WarSclerotic

C-130 “Hercules”

US President Barack Obama plans to dramatize his new appreciation of Israel as America’s long-trusted friend and strategic ally for the benefit of the American-Jewish and Israeli public.
One possible action, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources in Washington, is a second visit to Jerusalem by Vice President Joe Biden as a gesture of goodwill toward Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in sharp contrast to his disastrous visit in March, when Israel’s announcement of a construction project in East Jerusalem was used to inflame a deep crisis in relations.
Biden will be taxed with explaining that such incidents as the insulting reception afforded the Israeli prime minister on his White House visit on April 23 were a thing of the past and the administration was intent on putting relations back on track, with emphasis on the president’s unshakable commitment to Israel’s security.
Certain important gestures have already been forthcoming from Washington, although they received far less media play than the crisis.
In the first week of April, Obama ordered the Pentagon to release C-130J air transports to Israel. He had previously embargoed these aircraft because they could be used to drop Israel commando forces inside Iran in case of a decision to attack its nuclear facilities. The President had $98.6 million transferred to Lockheed Martin to pay for the delivery of the first nine transports.

Smart bombs for Israel and pursuit of American-Jewish leaders

On May 9, the President released a shipment to the Israeli Air Force of various types of smart bombs – most of them effective against the fortified locations and the weapons systems used by the Lebanese Hizballah, the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza and the Syrian army. The consignment also included Laser-Guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions system, called LJDAM, which was developed jointly by the US Boeing company Israel’s Elbit for improving the accuracy of bombs fired from a maximum distance of 28 kilometers in all weathers.
On May 20, US Congress overwhelming endorsed President Obama’s request for $205 million to help Israel build the new rocket defense system “Iron Dome.
Thursday, May 13, top White House aides, led by the President’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Senior Advisor to the President on Iranian Affairs Dennis Ross, and NSC Middle East desk chief Dan Shapiro (whose brief includes Israel), addressed a delegation of 15 leading American rabbis.
Rahm admitted the administration had “screwed up the messaging” to Israel and said “it will take more than one month to make up for 14 months.”
The White House fielded its top officials to show American-Jewish community leaders that the president was wholehearted in revising his attitude toward Israel and this group had been entrusted with following through on his directives.
Tuesday, May 18, Jewish Democratic members of the House and Senate were invited to a private meeting with President Obama and heard him admit he got “some toes blown off” making missteps in sensitive US-Israel relations. The lawmakers praised the administration’s effort to put forward tough sanctions against Iran and put to rest White House recriminations against Israel.
“It was a good meeting, but it was not a feel-good meeting – everyone spoke their minds and from the heart,” said Eliot Engel (D-Bronx & Westchester). “The President wants to see peace. We all want to see peace as well.”
The unprecedented 90-minute meeting took place in the Eisenhower Old Executive Office Building.

Stop badgering Israel, make Palestinians pull their weight

Between the two meetings with American Jewish leaders, senior administration emissaries were dispatched to Israel with orders to secretly meet Israel figures seen by Washington as influential and convey three messages:
1. President Obama was burying the hatchet with Israel – less to get out the Jewish vote and boost his Democrats’ hopes for Nov. 2 midterm elections, and more out of new strategic needs arising from the outbreak of a virtual Cold War between Washington and Moscow.
Middle East envoy George Mitchell had been instructed by the president in person to refrain from pressuring Israel to be the only side constantly badgered for concessions in the proximity talks with the Palestinians. He was told to accept Israel’s limits and starting leaning hard on the Palestinians to make them pull their weight too.
2. The President’s messengers reported that he had come to understand that as long as there was no one he could count on in the Arab world, the US and Israel must work together on ways to counteract the Iranian-Turkish-Syrian bloc and its input from Moscow.
Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak is too busy transferring the reins of government to his son Gemal Mubarak to be called on, while Saudi Arabia’s loss of Lebanon and Hamas to the Syrian-Iranian orbit has made its king indifferent to outside events.
Moscow was capitalizing on is reputation for cooperating with Washington, but the White House knew this was an act to cover up its return to Cold War tactics against the United States.
Without saying so explicitly, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources report that the American officials implied that the Obama administration would soon turn to Israel to talk about resuming the intelligence partnership which was so fruitful in the Cold War years of the 1960s and 1970s.
For the moment, Prime Minister Netanyahu is taking Obama’s gestures of friendship with great caution and refraining from referring publicly to the new face the White House appears to be presenting to Jerusalem. He is waiting to see what steps come next and, above all, keeping an open mind until after the November 2 elections before deciding on his response.

