WarSclerotic

DEBKA.

SCUD-D missile

A single Patriot anti-missile battery was stationed Monday, May 24, at Morag in northwestern Poland, less than 40 miles from the Russian naval and air bases in the enclave of Kaliningrad. A hundred US troops were attached to the site for training Polish soldiers in its use.
Although the Patriot was a pale relic of the missile shield President George W. Bush planned for East Europe, it drew deep frowns in Moscow. Seekers of comments were referred to the Russian foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko‘s statement of a month ago that such unilateral moves by the US cannot be left unaddressed.
Russian pundits specializing in US-Russian relations took a somewhat sharper tone, describing the move as a deliberate attempt to undermine Russian-American relations.
What would the Russians have said if the United States, or any foreign power, had parked not a single air defense Patriot, but 800 Scud-D surface-to-surface strike missiles with a 700-1,000-mile range, capable of carrying chemical or nuclear warheads – not 40 miles, but less than 16 miles from their territory?
That is exactly what Syrian President Bashar Assad has done, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s military sources reveal here. They are not part of the Syrian Army’s array of missiles for deterring an Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Syria, but parked on the Syrian-Lebanese border, painted in Hizballah battle colors and assigned Hizballah store serial numbers. Each battery has its own Hizballah unit, attached after learning how to operate them at Syrian bases for the past half year.

Unparalleled bonanza for Hizballah

Wednesday and Thursday, May 26-27, tensions shot up several notches when Beirut lined up behind Damascus and Hizballah and boosted its army units on the South Lebanese-Israel border “against any emergency” and the Syrian army placed all its units on war preparedness, ordering its ballistic missile units to switch to firing positions.
Israel, which ended its homeland defense exercise against missile attack Thursday, May 27, prepared to join Greece next week in a joint naval and aerial exercise for practicing in-flight refueling.
(For details, see also HOT POINTS below)

The stages of the buildup approaching its peak were progressively covered in DEBKA-Net-Weekly and DEBKAfile‘s reports. Even so, all our experts were astounded to learn that the unheard-of number of 800 Scuds had been assigned to Hizballah, a fact never disclosed until now.
The entire Scud D behemoth is now positioned ready for removal into Lebanon at one and-a-half hour’s notice from Assad’s green light. The Hizballah crews have been taught to launch them on the move at predetermined Israeli targets.
Syria, Iran and Hizballah have made military history – and that is why the Middle East is teetering on the brink of war. Four armies were on combat readiness Wednesday, May 26 after the Lebanese Army lined up behind Syria and Hizballah against Israel’s Defense Forces and Syrian ballistic missiles were placed in firing positions.
Never has any army, least of all a terrorist organization like the Shiite Hizballah, ever commanded so many surface-to-surface strike missiles and held them ready to fire on a neighbor’s cities.
By comparison, North Korea’s arsenal is also estimated at around 800 ballistic missiles. They include long-range systems which could one day strike South Korea and Japan. But even that rogue nation has never placed those weapons in firing position at points abutting the borders of South Korea and Japan.

Deeply ingrained collaboration with North Korea

And how would the strategic position of the 100,000 US troops fighting in Afghanistan be affected if the Pakistani government were to suddenly and covertly let Taliban have 800 Ghauri surface-to-surface missiles (similar to the Scud D) for firing at Kabul from its South and North Waziristan sanctuaries?
This scenario would sound absurdly unreal anywhere in the world – even in trouble spots. Yet, in the Middle East, it is a cruel reality.
The Scud concentration on the Syrian-Lebanese border came off Syrian military industry production lines, our military sources report. Their manufacture is based on North Korean technology, diagrams and licenses. They are in fact a Syrian adaptation of the North Korean Rodong-1 missile, whose 1,000-mile range brings Japan within firing distance.
This missile is essentially a hybrid: Its Isayev 9D21 engine was upgraded with the help of Russia’s Makeyev OKB industries as well as China and Ukraine, while the new TEL uses an Italian Iveco truck chassis and an Austrian crane.
Pyongyang’s Rodong program was itself largely financed by Iran in return for permission to reproduce it as the Shahab-3 ballistic missile.
Iranian-Syrian military collaboration with North Korea is thus deeply ingrained with Hizballah now brought into the equation for the first time.
Yet for reasons outlined in the next article, no Western power has hindered the coming together of these hugely destabilizing elements.

