WarSclerotic

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Tags: Erdogan Intelligence Pro-Hamas flotilla

Dr. Hakan Fidan, new Turkish MIT chief

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan is clearly spoiling for more trouble with Israel. This is manifested by the steps which are revealed here by DEBKAfile‘s military and intelligence sources. The peaceful outcome of the Rachel Corrie incident Saturday, June 5, and Israel’s efforts to keep the crisis under control have had no effect on his determination to raise rather than de-escalate Turkish-Israeli friction.
Friday, Erdogan made sure his close aides leaked word to the media that he was preparing a large wave of flotillas to challengeIsrael’s blockade, to be escorted next time by armed Turkish warships with himself possibly on board.

To this, our sources add:
1. The prime minister’s office in Ankara is forking out millions of dollars to the IHH (Insani Yardim Vakfi), the Istanbul-based terrorist group linked to al Qaeda and Hamas, with orders to purchase 8-10 large ships for a formidable fleet to challenge the Israeli Navy and its enforcement of the 20-mile blockade of the Gaza Strip.
This is the second time he is recruiting the IHH terrorists who assaulted Israeli commandos boarding the Mavi Marmara on May 31, leaving nine people dead and 45 injured in consequence.

The Washington Post Sunday called for the Erdogan’s government’s ties to the IHH to be one focus of any international investigation into the Marmara incident, pointing to its support for Hamas, which the United States has named as a terrorist entity. The paper called foreign minister Ahmet Davutogolu’s statement that the Israeli attack “is like 9/11 for Turkey” obscene.

2. Last week, ahead of the Marmara incident, Erdogan began deploying at the Turkish end ofCyprus air, naval and marine units, holding them ready to combat Israeli takeovers of Gaza-bound vessels. He was only restrained from sending them into action by the last-minute intervention of President Barack Obama’s NSA James Jones and President Nicolas Sarkozy’s chef de bureau who, according to DEBKAfile‘s Washington and Paris sources, threatened him with isolation in NATO and Europe if he went ahead.
Saturday, the Turkish leader had his aides leak to the media that he was seriously thinking of leading the next flotilla in person to dramatize his confrontation with Israel.
3. At home, the Turkish prime minister shored up his intelligence ranks ahead of his planned showdown with Israel, replacing professional directors for the first time in modern Turkish history with civilians, radical Muslims close to him personally.
DEBKAfile names them for the first time here as Hakan Fidan, the former head of TIKA, the Turkish International & Development Agency, who is appointed head of the Central Turkish Intelligence Agency – MIT, the equivalent of the Israel Mossad; and Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler, who is the new Undersecretary for Public Order and Security, who in fact directs Turkey’s special operations against terrorists.
By these appointments, the Turkish prime minister put paid to any lingering hopes still cherished by some circles in Israel of preserving the long-held back channels to Ankara.

And finally, Turkey’s state prosecutors are instructed to prepare charges of murder and piracy on the high seas against Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, defense minister Ehud Barak and chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gaby Ashkenazy.

D-Day – June 6, 1944 – Then and Now.

By Alan Caruba Saturday, June 5, 2010

There is a cruel calculus of war. It is the number of casualties required to win. Beyond that, it is the consequences of losing.

Sixty-six years ago, on June 6, 1944, the greatest armada of ships and men laid siege to the beaches of Normandy, France, in an invasion that would put an end to the Nazi conquest of Europe.

The invasion was divided into sectors involving U.S., Canadian, and British troops, including airborne. Conservative estimates are that the U.S. alone lost 4,696. The U.K. lost 1,043. The Canadians lost 1,204. The total is 8,443 and, in general, it is believed to have been closer to 9,000.

As the battles raged on, pushing into Germany, some American troops under the Supreme Allied Command of Dwight Eisenhower came upon the Nazi concentration camps. Eisenhower ordered all possible photos to be taken and that Germans from the surrounding villages be required to see the camps and even be made to bury the dead.

In words to this effect, Eisenhower said, “Get it all on record now, get the films, get the witnesses, because somewhere down the road of history, some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

Having previously attacked al Qaeda in Afghanistan, beginning in 2003 American and allied forces engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom, invading Iraq. Between then and now, the total American losses have been just over 4,400 while the British have lost 179 and others 139 for a total of 4,720.

In seven years of combat to create a democratic government there, the losses have been half of what was lost in the D-Day invasion.