Susan Rice

The coup pulled off in Tehran by Brazil and Turkey with Russian backing was contrived too deftly for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice to unravel – even by lightning diplomatic sleight of hand.
To rescue the administration’s Iran policy from total collapse, the two worked at top speed to cobble together a sanctions motion feeble enough to command a broad front and have it tabled at the UN Security Council on Tuesday, May 18 – a bare 24 hours after Brazilian and Turkish leaders had Iran sign a 10-point commitment to deposit less than half of its low-grade enriched uranium in Turkey in exchange for fuel rods.
To gain Russian and Chinese endorsement, the draft’s content was heavily watered down with hardly any new measures proposed. This process finally cut short Washington’s serpentine efforts to get Moscow and Beijing to collaborate on tough sanctions for halting Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear bomb. So, to keep the vestigial draft motion moving along the rutted path up to Security Council approval, there will have to be more chops and changes.
All the same, the week’s debacles over Iran prompted a new, hopeful line of thinking in Washington. Administration officials told DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Washington sources the cloud may have a silver lining, after all. They argued that, in the end, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva “Lula” and Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan undeniably managed to extract three concessions which Iran denied in former rounds of talks with the Six-Power bloc of the US, Russia, China, France, the UK and Germany.

Obama officials see a silver lining

1. After endless haggling, Iran has agreed to ship a total of 1,200 kilograms of its lightly enriched uranium overseas for further enrichment.
2. It has also consented to shipping the entire quantity all in one batch abroad, after long insisting on dribs and drabs. Washington’s main consideration was and is that it is safe to leave Iran with enough enriched uranium for building one or two bombs because it was sure Tehran would not cross that threshold until it had enough weapons-grade uranium in hand for assembling an arsenal of 10 to 12 warheads.
3. Tehran had always objected to the enriched uranium swap taking place outside Iran. Now, Turkey was accepted as a clearing house for the exchange.
Those sources go on to argue that if Tehran could be prevailed upon to give way on those three points, why not go for more? More concessions might be going with the right kind of pressure – not necessarily from the United States. US officials accordingly drafted a set of demands which they believe are worth presenting to Tehran in the hope of a substantial reward. If they are met, then a US-Iranian nuclear showdown might be delayed by a year – or even two – and the risk averted of an Israeli military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

