now so resistant to the proposition that, in the intervening two years, the Pakistani Taliban had taken the next step and crossed the Atlantic?
As for Baitulllah Mehsud, he was killed by a CIA drone at his South Waziristan stronghold in South Waziristan on August 5, 2009, only to be succeeded as commander of the Taliban in Pakistan by his son Hakimullah Mehsud.
Months went by and another US drone then went for Hakimullah, striking a compound in the Shaktoi district where he was thought to be spending the night in the early hours of January 14, 2010. The agency sought revenge for the murder of seven CIA agents two weeks earlier, under the orders of the new TTP chief.
Pakistan’ military intelligence, the Inter-Service Intelligence Agency reported him dead, but the Americans were not so sure.
One US intelligence official stated, “We’ve seen no evidence he was killed, nor do we hear chatter of a leadership crisis in the Taliban ranks.” The New York Times reported nonetheless that US intelligence was 90% certain the new TTP leader was dead and, in late February and early March, US intelligence sources came around to accepting his death and replacement with a successor.
But they were wrong.

Taliban claims taken with a grain of salt

Four weeks ago, in early April, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s counterterrorism sources report, the targeted Haikimullah Mehsed began showing signs of life and not only that, he was reported deep in preparations for punishing the Americans for trying to kill him.
From that point on, the road ran in a straight line to US counter-intelligence failure No. 4, the car bomb in Times Square, about which the TTP chief left no room for speculation.
On April 4, the Tehrik-i-Taliban recorded Hakimullah saying: “God willing, very soon in some days or a month’s time, the Muslim (community) will see the fruits of the most successful attacks of our fedayeen in the USA. The main targets of our fedayeen are American cities. This good news will be heard within some days or weeks. Inshallah we are successful!”
This tape was not brought to the attention of the American or Western public at the time. So deep was US intelligence in denial of the Taliban’s capacity for striking on American soil, that they did not listen when its top commander gave them advance notice of a terrorist operation, a piece of bravado never dared even by its partner, al Qaeda.
The claim of “full responsibility for the recent attack in the USA” by Qari Hussain Mehsud, Taliban’s top bomb-maker, was harder to ignore after it was aired 24 hours before the smoking bomb appeared on Times Square on an audiotape accompanied by images released on April 30, on a YouTube website called the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan News Channel.
And still, US intelligence sources advised taking the Taliban connection to the incident with a grain of salt.

US intelligence needs to urgently reassess Taliban’s capabilities

That was two own goals against American intelligence bodies, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s counter-terror sources.
It was luck rather than any branch of US anti-terror intelligence which saved the bustling center of New York from potential disaster. Their official stubborn adherence to a misconception made them deaf to the advance warnings the Taliban posted on April 4 and April 30, a failure even greater than the lapse which permitted the Nigerian extremist to come dangerously close to blowing up an American airliner last Christmas.
But it is not yet over. Our counterterrorism experts note that on both tapes, TTP leaders warned clearly that the Manhattan car bomb was not a one-off, but one of a series of attacks in American cities. The Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad‘s capture Tuesday, May 4, at JFK airport, where he was taken off a flight to Dubai just before take-off, did not nullify the Taliban threat and may even have heightened it.
It is only a matter of time now until other cells or networks planted by Hakimullah Mehsud in America are activated to continue his mission of jihad and vengeance. The captured suspect’s claim to his interrogators that he acted alone means nothing because that is what all Taliban operatives are instructed to say if apprehended.
The Times Square bomb, even though it failed to detonate, makes Hakimullah Mehsud the most dangerous radical Muslim to emerge on the international terror stage since Osama bin Laden staged the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.
This youthful (31), charismatic and dynamic terrorist chief, with his aptitude for tactical thinking and first-rate intelligence resources at his command, is a cut above most commanders of al Qaeda’s offshoots, franchises and related groups.
Hakimullah’s feats against Western intelligence and counter-terror agencies are adding up and it would repay them to take him a lot more seriously.