A Strategic (or Guilty) Secret

All Hands Join to Hide Number of Scuds – 800 (!) – Bound for Hizballah

Barack Obama

For ten days, the US and Israel improbably joined forces with Syria, Lebanon and South Korea for a mighty effort to conceal the mammoth figure of 800 Scud missiles held ready for Hizballah in custom-built Syrian bases a 15-20-minute drive from the Lebanese border.
This effort was exhaustive enough to magic away the only media reference; an item in the Japanese Sankei Shimbun of Sunday, May 23; vanished overnight from the paper’s Web site and the Internet.
But DEBKA-Net-Weekly managed to pin it down. Here is the quote:

North Korea has agreed to Syria’s shipment of long-range Scud missiles to the militant Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah. Syria is reportedly obliged to receive approval from North Korea the technology provider when handing over missiles to a third party. Citing unidentified sources, Japan says the North Korean embassy in Syria said it has “no intention to object to Syria’s transfer of Scud missiles to Hezbollah.” We speculate that the model Syria plans to provide the Lebanese militant group with is the Scud D with a range of 700 kilometers.”

The Japanese item included the disclosure that the Syrian president needed North Korean approval for transferring the Scud Ds to Hizballah. Given the structure of the ruling regime in Pyongyang, the handover would have necessitated a nod from Kim Jong-il in person.

Red faces in Washington

All the parties concerned one way or another found the Japanese disclosure embarrassing enough to kill it.
The United States, for one, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Washington and military report, was not prepared to own up to the failure of its every effort (going back to the Clinton and Bush administrations) to curb the massive proliferation of nuclear and missile weapons technology originating in North Korea – most damagingly to the Middle East. Worse still, for the first time, the North Korean ruler actually authorized their transfer to a militia officially listed by the UN and the US as a terrorist organization.
As long as this level of nuclear and other dangerous weapon proliferation goes on unchecked, questions must be asked about the point of the “bold and pragmatic” program President Barack Obama submitted to the Washington summit of 47 world leaders on April 13, asking for their commitment to eliminate or lock down their nuclear materials within four years.
With US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Beijing this week (May 23-25) for discussions centering Iran’s nuclear program and a bid for Chinese support for UN sanctions, Washington could not afford to let it be known that the world’s top nuclear violator Kim Jong-Il had more leverage over war and peace in the Middle East than any other Asian, or even European, leader.
There might also have been quite a few red faces if the presence of 800 Scud D missiles under Hizballah’s hand had been discovered during Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri‘s first White House visit Monday, May 24. It would have signaled the collapse of the Obama administration’s policy of wooing Assad and exposed a US intelligence fiasco, to boot.

How would Netanyahu and Barak explain how it happened?

In any case, no sooner was Hariri home to Beirut when he lined up behind Syria and Hizballah in boosting his southern units against “a war emergency,” despite his promise to the US president to try and abate rising war tensions.
Israeli leaders would also have been seriously discomfited by this discovery (see the separate item on the debate over Israel’s restraint in the missile threat), because the public would demand answers to at least three questions:
1. How did North Korea, a country far from Israeli consciousness, manage to grab a leading role in the schemes for its destruction for the second time in three years? The first time was in 2007, when Pyongyang helped construct the Syrian plutonium reactor at A-Zur which Israel destroyed before it was up.
2. How could Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak let 800 Scud missiles pile up on the Syrian-Lebanese border for no purpose other than to destroy Israel’s cities without stepping in to destroy them? That many Scuds imperils Israel’s very existence no less than the plutonium Syria would have produced had the Israeli Air Force not bombed its reactor in 2007.
3. Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah makes no secret of his plan to devastate Israel’s population centers with hundreds of missiles and rockets while at the same time fighting to capture sections of northern Israel. (See Issue no. 430 of DNW from January 22 – Iran-Hizballah Mark out Patches of Northern Israel for Capture). So is the Netanyahu government sitting on its hands and letting it happen?
Lebanon’s leaders President Michel Suleiman and the prime minister had an obvious interest in keeping the 800 Scuds hidden from sight. Their discovery would have shown them up as the stooges of Syrian president Bashar Assad and Iran’s surrogate Hizballah who are free to manipulate Lebanon according to their interests.