As Eisenhower predicted, in Iran and throughout the Middle East and everywhere else that Jews are hated, the Nazi Holocaust, the deliberate killing of six million Jews, is denied.

In the past week, the doyen of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas, demanded the Israelis “go home, to Germany, to Poland.” She could have added that the Israelis return to the Arab nations they had to flee following the founding of Israel in 1948 or the Russian émigrés who fled persecution in the former Soviet Union. There are six million Jews who call Israel their home.

The Israelis are home. After an exile of 2,000 years, they returned to their home and restored their nation.

On September 11, 2001, the attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. took approximately 3,000 American lives.

In late May, John Brennan, the Assistant to the President and Deputy Senior Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, gave a speech in which he described the people who flew commercial airliners into those buildings and who have not stopped plotting to kill more Americans as victims of “political, economic and social forces” who should not be described in “religious terms.”

He repeated the Obama administration’s assertion that the enemy is not “terrorism”, dismissing it as a “tactic” because, he said, terrorism is “a state of mind.” Then he added that the word “jihad” should not be applied to 9/11 and the subsequent attacks such as the Fort Hood murders.

Brennan described jihad is “a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community” adding “there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children.” Brennan denied the jihad that justified those murders.

Jihad has never really meant anything other than the total conquest of the world to impose Islam.

D-Day was the beginning of an epic struggle to restore and protect Western civilization against the barbarism of Nazism and every day that has passed prior to and since the establishment of Israel in 1948 has been part of this struggle, the legacy of that struggle.

Since the end of World War Two, Americans have sacrificed their lives in places like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, joining that struggle wherever freedom is challenged, wherever the barbarism of enslavement has asserted itself.

Does anyone think that the Israelis, on the frontlines of Western civilization in a barbaric region of the world, will not ultimately have to defend themselves against Iran?

That they are not now defending themselves against Turkey that has allied itself with the Palestinians who have no legitimate claim to Israel or Jerusalem, a city holy to Judaism and Christianity? Against a people who would dare to build a mosque within a short walk from ground zero in New York?

Does anyone think we should not have landed on the beaches of Normandy in 1944?

Does anyone think that freedom is not worth fighting for and even dying for?

In the wake of the Turkish terrorist flotilla incident, Charles Moore has made the blindingly obvious point — so obvious that the people who most need to acknowledge it are the last people on earth to do so. It is that those who defend Israel are undercut by Israel’s own utterly lamentable inability to make its case properly to the world. Moore writes:

Israel has fought so long, and usually so well, in real battles, but it seems to have forgotten how to fight in verbal ones. On the day of the flotilla incident, all the outraged governments were on the airwaves almost before anything had happened. But it took five and a half hours before the Israeli Ambassador in America appeared in public. Quite a lot of articulate people spoke up in Israel’s support – it really will be a black day when there are no articulate people to be found to defend the Jewish state – but they had no clear, coordinated, Israeli government message, and so their ‘innumerable guns’ were pointing in different directions.

Very true. But it’s actually worse even than Moore thinks. He observes:

Most of the world is not deeply interested in what happens in Israel, and probably does not want to be deluged with legalistic defences of particular actions. What it wants is a clear, calm, repeated case. It is a case – aimed more at public opinion than at foreign ministries – about freedom, democracy, a Western way of life and the need for the whole of the free world to fight terrorism.

So why doesn’t Israel make this case effectively? I would advance several reasons. Certainly, as Moore suggests, the Israeli government is organisationally dysfunctional and chaotic, riven by petty rivalries and crippled by the country’s ludicrous electoral system which locks in weak coalition governments. And yes, there is also indeed its lethal and self-fulfilling conviction that ‘the world will always be against us so there’s no point bothering to make the case’; and also the fact that, since it believes its moral case is so overwhelmingly obvious, it simply cannot get its head round the astonishing degree of ignorance, unreason and bigotry that it provokes in the west.

But worse even than this is Israel’s inability or refusal to acknowledge publicly – and maybe in private too – the true and devastating nature of the geopolitical drama in which it has such a pivotal role.

Presented with the fallacy driving western opinion that the Arab and Muslim war of annihilation against Israel is actually a dispute between Israel and the Palestinians over dividing up the land, Israel fails to set the record straight — and instead goes along with the fallacy.

Placed in the remarkable position in which the western world is requiring the victim of nine decades of exterminatory terror to make security concessions to its attackers even while they continue to attack it, Israel fails to challenge this unique double standard — and instead meekly plays along with the fiction and makes concession after concession to the Arabs, thus actually helping America, Britain and Europe to compromise its security and strengthen its attackers.