Obama May Reassess His Afghan War Strategy

Terror Repercussions on American Soil Must Be Considered

Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hamid Karzai

America’s stake in the forthcoming US-led Kandahar offensive in June has shot up since a smoking bomb car was discovered off Broadway, New York, Saturday, May 1.
Little did President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and their strategists imagine – when they put the finishing touches on their new military strategy and surge plan for Afghanistan in December 2009 – that they would have to reckon with Pakistani Taliban terrorists fighting back inside American cities. Now, say DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s source, they must decide whether to bring the offensive on the key southern Afghan city and Taliban stronghold forward from its June date, or postpone it.
(See DNW 443 of April 30: Afghanistan Veers out of Control – When Do US-Taliban Endgame Talks Begin?)
Before sending US Marines to fight for Kandahar, the war planners in Washington must determine how many terrorists Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullahh Mehsud is holding ready to strike US targets in Afghanistan and activate in America.
The young terror chief, faithful to the plan conceived by his late father, Baitullah Mehsud – before he was killed by a US drone – is in the process of widening the Afghanistan War, first bringing Pakistani cities into its orbit, then major urban centers in the United States.
The assembled explosive device left in a parked SUV on Times Square proved he means business.
Qari Hussain Mehsud, the top bomb maker for the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, said in a videotape aired 24 hours earlier on Friday, April 30, that operations were afoot to strike a “jaw-breaking blow to Satan USA.” His boss, Hakimullah, referred to suicide bombers in the speech he taped on April 4.

Will Obama rethink his Afghan War strategy?

As president of the United States, Barack Obama faces a new challenge not experienced by his predecessor. During the five years (from 2003 to 2008) in which George W. Bush waged war against al Qaeda in Iraq, he was confident that the conflict was bound by Iraq’s borders, albeit with logistical support from Syria, and never threatened to spill over into the United States.
Under the Obama administration, however, the Afghanistan War is taking a devastating toll on Pakistan and, for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, Taliban’s arm has grown long enough to reach inside America. Whatever strategy he may opt for in the multiple Afghan war arenas, the US president must know that this peril is here to stay, even though tactical scenarios may vary.
Should Taliban leaders Omar Mullah and Hakimullah Mehsud find themselves with their backs to the wall in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they may respond by stepping up the TTP’s terrorist offensive in the United States. But the opposite prospect may have the same result: The longer the Taliban can sustain the war stalemate, like the standoff in the southern Afghan town of Marjah in Helmand province, and the broader their areas of control in the two countries, the greater their appetite may be for disseminating death and destruction inside America.
Whichever scenario plays out, our Washington and counter-terror sources stress that the Taliban can bring terror to American with very modest, easily obtainable, resources – as President Obama and Hakimullah Mehsud both appreciate. Three or four “successful” suicide attacks or bombings in the heart of major American cities would suffice to turn the tide of popularity against the president, especially now that more than half the American public figures that the Afghanistan War is no longer winnable.

Can the CIA match the Taliban’s international spread?

The president also recognizes that the Pakistani Taliban and Hakimullah are more than America’s match in the intelligence war on terror. While US undercover services can keep track of Taliban forces in Afghanistan, they know nothing about the scale of TTP infiltration in the United States.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence sources report that the May 1 near-disaster on Times Square found US undercover agencies more or less on top of the tasks of weeding out lone wolf terrorists trying to enter the United States. But they have never been programmed to contend with an encroaching terrorist organization, one that is backed from afar by an irregular army organization with a logistics system based in two war-torn countries, i.e. Afghanistan and Pakistan.
On Monday, April 26, five days before the sputtering car bomb turned up in Manhattan, Central Intelligence Director Leon Panetta announced his organization would be spending many millions of dollars in the coming five years to improve intelligence-gathering, upgrade technologies and bring analysts closer to spies in the field. The plan renewed the agency’s year-old goal to increase the number of analysts and overseas operatives fluent in another language – the lack of which impaired the performance of military and civilian intelligence officers in the Afghanistan and Iraq arenas.
However, this plan had to be shredded before it left Panetta’s desk.
The CIA is rushed off its feet, with little time to spare for recruiting all these case officers. It has its hands full with the war against Taliban and the attempts of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan to spirit terrorists into the United States. Panetta will have to spread thin the inadequate pools of professional operatives working in the Afghanistan, Pakistani and Iraqi war arenas; one part must be diverted to surveillance of international transport routes to and from the United States from the Middle East, Europe and Asia; another used as back-up for extended FBI monitoring of ex-Pakistani communities in America.