The three concessions as building blocks for more

These are the new demands:
A. Iran must abandon its announced intention of continuing to enrich uranium at home from a low 3.5 percent to 19.5 percent grade. Since the Iranian-Turkish-Brazilian agreement allows for overseas processing to 19.5 percent, Iran has nothing to lose by halting the centrifuges spinning at its plants since February. According to our Iranian sources, some 300 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20- percent are already in stock.
B. If Iran complies with A., Washington will guarantee a regular supply of fuel rods for the light water reactor at Bushehr which the Russians have promised to have up and running by late summer. This would entail the US withdrawing its strong objections to Russia finishing the reactor, while at the same time internationalizing the supply of fuel rods and taking it out of Moscow’s hands.
C. Iran’s consent to the reprocessing of low-grade enriched uranium outside its borders must be extended to further quantities. Since negotiations began last year, the 1,200 kilos of low-enriched uranium to be exported – then three-quarters of Iran’s total stock – has almost doubled.
The Americans will ask Tehran to split future amounts into batches of predetermined size for overseas upgrading to 19.5 percent, and insist that the reprocessing take place in Russia, France or Holland, the only countries with the technology for making the product unusable for military purposes.
In this way, Iran would never accumulate enough of this product for further enrichment to weapons-grade.
D. Iran must fully comply with the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency’s demand to open up more nuclear facilities to monitors and admit more inspectors to its suspected military projects.
E. Iran must give part with answers to long years of IAEA queries about the military aspects of its nuclear industry.
Who will put these demands to Iran? Its Brazilian or Turkish chums? Or why not let the IAEA take this starring role in future nuclear diplomacy and recover some of its lost relevance? But first, the Obama administration needs to find out if there are any real grounds for its sudden upbeat mood after a lousy week – in other words, will Tehran play along and meet those five demands?
The answer is brutally clear: Not a chance, say DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Iranian sources. Tehran will never negotiate on – or lay to rest – any queries about the military nature of its nuclear program.
Transparency there is not an option.

Barack Obama

The White House blandly depicted the telephone conversation between Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday, May 13, as producing agreement to step up moves for new sanctions against Iran over its suspect nuclear program. In their wide-ranging exchange, they were said to have noted “good progress and “agreed to instruct their negotiators to intensify their efforts to reach a conclusion as soon as possible.”
While the Iranian issue was certainly broached, Obama and Medvedev’s conversation was far from bland and its wide range covered a minefield.
A high-placed Washington source told DEBKA-Net-Weekly that Obama took Medvedev to task and told him he must rein in Syrian President Bashar Assad to save the Middle East from an imminent full-scale war.
The US president was prompted by an intelligence update reaching him shortly before the phone call, in which the watchers tracking the flow of smuggled Syrian weapons into Lebanon had spotted Scud missiles moving across the Syrian-Lebanese border into Hizballah hands – in defiance of ominous US and Israeli warnings.
Damascus had been tipped off by Moscow that America and Israel would take no action, provided the transfers went forward slowly and only a few at a time.
Yet Medvedev, who had just returned from Damascus, promised to comply with Obama’s request.

What promises? Moscow is grinding its own axe

But instead, Moscow delivered a shocker. Just a few hours later, Friday morning, May 14. Mikhail Dmitriyev, head of Russia’s Federal Agency for Military Cooperation, announced the sale to Syria of MiG-29 fighter jets, Pantsyr short-range air defense systems and armored vehicles.
He did not say exactly when the transaction was signed, suggesting only that it was finalized during Medvedev’s visit to Damascus the week before.
President Obama and his senior advisors were forced to acknowledge finally that Moscow’s sole motive now was to grind its own axe, just for starters in Iran and Syria. (See DEBKA-Net-Weekly reporting in this issue and on May 14: Russia Tries to Push US aside on Iran).
Washington would therefore be well advised to discount Russian leaders’ promises, including support for tough sanctions against Iran. And rather than curbing Assad, the Kremlin was acting to boost him with a fresh injection of arms and backing for his anti-American tactics.
The negative messages from Moscow coincided with a White House re-evaluation of the president’s “grand bargain” policy which made a point of treating Moscow as nuclear friend and partner and a willingness to revive the civilian nuclear cooperation agreement shelved two years ago by his predecessor George W. Bush to protest Russia’s conflict with Georgia.
White House analysts came up with a grimly unequivocal diagnosis, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Washington sources disclose: The president’s year-old policy of fair cooperation with Russia was counter-productive – if not downright damaging.