Assad capitalizes on the secrecy for buck-passing on the impending war

As for Bashar Assad, who built up the Scud stockpile, he is exploiting the missile controversy to pass the buck for the flare-up of hostilities he is engineering to the United States and Israel.
In an interview with the Rome newspaper La Repubblica on Monday, May 24, the Syrian ruler said the United States had lost its influence in the Middle East by failing to contribute to regional peace. In his view, US President Barack Obama had “raised hopes” in the region but failed to follow through with substantive peace moves.
Assad also boasted about a new world order which, he said, had cut the United States down in the world by refusing to wait for roles to be handed out by Washington. He was referring to the bloc formed by Turkey, Brazil, Syria and Iran and sponsored on the outside by Russia and aiming a side swipe at Obama’s White House welcome for Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, by showing that Damascus calls the shots in Lebanon – not Washington.
By keeping the 800 Scud D stock poised for handover to Hizballah dark, the United States and Israel played into Assad’s hands and let him get away with engineering the elements of an impending Middle East war while pinning them blame on them.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Tags: Iran Strait of Hormuz US nuclear sub

US nuclear-submarine in Persian Gulf waters

Tehran reports that an Iranian naval patrol Thursday, May 27, detected a US nuclear submarine sailing through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which most of the oil produced by Persian Gulfstates passes on its way to world markets. DEBKAfile‘s Iranian sources report Tehran has placed its navy and army on high alert.

Western intelligence and naval sources confirm that a nuclear-armed American submarine has in fact entered the Persian Gulf. This confirms DEBKAfile‘s report of May 20 that the Obama administration had decided to boost US military strength in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf regions in the short term with an extra air and naval strike forces and 6,000 Marine and sea combatants. Carrier Strike Group 10, headed by the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, was due to sail out of the US Navy base at Norfolk, VirginiaFriday, May 21.

On arrival, it was to raise the number of US carriers off Iranian shores to two.
Thursday’s arrival of a US nuclear submarine also ties in with the currently rising military tensions along Israel’s borders with Syria and Lebanon.

Up until now, President Barack Obama kept just one aircraft carrier stationed off the coast ofIran, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Arabian Sea, in pursuit of his policy of diplomatic engagement with Tehran.

UN asks for agreement on nuclear disarmament.

Hoekstra: Obama Withholding Terrorism Intel from Congress.

By: Jim Meyers

Rep. Hoekstra was first elected in 1992. He is not running for re-election in November and instead seeks the GOP nomination for governor in Michigan.
In an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV, Hoekstra says: “All of us are very frustrated, Democrats and Republicans, with the lack of information sharing coming from this White House.

“They’re saying Justice is giving you everything they can. The operative words are ‘they can,’ because what the Justice Department is now throwing out is that the Christmas Day bombing, the attack at Fort Hood, the Times Square bombing, these are all now in the prosecutorial stage and we can’t give you information that may jeopardize the prosecution.

“So we’re learning very, very little about their connections to international organizations, how these things were funded, where the money came from — the types of things you would like to know to get a better understanding of each one of these attacks so that we can better enhance our intelligence capabilities to identify these threats earlier and stop them.

“I’m in the prevention business. I want these things prevented. I want these folks identified before they ever get to the United States, or before they can ever operationalize what they want to do. [Attorney General] Eric Holder and others are in the prosecutorial stage. That’s too late.”