Faced with an American President who is throwing Israel under the global bus at a time when Iran is at the point of obtaining its nuclear genocide bomb, Prime Minister Netanyahu chooses not to appeal over Obama’s head to the great mass of staunchly supportive Christian Americans, who need to be told precisely what is being done in their name against the ally in the Middle East that they so passionately support and what the lethal consequences may be.

Moreover, despite the fact that what it has been facing for the past nine decades is at root not a war over land but a holy war, driven by the fanatical Islamic belief that not just the Jewish presence but the historical claim by the Jews to the land of Israel must be expunged altogether, Israel never presents itself as the victim of Islamic fanaticism, thus failing to drive home to the west the fact that Israel is the front line of the west’s own defences against the jihad.

In part, this failure to tell the world these home truths derives from a progressive weakening of Israel as a result of the Oslo debacle, which invested Arab terror and propaganda with both weaponry and diplomatic credibility and cut the ground from beneath the feet of anyone who wanted to reconnect Israel with reality.

In part, it derives from Israel’s extreme vulnerability. This means it can be bullied by America; and because it feels it cannot take on the entire world, it feels it must observe the rules of the diplomatic game – even if that game is patently rigged, unjust and irrational.

More disturbingly still, it is reluctant to admit even to itself that it is facing not a war over territory but an Islamic holy war. As has been said to me on more than one occasion by members of Israel’s establishment: ‘Since we are surrounded by many millions of Muslims, a religious war against us is far too terrifying for us to acknowledge’.

As a result Israel, which is understandably so preoccupied with the military onslaught against it, has failed to grasp what is perhaps the single most important fact about that Islamic holy war – a fact which was so graphically illustrated once again by the flotilla episode — that the principal strategy of the jihad is the manipulation of public opinion through intimidation, propaganda stunts and the suborning of the western intellectual establishment to a meta-narrative of lies.

Israel is up against psychological warfare, practised over many decades with a huge investment of funding, a high degree of professionalism and a very shrewd understanding of the credulousness of the western intelligentsia and their receptivity to lies. Yet Israel has simply refused to take any of this seriously. Failing to go onto the public offensive and provide a systematic antidote to the Big Lies being told year in, year out it has been reduced to bewildered attempts to defend itself in under three minutes against hostile BBC interviewers. And then it wonders why the world has turned against it.

For the Islamists, the real battleground is the mind, both in the Islamic and the western world. And that is the battleground that Israel has left empty – with the baleful consequences for all of us that we can now so clearly see.

Joshua Gleis: Another Middle East War on the Horizon.

A new war in the Middle East is looming on the horizon–one that could create a fundamental shift in the region, and whose repercussions would be felt around the world. Israel, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran are all feverishly preparing for war, even while declaring an interest in maintaining the status quo. One need not look any farther than World War I to remember that millions of lives can be lost due to happenstance. It would not be the first time a region teeming with armies ignited in war despite a stated desire for peace.

Rhetoric is at a high, even for the loquacious Middle East. Iran’s vice president recently threatened to “cut off Israel’s feet”, its parliamentary speaker promised a “final and decisive war”, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, added that the next conflict would be the “last war launched by the Zionists”. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has warned that Iran is provoking a war between Israel and Syria, while President Shimon Peres has declared the transfer of Syrian scud missiles to Hezbollah as unacceptable. Syria’s Bashar Assad recently chimed in as well, dismissing an Israeli offer made through Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev to cut ties with Iran and “resistance movements” in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights and a final peace agreement. All of this is translating into real actions that could lead to war. The Israeli military is quietly preparing for another conflict, drilling its forces and increasing its surveillance and reconnaissance. Syrian and Hezbollah forces were put on alert along their southern borders with Israel as the Jewish state distributed gas masks to its citizens and prepared their bunkers for war. Weapons transfers continue as Hezbollah militants drill for a fight. At this point, any miscalculation can set off a war.

The most likely culprit for war this summer appears to be the continued transfer of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah by Syria and Iran. Hezbollah has tens of thousands of rockets in its arsenal, and has increased the number of projectiles that can reach nearly any point in Israel. So many, in fact, that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated last month, “We are at a point now where Hezbollah has far more rockets and missiles than most governments in the world”. Former Director of the CIA George Tenet described Hezbollah as follows: “An organization with capability and worldwide presence, it is al-Qaeda’s equal, if not a far more capable organization… They are a notch above in many respects…” No country is more aware of this than Israel, which remains the main target of Hezbollah’s aggression. This week it was reported that Israel cancelled a planned strike on a Syrian-Hezbollah missile transfer at the last moment, likely under pressure from the United States.

