Benjamin Netanyahu and Rahm Emanuel

On Wednesday afternoon, May 26, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel handed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an invitation from President Barack Obama to meet him for a working meeting at the White House Tuesday, June 1 on his way home from Canada.
Emanuel’s visit – he arrived on May 23 – was described as a private family trip to celebrate his son’s bar-mitzvah in Jerusalem. But the US president found his right-hand man’s journey useful for tying the hands of prime minister Netanyahu and Defense minister Ehud Barak, in case they contemplated mounting an attack on the 800 Syrian Scud-D missiles piled up on the Lebanese border to prevent them reaching the hands of the Lebanese terrorist Hizballah – or even going ahead and striking Iran’s nuclear sites.
(See the first item in this issue on the placement of these missiles on the Syria-Lebanon border).
A day earlier, May 22, John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was dispatched to Damascus to try and dissuade Syrian president Bashar Assad from shifting the Scuds the last few miles into Lebanon.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources in Washington report the Obama administration is going all out to ward off a military showdown in the Middle East because it would interfere with his plans to resume nuclear dialogue with Iran.
But Thursday, May 27, brought high noon closer. Netanyahu flew off on trips to Paris and North America that morning and Israel’s five-day homeland defense exercise drew to a close. However, the night before, Syria placed all its armed forces on combat readiness for the first time since the 2006 Lebanon War and ordered its missile units to take up firing positions.
(See HOT POINTS below for details)

Washington turns its face to diplomacy, not war

In the midst of these war signals, Washington forged ahead with its policy of diplomatic engagement for solving conflicts on all fronts – against all the odds. But President Obama did not neglect to shore up his assets ahead of the talks by sending a nuclear submarine to cross the strategic Strait of Hormuz past the Iranian coast Thursday, May 27.
Tuesday, May 25, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton summed up her two days of talks with Chinese officials in Beijing to reporters: “We discussed at some length the shortcomings of the recent proposal put forward by Iran in its letter to the IAEA. There are a number of deficiencies (in the Iranian-Turkish-Brazilian nuclear agreement) which do not answer the concerns of the international community.”
Her comment could be taken to mean that there is some basis for discussion in the new proposal and if the flaws are repaired, the agreement may be acceptable.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly 446 of May 21 (It May Not Be All Bad, Say Obama’s People) outlined the changes the administration wants to see.
The day before (Monday, May 24), Washington asked the UN Secretary General to pass on the message that if the Brazilian-brokered enriched uranium deal for half of Iran’s stock to be swapped for nuclear rods in Turkey were accepted and implemented, it might serve as an important confidence-building measure for opening the door to a negotiated resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue.
In other words, there was room for discussion.
To persuade the American public that the administration was not again bending over backward to let Iran get away scot free, a leak was dropped into the Tuesday, May 25, US media revealing that Gen. David Petraeus, chief of the US Central Command, had last September signed an order authorizing clandestine military operations in allied and hostile Middle East, Central Asian and Horn of African nations for surveillance and cooperation with local security forces. Iran appeared from the document to be singled out for covert operations – most likely for gathering intelligence about the country’s nuclear program or identifying dissident groups that might be useful in a future military offensive.
It was hoped in administration circles that people would forget how cynically Tehran trifled with the sharp ultimatums President Obama slapped down exactly a year ago when Iran was discovered to have hidden a clandestine uranium enrichment facility (since abandoned) in a mountain near the holy city of Qom.

Israeli leaders agreeable

In Jerusalem, Netanyahu had no trouble giving Rahm Emanuel the same promise Assad gave Senator Kerry, namely that, barring unexpected events, he would do his utmost to cool border tensions and keep them from flaring into a fully-fledged war.
The Israeli prime minister was delighted with the affection showered on him now by the White House in Washington after a year of Obama’s icy aloofness – which, incidentally, helped him keep his government coalition on an even keel. He expects his White House welcome Tuesday, June 1 will be a lot warmer than the last two.
For both Israeli and Syrian leaders, “barring unexpected events” is a catchall caveat in case they choose to be let off the hook of their promises.
Netanyahu in particular may not be allowed to stay the course of restraint in the face of rising criticism from Israel’s military and security chiefs.
(This is discussed in detail in the next article.)