Hoekstra charges that the administration has been withholding information on key terrorist threat Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric who moved to Yemen in 2004 and whose Internet sermons are believed to have helped inspire attacks on the U.S. He recently advocated the killing of American civilians in an al-Qaida video.

Hoekstra discloses that he traveled to Yemen on New Year’s Day, but the White House and Department of Defense contacted the American embassy there and instructed officials not to talk to Hoekstra about al-Awlaki.

“I don’t know why they did it,” Hoekstra says. “They still haven’t shared that information that I was looking for.

“That’s a mistake. Congress shouldn’t have to pull information out of the administration. It’s the administration’s job to keep us fully and currently informed on intelligence matters. That is the requirement of the law. This administration is not meeting those requirements.”

If a terrorist attack does succeed in the future “it will be on the heads of the administration because they do want to involve Congress in discussing the types of changes that might be necessary to keep America safe,” Hoekstra tells Newsmax.

“If they can’t give me the information as to what happened at Fort Hood, what happened on Christmas Day, what happened at Times Square, how can I work with them to give them better tools to keep American safe?

“That’s a discussion we need to be having. These homegrown terrorism threats are expanding. They are going to be more frequent. We’re going to have to modify and revise our intelligence gathering and our law enforcement procedures if we expect to keep America safe.”

Asked if he believes war could break out in Korea following the North’s sinking of a South Korean ship, Hoekstra responds:

“I sure hope not. That leads to all kinds of bad consequences throughout that part of the world. We’ve got enough struggles in the world right now without an all-out conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

“I don’t think China would want that to happen. I don’t think Russia would want that to happen. I’m not sure, however, that Russia and China have the influence over North Korea that if they wanted to do something like that, Russia and China could actually stop them.

“I do think we need to put North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. I thought President Bush made a mistake when he took them off that list at the end of 2008. President Obama should put them back on the list.

“In some ways it’s a symbolic list, but sinking a warship is not a symbolic step. It was a real step by North Korea and there should be consequences to it.”

Hoekstra also says that Dennis Blair, who resigned as Director of National Intelligence under pressure from Obama, served as “something like a scapegoat” for the administration, and called the White House’s move a “wrong decision.”

And he charges that Iran is taking advantage of America’s “weakness and indecision” to continue its nuclear program.

“The consequences are that Iran has now had another year and a half to continue enriching uranium,” Hoekstra says.

“They’re a year and a half closer to having a nuclear weapon, and we’re a year and a half closer to Israel believing that perhaps the only way Iran will not get a nuclear weapon is if Israel takes unilateral action without the support of the United States. That would be a very ugly place for the Middle East and for the United States and Israel to find themselves.”

Link TV | Episode Transcript.

American Thinker Blog: WH Counterterror advisor: Jihad a ‘legitimate tenet’ of Islam.

I know what he was trying to say; that there are some schools of Islamic thought that defines “jihad” as unarmed “struggle” by the pious Muslim against his own weaknesses.

So what?

That’s not how our enemies describe Jihad. The Islamists combine religious fervor with a fanatical political ideology that instructs them to kill those who won’t submit. It really is that simple and the idea that we have top officials (Brennan isn’t the only one who holds this view) in the Obama White House who pretend that Islamists don’t believe what they actually believe is worse than self-delusion; it is bordering on criminal negligence:

The president’s top counterterrorism adviser on Wednesday called jihad a “legitimate tenet of Islam,” arguing that the term “jihadists” should not be used to describe America’s enemies.

During a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan described violent extremists as victims of “political, economic and social forces,” but said that those plotting attacks on the United States should not be described in “religious terms.”

He repeated the administration argument that the enemy is not “terrorism,” because terrorism is a “tactic,” and not terror, because terror is a “state of mind” — though Brennan’s title, deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security, includes the word “terrorism” in it. But then Brennan said that the word “jihad” should not be applied either.

“Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children,” Brennan said.