To complicate matters further, Hezbollah today is a member of the Lebanese government, which has publicly backed its continued military buildup. This despite the fact that numerous UN Security Council resolutions and Lebanon’s own Taif Accord call for the radical Shiite group and all other militias in the country to be disarmed.

In the last round of fighting with Hezbollah back in the summer of 2006, Israel was unable to quell the thousands of rockets fired at its northern towns and cities. It was, however, able to eliminate the group’s medium range rocket and missile capabilities in the first hour or so of that war–an arsenal that threatened Tel Aviv and Israel’s heartland. This time around, however, Hezbollah has significantly increased and spread out its longer range projectiles, storing some just over the border in Syria, seemingly out of harm’s way.

Yet Hezbollah was not the only one to discover lessons from that war. Israel once again learned the hard way the dangers of retaliation versus preemption. While it had intelligence that Hezbollah was planning another kidnapping attack on its troops, it chose to wait for an attack before it struck out against Lebanon. Consequently, Hezbollah was permitted to attack on its own terms, ensuring a more positive outcome than was necessary. Israel had been loath to be seen as the aggressor back in 2006, and consequently suffered the consequences. Yet the truth is, regardless of the act or the response, many in the international community and particularly the Arab world, have a knee jerk reaction to Israeli activities that accuse the Jewish state of aggression and disproportionate response regardless of why it launched a military strike. A similar lesson on preemption was first painfully discovered during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when under pressure from the United States, Israel chose not to strike first as it had in the 1967 Six Day War. The differences between those two wars were startling.

In light of Israel’s past experiences, along with the continued supplying of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, the steady progress of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic programs, and the increasing threats publicly made against Israel, the possibility of another war breaking out appears increasingly likely. The question is whether Israel will succumb to US administration pressure to hold off on a preemptive strike, or whether it will decide it is time to strike first and lessen the blow of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. Such a scenario might be the lesser of all evils for Israel, but it would still be devastating for all sides.

Such a war could see Israel launching attacks against Hezbollah weapons depots in Lebanon and Syria in response to the continued transfer of weapons to the Shiite Islamist group. Hezbollah has declared its desire to bring the next round of fighting into Israel this time–a scenario hitherto unheard of for Israelis and one that the Jewish state will make every effort to prevent. If Hezbollah fighters or weapons are positioned in Syria, that country might also be forced to join the war, at least symbolically. Iran has declared that in the case of war between Syria and Israel, it would come to the defense of its Syrian ally. In such a scenario, Israel might even find a further opportunity to launch a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, although its effectiveness would be questionable.

Any way you slice it, this next war will not be a cakewalk for any side, which is why all parties continue to claim they do not want another fight. Yet the present situation is ultimately becoming untenable. If all of this reads like a fiction novel, let’s remember the lessons of World War I. It is without question that all sides are feverishly preparing for war even if they do not necessarily want to fight one. Hezbollah has increasingly become an agent of Iran, with its Revolutionary Guards playing an important role in the decision-making body of the organization, known as its Shura Council. The terrorist group will never recognize Israel or make peace with it. And so the only questions left to ponder are who is going to ignite the next war in the Middle East, and when? Don’t be surprised if Israel returns to the use of preemption to gain the upper hand and further its deterrence.

Dr. Joshua Gleis is an international security consultant and political risk analyst. He received his PhD and MALD from the Fletcher School, Tufts University. His forthcoming book is entitled “Withdrawing Under Fire: Lessons Learned from Islamist Insurgencies” (Potomac Books, Inc., Fall 2010).

Troubling Implications of Israel Flotilla Incident | Before It’s News.

By Sol Sanders – Washington Times – June 7, 2010

Encounters between the so-called Peace Flotilla and Israeli Defense Forces have far reaching implications beyond the conflict between the Jewish state and the Palestinians and their supporters.

Those concerns eventually will dictate the course of the U.S. fight against terrorism. Basic trends are now obscured by Washington’s desperate attempt to minimize friction with the umma, the whole of the 1.3 billion Muslim world.

But the clash has dramatized an ugly reality: a world torn apart by Islamic fanaticism verging on nihilism is increasingly abetted by old European and American leftism. That is further compounded by an attenuated economic recovery in the West. And that, in turn, threatens what has been until now rapidly growing export-led Eastern economies.