Painful adjustments for Obama and the CIA

To perform these tasks effectively, the US intelligence community must radically rethink its evaluation of the Taliban and its global capabilities, acknowledging that its refusal to recognize these capabilities came close to letting Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad escape. He was pulled off a jet bound for Dubai in the nick of time, only because some members of that community were not blinded by the ruling misconception.
His new homeland war-front also obliges President Obama to review his policy toward Islamabad.
If until now, US-Pakistani cooperation in military and intelligence matters was, at best, limited and shot through with mistrust – particularly on the part of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI – Washington must now ask itself how much genuine cooperation can be expected from Islamabad in a showdown with Pakistani Taliban elements plotting terrorist attacks in America.
Outwardly, the Pakistanis are falling over themselves to help in the American investigation. But when it comes to the crunch, the US may find closed doors in Islamabad, as Britain did after British Muslims of Pakistani descent plotted a string of terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow. It was then that the UK government found practical Pakistani cooperation dwindling sharply, with no chance of permission for British agents to infiltrate Taliban strongholds.

Blanks in the Times Square Bombing Episode

Was Faisal Shahzad a US Double Agent Turned Traitor?

Times Square

In his first comment after Faisal Shahzad was arrested in connection with the Times Square bomb car, President Barack Obama said Tuesday, May 4: “The American people can be assured that the FBI and their partners in this process have all the tools and experience they need to learn everything we can. That includes what, if any, connection this individual has to terrorist groups. And it includes collecting critical intelligence as we work to disrupt any future attacks.”
This reassurance was timely, but his remark, “That includes what, if any, connection this individual has to terrorist groups,” was odd, considering that Shahzad had admitted to his interrogators that he had trained in bomb-making at camps in Waziristan, the Taliban’s home base.
Was President Obama choosing his words to cover himself against any future discovery that the suspect had past ties with American intelligence before working for Taliban? Or, even worse for his purpose, was Shahzad a double agent who went bad? If so, he would have been the third Muslim double agent recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Taliban or Al Qaeda ranks – only to betray his American handlers.
The first such double agent was an American, David Coleman Headley of Chicago, original Pakistani name Daood Gilani, whom US intelligence recruited to infiltrate Lashkar-e-Taiba, Al Qaeda’s special operations branch in Pakistan. He was soon employed as the terrorists’ operations scout and planner of attacks in the United States, India and Denmark. His work on their behalf during 2007 made Headley a key accomplice in the massive terrorist siege of Mumbai in November 2008, in which 166 people died, including all but one of the perpetrators, and hundreds were wounded.
(Thursday, May 6, an Indian court sentenced the only surviving gunman Mohammed Ajmal Kasab to death by hanging)

At least two CIA double agents crossed the lines

Even after his part in the Mumbai outrage was discovered, US intelligence let him return to India four months later in March 2009, hoping he would keep faith and bring back an inside view of Pakistani terrorist activity. But Headley used his freedom to revert to his former services to the L-e-T, selecting targets for their attacks, performing advance reconnaissance, plotting the terrorists’ getaway routes and arranging for weapons hideouts close to target.
In October 2009, his American handlers, for reasons not fully known, put a stop to Headley’s run as a double agent and arrested him.
The next double agent to turn coat not only betrayed his American handlers, but murdered them. The Jordanian doctor Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi was drafted as an undercover line into the inner workings of Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. On Dec. 30, 2009, Balawi set up a rendezvous with top CIA personnel at their base near Khost and blew himself up killing seven American agents. (See the first item in this issue).
If Faisal Shahzad proves to be the third American agent in two years to have crossed the lines and worked for Al Qaeda and Taliban, the CIA will have suffered extreme damage on a scale that recalls their unfortunate duels with the Russian KGB and GRU military intelligence in the ’80s and ’90s.
Some DEBKA-Net-Weekly intelligence and counterterrorism sources in the West and the Middle East have begun considering this theory, drawing on an number of possible clues:

Did Shahzad fake the bombing incident?