Please note in the second paragraph above where Brennan describes violent extremists as “victims.” What does that make the targets of their fanaticism? Do we have victim on victim crime? Or perhaps the jihadists targets had it coming? You cannot have a terrorist attack without someone being at fault. And if Brennan is going to excuse the jihadists because they are suffering oppression or something, then he must believe that those who die horribly in those attacks deserved it.

This is the same naive fool who wants to look for and promote Hezb’allah “moderates.” Michael Totten, who has forgotten more about Hezb’allah than this fool will ever learn, applies the necessary take down:

There are no moderates within Hezbollah, at least not any who stand a chance of changing Hezbollah’s behavior. Sure, the terrorist militia has sent a handful of its members to parliament, as Brennan says, and once in a while they sound more reasonable than its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, but these people are employees. They don’t make policy.

If you want to catch a glimpse of Hezbollah’s org chart, just rent a car in Beirut and drive south. You’ll see billboards and posters all over the place in the areas Hezbollah controls. Some show the portraits of “martyrs” killed in battle with Israel. Others show the mug shots of Hezbollah’s leadership, most prominently Nasrallah and his deceased military commander, truck bomber, and airplane hijacker Imad Mugniyeh. Alongside the pictures of Hezbollah’s leaders, you’ll also see Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the two “supreme guides” of the Islamic Republic regime in Iran.

Sun Tzu famously made the first rule of war “Know your enemy.” Brennan has taken that adage a step further. He is pretending there is no enemy, no war – only victims who who need us to address the “root causes” of their fanaticism.

I am not confident that we will escape the next three years without a massive terrorist attack. At this level of denial comes extreme danger. Seeing the enemy as potential welfare customers will not win any battles and will probably get a lot of innocent people killed.

First step toward last resort: No case to attack Iran before trying sanctions..

The United States has at least two reasons for trying everything short of preemptive attack to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Sanctions might work, in the unlikely event that Iran’s leaders develop more than a fleeting case of rational thinking. If sanctions don’t work, the U.S. – as was not the case before invading Iraq – will have more international support for that last resort.

Such a strategy, however, doesn’t mean letting Iran play us and the United Nations for chumps. Iran was trying to do that when, to avoid a fourth round of U.N. sanctions, the country suddenly announced a deal last week with Turkey and Brazil to export 2,640 pounds of low-enriched uranium and receive, in return, fuel rods suitable for use in a medical research reactor but not suitable for use in a nuclear weapon.

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quickly and correctly called that deal a sham. Though the uranium-out/fuel-back model once could have halted Iran’s drive to produce the enriched uranium necessary for making bombs, that strategy works only if Iran sends away most of its enriched uranium and stops enriching more. Under the Turkey/Brazil deal, Iran would give up only half its enriched uranium and didn’t promise to stop producing it. By most estimates, the deal would leave Iran with enough enriched uranium to produce at least one bomb.

One day after Turkey and Brazil declared themselves to be Iran’s enablers, the Obama administration announced that China and Russia – surprisingly – have said that they are open to economic sanctions against Iran. Mr. Obama has courted them because Russia is Iran’s largest trading partner and China buys lots of Iranian oil. If they don’t renege, their agreement clears the way for the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to approve sanctions. Until Dec. 31, Turkey and Brazil are two of the council’s 10 non-permanent members, which explains Iran’s outreach to them.

Proposed sanctions include a tighter weapons embargo, the right to search shipments to Iran and a list of companies and individuals barred from trade. Still, they’re seen as fairly weak. Even though some companies may impose tougher sanctions, Iran still might be able to cheat. But sanctions could delay the day when Iran gets too close to nuclear capability for the West to ignore. Israel has bombed Iraq and Syria to cut off nuclear development. Something like that, perhaps carried out by the United States or a group of allies, could be necessary again.

If sanctions don’t end Iran’s nuclear ambitions, they at least would be a step – if Iran gets too close to building a bomb – toward proving that armed intervention is the only remaining option to avoiding a Middle East nuclear arms race