Gabi Ashkenazi

When the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu returns from his working meeting with President Barack Obama in the second half of next week, he and defense minister Ehud Barak will have their hands full dealing with disgruntled generals and security chiefs, our military and Middle East sources report.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi is of one mind with the policy-makers (and Washington) on the need for utmost military restraint, but most national security and military leaders maintain that the 800 Scud D missiles, which are capable of carrying nuclear or chemical warheads, pose too great a peril for Israel to allow them cross into Lebanon and become operational.
They offer three arguments:
1. Israel stood idly by for the build-up of thousands of Iranian and Syrian missiles smuggled to the Lebanese Hizballah, but the Scud D missiles’ presence in Syrian bases minutes away from the Lebanese border must be seen – even in Jerusalem – as the last straw which broke the camel’s back.
The scenario of a chemical attack on Tel Aviv was drilled Tuesday, May 25, the third day of the Israel Home Front defense drill, ‘Turning Point 4’ (May 23-27).
The results and conclusions were disturbing.
More than 65 percent of the population lacks protection against an attack using toxic chemicals. Israel may suffer an estimated 3,300 casualties including up to 200 dead in conventional Syrian or Hizballah long range missile attacks, but if those missiles carry chemical warheads, the casualty figure would soar to 16,000 and leave more than 200,000 homeless.
Tiny Israel with its small population cannot possible afford casualties on this scale, say the government’s critics.
2. Iran and Syria will use the Scud D menace as a card for squeezing more concessions when the US faces Iran in negotiations on the new enriched uranium swap deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil. By allowing this to happen, Israel will strengthen Tehran’s hand and help bolster the hostile “Northern Alliance” of Iran, Turkey, Brazil and Hizballah.
3. In the view of most Israeli military and security leaders, if Netanyahu and Barak hold back from a timely strike against the menacing Scud missiles, they will ultimately shrink back from hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities as well. This pattern of non-response will lead Israel into coming to terms alongside the Obama administration with a nuclear-armed Iran.
Lawmaker Tzahi Hanegbi, Chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, has been going around later warning that Iran’s attainment of nuclear weapons would pose Israel with mortal danger. He speaks for a large body of well-informed security and military chiefs – and is not the only one.

Israel’s top security-military echelons up in arms

DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s military sources disclose comments at a closed-door lecture by General (res.) Amos Gilad, senior political-security advisor at the Defense Ministry, which are gaining ground among broad circles of high-ranking IDF and junior officers.
After serving a series of Israeli defense ministers as senior strategic adviser, Gilad is now voicing in private circles, exasperation with the policies Israel has followed in the decade since Bashar Assad came to power and vis-à-vis Hizballah. These policies, he maintains, were costly in terms of Israel’s deterrent strength and have left the country exposed to the current outburst of aggression from the North.
Unusually outspoken, Gen. Gilad says Israel came away from the 2006 Lebanon war, which was triggered by a Hizballah cross-border attack, with hardly a single strategic gain. Its outcome was harvested by Syria and Hizballah to upgrade Hizballah and transform the terrorist militia, ordered by the UN Security Council to disband, into a professional military force for confronting Israel’s armed forces.
Gilad asserted that the relative calm of the ensuing four years on Israel’s borders with Syria and Lebanon owed nothing to Israel’s deterrent power, as defense minister Barak and Chief of staff Ashkenazi were fond of stating; they owe everything, he says, to the quiet needed for Iran and Syria to finish arming Hizballah with the sophisticated tools of war for attacking Israel at the earliest opportunity.

Assad is not susceptible to diplomacy, only force

Regarding Israel’s waning deterrent strength, the Defense Ministry adviser drew attention to the fluctuations in Syrian ruler’s bellicosity, which peaked before Israel demolished his North Korean-built plutonium reactor in September 2007 and damped down right afterwards. But when Assad realized eighteen months later that the attack was a one-off, he went back to his threatening rhetoric for Israel and the open pursuit of brutal steps for subjugating Lebanon.
By May, 2010, his stridency and aggressiveness had reverted to their old level.
It’s about time we took Bashar Assad’s measure, said the defense ministry adviser. We all know he is tremendously cunning, but we have to remember that this guy gets up every morning, looks in the mirror and asks himself – What can I do today better than my late father (Syrian President Hafez Assad, who ruled Syria with an iron fist from 1971 to 2000)?
Gilad stresses that Bashar’s driving force is the urge to outdo his father.
Therefore, because Hafez forged a strong alliance with Tehran to preserve his regime at the head of his minority Allawite sect, Bashar felt compelled to deepen that alliance still further. In following in his father’s footsteps, he constantly needs to go that extra step.
The Obama administration and Israel have made no impression on the Syrian ruler because they missed his most basic motive, which is the compulsion to beat his father at his own game, according to Gilad. It explains why he is so unresponsive to any form of diplomacy rooted in rational political expediency, or even gain. But he is very sensitive to any display of force, especially if it menaces his dynastic grip on the regime
Ex-General Gilad’s arguments have been making the rounds and influencing members of the IDF high command.
The high command and its ministerial supporters are increasingly critical of the way the Netanyahu-Barak duo is handling the 800-Scud D missile crisis. Their clamor for Israel to take the weapons out before they cross into Lebanon is getting louder.

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.

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.