One: Why did Faisal Shahzad blaze a wide trail leading to himself before parking the SUV, packed with gasoline, propane, fertilizer and fireworks, on Times Square? His purchase of a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder for $1,300 on April 24 through an ad on eBay was quickly discovered. And why did he neglect to hide himself and the bomb vehicle from the security cameras studding the area, before abandoning it off Broadway?
In fact, he made every effort to attract attention: He parked in a no-parking zone, switched the flashers on, clumsily hid the original identification number on the engine block, and left a bunch of keys in the ignition which included the key to his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut and his white Isuzi Trooper. Finally, he changed his shirt in plain view of the security cameras, right after getting out of the car and leaving it smoking, where it was bound to catch someone’s notice very soon.
No terrorist would act like this in a major operation unless he wanted to be caught.
On the other hand, there may have been reason in his rhyme.
For instance:
1. If he was indeed a double agent loyal to US intelligence, he may not have seriously intended to cause an explosion, but only to rig it so that it would be discovered before it went off and caused untold harm. He needed the ensuing worldwide publicity to convince his Taliban handlers thousands of miles away of his bona fides. The more they trusted him, the deeper he would be able to burrow inside their upper echelons and serve his US intelligence controllers. His deliberately amateurish assembly of the device may have been part of this plan. Or –
2. Faisal meant to go through with a real bombing attack in the heart of New York, but wanted his American handlers, the CIA or the FBI, to identify him as the culprit, and so perform a double service for his real masters, the Taliban – to kill a great many Americans and to show he could outwit US intelligence on their behalf.

Why did Shahzad not head straight for the nearest airport?

Two: Instead of heading straight to the airport and boarding the first plane flying out of New York well ahead of the hue and cry – or departing the city by some other means – Shahzad felt confident enough to go home first and stay there until Monday night, May 3, when he drove in another car to JFK and bought a ticket to Pakistan via Dubai for cash.
So why didn’t the New York police and federal security personnel, who had his home under surveillance from Sunday night, arrest him there and then?
And why, seven hours after being red-flagged on the no-fly list, was he was still allowed Monday afternoon to pack at leisure, leave the house, drive to the airport, undergo security checks and board Emirates Flight 202 bound for Dubai? Were it not for an alert Customs and Border Protection clerk, who noted his name had been added to the no-fly list when the Emirates plane with Shahzad aboard was already taxiing away from the gate, Shahzad would have got clean away.
Was his near-escape due to major security holes in airport security? That’s hard to buy. After all, he was not just a regular passenger whom no one suspected, but a person who had been under heavy federal surveillance for twelve hours.
In the 53 hours and 20 minutes between the bomb car’s discovery and Shahzad’s arrest, could the several hours’ break in physical surveillance be explained by negotiations of an unknown nature going on between him and US investigators?

After claiming credit for NY car bomb, Taliban spokesman calls it a US plot

Three: Shahzad’s putative association with US intelligence may go back twelve or thirteen years. He first arrived in America aged 18, after growing up in Peshawar and Karachi as the privileged son of a Pakistani air vice marshal who retired in the 1990s.
Young Shahzad appears to have attended a university program in Pakistan that was affiliated with the University of Bridgeport, from 1997. He also attended a program in Karachi affiliated with Southeastern University, a private, nonprofit school in Washington that shut down last year after losing its accreditation.
In 2000, he enrolled at the University of Bridgeport, where he received a bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering and an MBA.
In January 2002, the authorities said, Shahzad got an H1-B visa for skilled workers. He then married an American citizen named Huma Mian, and in January 2006, was granted a green card.
A year ago, on April 17, he became a naturalized US citizen at a ceremony before a federal magistrate in Bridgeport. His wife and two children meanwhile left for Pakistan.
During all those years, he traveled back and forth between the United States and Pakistan, saying he was visiting his family. He used three passports, one American and two Pakistani documents in his possession. His last trip to his homeland was in February, when he admitted he had undergone bomb-making training in Waziristan, the tribal area which is home to Taliban strongholds.
Four: Finally, Thursday, May 6, after Taliban chiefs had claimed credit for the Time Square incident, the Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq, suddenly came forward to deny that Faisal Shahzad was “part of our network” while praising his action as a “noble deed.”
Tariq said that the failed Times Square car bombing was a plot “hatched by the US and its allies to trap Muslim and Pushtun youth in terrorist activities” – a hint that Shahzad had been recruited to set this trap.
The Taliban spokesman vowed “new zeal and style” in attacks to be launched against the US and its allies.
Activists, he said, had been sent to the United States and European countries to launch further attacks soon.