Clobbering the US with its own diplomatic initiatives

Moscow was found to be using the Obama administration’s diplomatic initiatives as hammers to clobber US interests in the Middle East as well as the Caspian and Central Asian countries. Its activities for disrupting those interests in such places as Syria and Iran were described as comparable in intensity to the Cold War campaigns of the Soviet era in the 1970s.
In Iran, for instance, Moscow had cynically exploited the US president’s quest for succor and support for harsh UN sanctions against Iran as a tool for rendering those sanctions toothless and of no use for curbing Iran’s drive for a nuclear weapon.
The Russian president was caught putting on a big show to disguise his complicity in the maneuver hatched by Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva “Lula” and Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan which produced the deal Monday, May 18, for Iran to send some enriched uranium to Turkey in return for fuel rods for “medical research.”
The show began when Medvedev told Lula who had stopped over in Moscow on his way to Tehran, “The president of Brazil is an optimist, so I’ll be an optimist, too. I give him 30 percent chance of success.”
From the start, this deal was a secret conspiracy hatched with Iran behind America’s back during the Russian president’s visit to Damascus, whereby Brazil and Turkey would clinch a deal for de-activating the US drive for tough sanctions capable of stalling Tehran’s progress towards its nuclear objectives.
One high-ranking US official commented: “The beauty of the stunt is that the Russians didn’t leave any detectable fingerprints, even though they pushed for it as hard as they could.”

Moscow quietly shapes a new anti-American world bloc

While holding back S-300 interceptor missiles for warding off potential US or Israel strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites – as Putin personally promised Washington – Russia has resumed training of Iranian teams in their operation. (See HOT POINTS of May 19, below).
Russia’s drive for influence and gain goes well beyond diplomacy, according to the new White House assessment. While in Damascus and Ankara, Medvedev also dealt with Russia’s push to expand its control of the oil and gas pipelines from Iran and the Central Asian countries to Europe in a takeover of American holdings.
Last November, the Russian pipeline builder OAO Stroytransgaz completed the first part of the Syrian section of a gas pipeline from Egypt across Jordan with a branch running into Turkey.
Shortly before his visit to Syria, the Russian president told the Syrian newspaper Al Watan in an interview that Russian firms were also interested in participating in the construction of an oil refinery in the northern Syrian city Deir Ez-Zor, and also in reconstructing an oil pipeline from the Kirkuk oil field in northern Iraq to the Syrian port of Banias.
In other words, Moscow is getting ready to assume a controlling share in the huge Iraqi oil export industry as soon as American forces pull out of the country.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources in Washington, Obama’s analysts have picked up on Russia’s grand design to foster a new grouping of Middle East and South American nations, such as Brazil, Turkey, Iran and Syria, with Iraq eventually attached – or rather swallowed up.

Nuclear proliferation, terror sponsorship are no object

In contrast to the non-aligned bloc of the old Cold War days, this one has rich economic potential, gathering in two of the world’s biggest oil exporters, Iran and Iraq, and cultivating their dependence on Russia’s technological, nuclear and military capabilities.
This new alignment of world nations would be pro-Russian and anti-American in character.
In pursuit of this goal, Russia is not only prepared to let Syria have sophisticated weapons. Medvedev also promised Assad a nuclear reactor, despite its record of non-cooperation with the nuclear watchdog, and signed deals for building $24 billion dollars-worth of nuclear plants in Turkey too.
Russia’s partnership with America for containing nuclear proliferation is therefore one more show as Moscow lets Iran get away with triggering a Middle East nuclear arms race and helping it spread like fungus into southern Europe and Central Asia.
Sponsorship of jihadi terrorism is no bar to its plans, as the Russian president demonstrated by acceding to the Syrian president’s request for a meeting with the Palestinian Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus.
That marked the end of cooperation with America in combating global terror.
This week, administration leaders are quoted by our sources in Washington as commenting with glum resignation that they see no way at this juncture of averting the emergence of a new Cold War between the United States and Russia under the incumbent governments.
“The die is cast,” said one very senior US official. “Although we can’t say so in public, all our policies and efforts must now be ruled by the ongoing battle of interests between Washington and Moscow.