This economic and political devil’s brew includes:

• Turkish government knowledge/participation in the Flotilla operation, is a touchstone which casts doubt not only on Ankara’s role but questions hoped rapid modernization of other Muslim societies
• NATO’s eastern flank crumbles as member Turkey courts Iran, Russia and Syria and other pariahs, in an effort to establish regional hegemony.
• Israel poses a moral, political and military dilemma for the West as multidirectional hostile forces threaten Jerusalem’s existence, forfeiting any possibility of major compromises from the Jewish state — including land for peace.
• Pres. Barack Hussein Obama’s outreach to the Islamic world has failed — all signs pointing to growing radicalization and no evidence of emerging strong reformist leadership.

All these issues are complex, of course, and there will continue to be conflicting evidence. VIP voices will deny these interpretations because geopolitical reality is always difficult to acknowledge. But just as the collapse of European welfare statism has proved those critics clairvoyant who argued against creating socially dependent societies, so inevitably will the true nature of the present conflict become self-evident.

As anti-Nazi German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoeller acknowledged so long ago, the Jews – this time in their own country — are the canary in the mineshaft.

That Jerusalem underestimated the capacity for violence is intriguing. The Turkish activists’ affiliation to known Istanbul terrorists was well-known. Counter-intuitively, caution led the Israelis to incur casualties, grist for propaganda of the new alliance of red and green, the traditional Western radical left and Islamicist sympathizers. Their attempt to portray their provocative voyage as a mercy rescue ignored Gaza’s large food and vitals stocks provided through additional European and American aid millions., actually flowing through Israel and Egypt.

The Israelis now facing rapidly arming terrorist neighbors – Hamas in the south, Hezbollah in the north, and an increasingly unstable Jordan to their east – can take no new gambles on their security in any “peace process”. Israel’s Gaza withdrawal has proved a strategic catastrophe.

Meanwhile, the Tehran mullahs who arm these groups are moving relentlessly toward nuclear weapons at some indeterminate date. However credible Tehran’s threat to wipe Israel off the map, a nuclear Iran would dominate world oil and gas, a constant threat to regional stability and the world.

Turkey’s new role as an apologist for Tehran means turning its back on its half-century alliance with the U.S. It returns to an equivocal position, much like that during World War II when former German Chancellor Franz von Paper made Istanbul the Nazis’ overseas intelligence center.

As with more than one contemporary administration around the world [perhaps including the U.S.], it is hard to judge how much Turkish Prime Minister RecepTayyip Erdogan’s policies are Michaevelleian and how much amateur hour. But clearly a half century of top-down Kemalist secularism is fading rapidly under attack from a new Anatolian, conservative Muslim middle class — ironically in no small part created by huge post-World War II American aid. As an anti-Soviet ally, Washington pumped more than $12.5 billion in economic and $14 billion in military aid [in unadjusted dollars] into Turkey. This does not include vast sums spent on and from U.S. bases and training programs. In riposte, Turkey, of course, blocked US/NATO base transit during the Iraq invasion.

Although Ankara now runs a bilateral trade deficit because of energy dependence on Moscow, Turkish companies are investing heavily in Russia. In return Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has promised to build Turkey’s first nuclear power plant — ominous given Moscow’s collaboration in helping to lay the groundwork for Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Unlike the Korean War, and even Vietnam, where Turkey played a role, its 1800 troops in Afghanistan are smaller than Holland’s contribution and restricted to training. So much for calculations that its high birthrate and military tradition would make Turkey the principal NATO European fighter pool.

It was in Turkey, of course, where Pres. Obama launched his celebrated foreign policy initiative, an attempt to dialogue with a hoped for strengthening moderate Islam. Pres. Obama’s reiteration of American support for Turkish entry into the European Union rings hollow today with membership out of the question. To the contrary, how to deal with radicalization of Europe’s growing emigrant Muslims – including Turks — has become a chief West European headache. And nowhere has new, effective reformist Muslim leadership arisen.

Sol Sanders, veteran foreign correspondent and analyst, writes weekly for the Washington Times on the convergence of international politics and business-economics. solsanders@cox.net

Israel against the world – yet again.

Column One: Israel’s daunting task.

Parallels Between Present-Day Iran and Nazi Germany – R. James Woolsey on National Review Online.

“History doesn’t repeat itself,” said Mark Twain, “but it does rhyme.”

LobeLog.com.