Iran’s Second Iranian Naval Exercise in Two Weeks

The US Diego Garcia Base Is Shown to be in Tehran’s Sights

Iranian Navy

On Wednesday, May 5, Iran launched its biggest ever naval and military war exercise, calling it “Great Prophet” or “Judgment Day.” The drill under the command of the Iranian Navy commander, Rear Admiral, will last eight days and cover a quarter of a million square kilometers – from the big Iranian naval base of Chah Bahar in the Arabian Sea near Pakistan, to the Gulf of Aden and the shores of Somalia in the West, and the Red Sea straits off Yemen northwest of Iran.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Iranian and military sources reveal that the war games have five principal goals, which Tehran has not published:

1. As a demonstration to US, Gulf and Israeli governments that Iran has solved all the military issues besetting its shores in a potential war. Tehran aims to show its forces are capable of seizing control of the Persian Gulf and repelling or neutralizing all the military forces and fleets present there, including the US Fifth Fleet and its command headquarters in Bahrain.
2. As a warning to the West and its Arab neighbors that, if war breaks out, Iran will seize command of all the oil export routes out of the Gulf, primarily the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf of Aden.
3. As a corollary to the naval drill last week, which Tehran saw as having aptly demonstrated the first two objectives, Iran is now moving on to the main stage of the new “Great Prophet” maneuver, the seizure of parts of the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden by its naval and air forces.
   For the first time in its contemporary history, Iran is flexing muscle to assert its dominance of the northern reaches of this ocean. An official spokesman made it clear Wednesday, May 5, that the war games would be conducted in the Sea of Oman and “all the strategic waterways connecting it to the Persian Gulf.”
   
   Practices for breaching a naval blockade against Iran

4. Iranian strategists believe that control of a large segment of the Indian Ocean and passageways to the Red Sea will not only enable Iran to cut American Persian Gulf units from their sources of supplies and reinforcements, but also isolate the huge American Camp Justice base complex on Diego Garcia and make it vulnerable to Iranian attacks.
   (See DNW 443 of April 30: “Work at feverish pace to prepare logistic base on Diego Garcia.)
   The first two days of the maneuver (Wednesday and Thursday, May 5-6), were devoted to drilling the breaching and breaking of a naval blockade potentially thrown up by the United States when sanctions fail to have any effect and backed by allied British, French, Italian and German fleets.
   Iranian leaders are plainly bracing for their relations with Washington to continue to deteriorate up to and including an eventual military showdown.
   This line of thinking colored the remarks of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday, May 4, in New York, when he warned that more UN sanctions would not stop Iran’s nuclear program but permanently wreck its relations with the United States.
   “Relations with the United States might never be repaired if new sanctions were imposed against us,” the Iranian president said.

To underscore the weight of its military options against the United States, the Islamic Republic has invested the bulk of its might in the Judgment Day war game – most of its marines, special operations units and commandos, almost all its warships, submarines and air force and an array of new weaponry for dazzling potential enemies.
Western military observers monitoring the maneuver were surprised to find Iran’s borders almost stripped suddenly of their regular guard units; they had been diverted to the Persian Gulf maneuvers far from home, along with the bulk of Iran’s armed forces.

Egypt in Transition

Obama Backs Handover to Mubarak Junior, Gemal

Hosni Mubarak

The Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, 82, has finally decided not to run in the 2011 presidential election. He has begun handing the reins of government over to his son and anointed successor, Gemal (Jimmy) Mubarak, 52.
(See DNW 437 of March 19: Mubarak has Cancer, Presidential Powers are in the Process of Transfer).
Gemal Mubarak, who officiates as General Secretary of the ruling NPD’s Policy Committee, has taken charge of day-to-day presidential business, while Mubarak Sr. retains key foreign policy and security affairs – though not for much longer.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Western intelligence sources in Cairo report that the president is weak in health after undergoing major surgery in Germany in early March. In the process of removing his gallbladder, cancerous cells were discovered in his stomach. The German doctors told Mubarak that, at his age, these cells are not overly aggressive and the disease is treatable in a way that allows him to carry on a normal lifestyle for an unknown period of time in the hope that the disease does not metastasize and spread to other parts of the body.
But a “normal life-style” depends on his retirement from presidential duties and enjoying complete rest. The doctors warned him that the strains of the presidency could stimulate the cancerous cells and make them more aggressive.
Most Middle East visitors who saw him in the last few days described him as looking frail. He moves very slowly with great effort and has just had a hearing aid fitted after partially losing his hearing. Most of his time since the operation, Mubarak spends at the presidential retreat at Sharm el Sheikh in southern Sinai. The speech he delivered in Cairo Thursday, May 6, was his first appearance in the capital since he returned from Germany on March 17 and he appeared in public to calm rumors about his failing health.

Washington snubs ElBaradei’s bid for the presidency

A few hours later, he was back in Sharm. There, he is attended by personal aides who help him keep the presidential bureau functioning and ministers, bureaucrats and officials at arm’s length.
The president’s reclusiveness and absence from the capital is causing political unrest in Cairo.
Monday, May 3, Egyptian police beat up anti-government protesters out on the streets to demand an end to the country’s 30-year emergency laws restricting civil liberties. Several hundred black-uniformed riot policemen pushed back about 150 protesters who tried to break through a security barrier in downtown Cairo. Police using night sticks set about members of the pro-reform youth April 6 movement, which backs the unofficial candidacy of former UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohammed El Baradei, starting a major scuffle.
El Baradei’s supporters organized the protest to try to cover for the failure of their leader’s mission to Washington last week.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources in Washington, he asked to meet Obama administration officials to try and to persuade them to back his campaign to amend the Egyptian constitution before next year’s presidential election in order for him to stand as a candidate.
But all he found in Washington was closed doors.
They were shut by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Advisor Jim Jones in an unusual, well-orchestrated move against a once towering international figure.
El Baradei had to make do with an appearance before an audience of Egyptian academics at American universities, who gathered to hear him speak at Harvard University.
By brushing off ElBaradei and his ambitious bid to enter Egyptian politics as a presidential candidate, the Obama administration signaled the ruling echelons in Egypt that Washington fully backed Jimmy Mubarak as his ailing father’s successor.

Head of Atomic Agency Asserts Right to Scrutinize Iran – NYTimes.com.

The new chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday rejected Iran’s claim that international inspectors have no right to ask questions about research Tehran has conducted into missile technology and warheads.

In an interview on Thursday, Yukiya Amano, a Japanese diplomat who took over at the agency five months ago, said that Iran would not be able to satisfy the world that its nuclear program was peaceful unless it answered a series of questions about its research, its procurement of high technology and the activities of its scientists — including whether they worked on designing a warhead that could be fitted with a nuclear weapon.

“We need to have a good understanding of major activities related to nuclear issues,” Mr. Amano said of his investigations of the Iranian program. “I’m not talking about land mines, but things related to nuclear material. If we don’t have a good understanding, we cannot say if all the activities, or all the activities and material, are for peaceful purposes. Credible confidence is needed.”

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has rejected answering questions about the missile program.

Mr. Amano’s stance contrasts with the more accommodating style of his predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei, an Egyptian-born lawyer who served as the agency’s director for a dozen years. Mr. Amano, though he spent most of his career in the cautious world of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, has been praised in recent days by American and other Western diplomats for taking a far more direct stance with Iran, insisting that it answer questions it had refused to talk about since the summer of 2008.

Mr. Amano’s comments came as the Iranians, and Mr. Ahmadinejad in particular, have increased their criticism of the atomic agency, which has a mandate from the United Nations to make sure that member nations use their nuclear programs exclusively for peaceful purposes.

On Dec. 1, Mr. Amano’s first day in office, Mr. Ahmadinejad greeted him with a defiant threat, saying Iran’s “friendly relations with the agency are over.”

On Tuesday, while in New York for the opening of a conference on the 40-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Mr. Ahmadinejad kept up the confrontational approach, saying the atomic agency had no authority to insist on answers about evidence that Iranian scientists worked on warhead designs.

In the spring of 2008, the agency’s chief inspector shared with members of the agency what he described as a video produced by Iranian engineers showing a “re-entry vehicle” and a midair detonation that would be consistent with designing a nuclear explosion. (Iran declared that the materials were forgeries.) “The agency has no right to intervene in the missile program of any country,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said in an interview. “What does that have to do with the purview of the agency?” he added, calling it an “imperfection” in the arms treaty from which the agency draws its mandate.

Mr. Amano argued that the agency had a responsibility to scrutinize all kinds of military gear and design work that could lead to evidence of work on nuclear arms, in Iran or any other nonweapons state that signed the nonproliferation treaty.

“The I.A.E.A.’s function is to provide adherence, confidence, that all the activities are for peaceful purposes,” Mr. Amano said during the interview. “And in order to make sure that all the activities are peaceful, we need to know whether there are nuclear activities with military dimensions.”

Mr. Amano also discussed Israel’s nuclear program, acknowledging that last month he wrote to member states of the agency to send him “any views that your government many have” about how to persuade Israel to join the nonproliferation treaty and, as a result, to give up its weapons.

The presumed Israeli arsenal is a subject that Iran, Egypt and other gulf states have said they would try to make a central issue at the nonproliferation conference, which runs all month.

Last September, the I.A.E.A’s annual General Conference’ passed a resolution, drafted by many of the Arab states, urging Israel “to accede to the NPT and place all its nuclear facilities” under the agency’s safeguards.

Along with Pakistan and India, Israel has refused to sign the treaty. All three countries have nuclear arsenals, though Israel has never acknowledged its weapons program.

The resolution said nothing about urging India and Pakistan to join the treaty, leading American officials to argue that the resolution was discriminatory, intended only to force Israel to discuss its capabilities. Mr. Amano said he wrote the letter to fulfill the mandate of the resolution, but he expressed no personal opinion on the subject. President Obama ducked questions about Israel’s nuclear weapons last month, but said that achieving disarmament in the Middle East would first require creating a security environment in the region in which Israel and other states did not feel vulnerable.

Israel fears energy targets will be hit – UPI.com.

PostPartisan – Has Brazil’s Lula become Iran’s useful idiot?.

Has Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio “Lula” da Silva become Iran’s useful idiot?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clearly thinks so. On Wednesday his website posted a statement saying he had accepted “in principle” a supposed Brazilian proposal to defuse Iran’s standoff with the U.N. Security Council — and prevent the adoption of new sanctions pressed by the United States, Britain and France.

The Brazilian foreign ministry hastily denied that there was a concrete proposal. But that’s irrelevant: Lula, who is planning a trip to Tehran next week, is obviously seeking to position himself as the mediator who can broker a deal between Iran and the West.

His gesture would be as irrelevant as his recent attempt to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — except for the fact that Brazil currently holds one of the rotating seats on the Security Council. Like Turkey, another temporary member, Brazil is stoutly resisting the new sanctions initiative, which is one reason why the measure was not adopted last month, as the Obama administration had hoped.

In other words, Lula is providing Iran with valuable time to delay sanctions, even as it presses ahead with enrichment and prepares a new generation of centrifuges to do it more efficiently.

The Brazilian “proposal” seems to amount to another version of the deal Iran has already rejected repeatedly: an exchange of most of the nuclear material it has already enriched for fuel rods it could use to resupply a medical research reactor. Tehran initially appeared to accept a Western offer along these lines last fall, then retreated. Since then it has played at discussing various variations on the deal — most of which would neuter the point of the transaction from the West’s point of view, which was to remove nuclear material from Iran.

Ahmadinejad’s obvious intention is to discuss this proposal with Lula as long as possible — without, of course, ever agreeing. “The proposal has many details,” Ahmadinejad’s chief of cabinet said on Wednesday.

Turkey has already been playing this same game with Iran for months, with no results. So why would Lula jump in? For the same reason as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan: to prove that his country is an emerging world power that is capable of acting independently — and defying the United States. It doesn’t matter to Lula that his diplomacy has no chance of succeeding. What matters are the wire service stories describing Brazil as “an emerging world player” and Lula himself as one of the globe’s most influential leaders.

The price for this vanity diplomacy is the continued delay of sanctions that could be the last chance of stopping Iran’s drive for a nuclear weapon peacefully. The United States looks impotent; Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard cronies are confirmed in the belief that they have nothing to fear from the West. President Obama’s attempt to restore multilateralism to the center of U.S. diplomacy falls flat.

But will there be any consequences for Lula? The Brazilian president probably doesn’t mind much whether or not Iran acquires nuclear weapons — after all, he is in his last year in office, and Iran poses no threat to Brazil. Nor does the Obama administration appear inclined to punish the Brazilian leader, whom Obama recently called “my man.” The State Department said this week that the administration is “increasingly skeptical” that Iran was going to change course, and that “there may still be a difference of opinion” with Brazil “as to where we are in this process.”

Nevertheless, “we do recognize the value and importance of a variety of countries engaging Iran,” spokesman Philip Crowley said.

In other words: Lula, go ahead and grandstand.

FOXNews.com – Iran’s President Is Defiant and Our Diplomacy Looks Foolish.

Washington’s delayed, watered down, and ineffective sanctions program and President Obama’s “soft diplomacy,” is simply emboldening Iran.

Since they took over 30 years ago….when the regime acquired rocks, they stoned our women; when they acquired rope they hung our men; when they acquired guns they used them on our streets; when they acquired technology they spied on our children. Does anyone doubt what this illegitimate regime would do if it acquired nuclear weapons?”

Those are the words of Roozbeh Farahanipour, a former law student in Tehran, who graduated with honors from Iranian prisons where he was tortured for his student activism. They were delivered on Monday at press conference at the Simon Wiesenthal Center following President Ahmadenijad’s speech at the opening of the U.N. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Conference. Now based in Los Angeles, democracy advocate Farahanipour is pleading with President Obama to finally deploy sanctions that still might prevent the Mullahs from going nuclear.

Meanwhile in New York, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proved once again that no one does “chutzpah” better than he, and nowhere does he do it better than at the United Nations.

Last year, serial human rights abuser, Mahmoud “Wipe Israel from the Map” Ahmadinejad keynoted the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Durban II Conference in Geneva. At another appearance at the General Assembly in New York, he flirted with Holocaust denial and boasted about Tehran’s 9,000 nuclear centrifuges making fissionable material in contravention of International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) rules and U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Now, basking the spotlight as the only head of state to attend the opening session of the U.N.’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Conference, the irrepressible Iranian president castigates the “Zionist regime” for engaging in “acts of terror” and claims that the U.S. and Israel have created “major terrorist networks” that threaten the world with nuclear blackmail.

Indeed, even before the conference’s opening gavel, came word of a significant victory for Iran. Egypt, Tehran’s historic Mideast archrival, a country which fears a nuclear Iran, telegraphed that it would seek to spin the nuclear forum’s focus onto Israel. Ambassador Maged Abdel Aziz told reporters last week that “Success in dealing with Iran will depend to a large extent on how successfully we deal with the establishment of a nuclear-free zone.” Egypt’s working paper will urge NPT members to “renew their resolve to undertake, individually and collectively, all necessary measures aimed at…the accession by Israel to the Treaty as soon as possible as a non-nuclear weapon state.”

Worse still, there are hints that the U.S. may follow up on Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller’s demand last year that Israel go public about its defensive nuclear arsenal and sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This would break forty years of U.S. policy not to paint Israel as the Mideast’s atomic bad guy at the very moment Tehran is planning its nuclear breakout.
Behind their public anti-Israel bluster, Arab leaders privately tell us they’re not losing sleep over the Jewish state but because of the real-time nuclear threat unfolding next door in Iran. It’s a threat that they fear America lacks the resolve to stop. In his new book, “The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations,” author Lee Roberts argues that the key to understanding the Mideast mindset is captured by this statement from Usama Bin Laden: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” As we witness North Korea’s and Iran’s defiance of the U.S. — as well as the Obama’s administration’s hint that it may join demands that Israel unilaterally surrender its nuclear deterrent — Egyptians, Saudis, Kuwaitis and other regional players may use anti-Israel rhetoric to hide their real purpose of distancing themselves from a weakened “American horse” and prepare to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

While Mideast proliferation is surely not the purpose of Obama’s new “soft diplomacy,” Washington’s delayed, watered down, and ineffective sanctions program, coupled with diplomatic signals designed more to put pressure on Israel than Iran, serve only to embolden, not rein in, Tehran.

Israel’s commitment not to threaten the region with nuclear attack or to engage in blackmail has been unwavering for over last forty years. In the 1960s, Egypt’s Gamel Abdel Nasser pledged to secure “atomic weapons at any costs” and threatened to “drive Israel into the sea.” The 1967 Arab-Israeli War was the result. Rather than wait around to see if Nasser was serious about getting atomic weapons, Israel developed its own deterrent nuclear capacity, pledging never to be the first to introduce nukes in the region. It held fast to its “no first use” policy, even in 1973 when a combined Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on Yom Kippur threatened its very survival.
Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, the “father” of Israel’s secret nuclear efforts told President Kennedy in 1963 that “Israel would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.” Long before the election of Barack Obama, Peres personally told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that Israel would be willing to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty within two years after the establishment of “regional peace.” Peres believes that it was Israel’s unstated but obvious nuclear capabilities that helped set the stage for the Jewish state’s historic peace with Egypt.

President Obama claims to be a “realist” about the Mideast, but his ambiguous policy about Israel and regional deterrence is anything but that. In pursuit of a “new day”, he should stop wasting precious political time and capital debasing the deterrence of democratic Israel. Instead, to stop the volatile region from becoming an armed nuclear camp, President Obama must demonstrate to nervous Arab leaders and the rest of the world that Washington is still “the strong horse” with the will to thwart any form of nuclear blackmail from the tyrants in Tehran.

Abraham Cooper is Associate Dean and Harold Brackman is Senior Researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.