WarSclerotic

Israel-Hezbollah War? Iran holds key–Benny Avni – NYPOST.com.

Four years after the last war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Middle East is rife with expectations of another round. “The July War Is Not Over” was yesterday’s headline In the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar.

In fact, neither Israel nor Hezbollah wants to fight just now — but it’s Iran that holds the key.

That’s a big problem for the Obama administration, which has organized its Mideast efforts around the attempt to solve the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. War on Israel’s northern border would suspend (at best) those negotiations — thereby stalling US diplomacy in the region.

Four years ago, Israel launched an air assault and limited ground attack in retaliation for a July 12, 2006, cross-border Hezbollah attack that killed three Israeli soldiers and left two missing in action. But airpower proved less effective than hoped — and Israel suffered an unprecedented attack on its civilian centers during that Second Lebanon War.

Also in that war, Israel’s enemies discovered a new and increasingly effective weapon, harnessing “international law” (war-governing treaties that are signed between states but don’t apply to militias) to accuse Israel of war “crimes.”

As it is yet to find an effective answer to such challenges, Jerusalem is very reluctant to relaunch hostilities now.

This, even though Hezbollah is stronger now than it was before. Its spokesmen increasingly boast of their shiny new weapons and their ability to hit undisclosed “target banks” inside Israel — targets that, unlike in 2006, include major cities in the center of the country.

Last week, the Israeli Defense Force released aerial photographs showing numerous missiles deployed near and in villages in southern Lebanon — that is, in areas where, under the UN Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 war, the only weapons should be those of the Lebanese Army and of UNIFIL, the international force that was deployed to enforce that resolution.

French troops operating as part of UNIFIL are regularly harassed. In recent weeks, “villagers” stoned several contingents of French soldiers and stole their vehicles; the “locals” have also prevented French forces from entering areas UNIFIL is supposed to inspect for illegal weapons.

(Why they bothered keeping UNIFIL out is another question, since the “inspectors” mostly turn their backs when they see any illegal Hezbollah activities.)

Last Friday, the UN Security Council issued a statement claiming that all 15 of its members “deplore” the attacks on the French UNIFIL troops. But (as always), the council failed to name the entity it deplored. The statement didn’t even mention Hezbollah, which everyone in the region knows is behind the attacks.

In other words, Hezbollah can expect to keep growing stronger without war — whereas it took a heavy beating in the open fighting. In particular, it’s built a stronger political position in Lebanon — but could lose it if it’s blamed for the nationwide destruction that a new war with Israel would bring.

Thus, for all its bravado (it celebrates the war as the greatest Arab “victory” ever over Israel), Hezbollah has little appetite for a repeat.

But it might be unable to say no if its benefactor and master, the Islamic Republic of Iran, demands action against Israel.

Right now, the Iranian regime fears it will soon begin to feel the pinch of various new sanctions imposed by the Security Council, the European Union and the United States. It might see a new Lebanese war as the best way to divert everyone’s attention away from its nuclear program.

Nor is Hezbollah the only proxy army available to Tehran: Founding and arming the Lebanese group worked so well at extending its influence over the region that Iran repeated the trick by becoming Hamas’ patron, too.

So Obama’s central Mideast goal (an Israeli-Palestinian deal) is at Iran’s mercy. Tehran, meanwhile, can aid its prime objective (going nuclear) by throwing a wrench into US diplomacy. And if it does go nuclear, it can use its proxies even more readily, with vastly reduced fear of retaliation.

Obama’s Middle East team should give up on the Palestinian “track” for now, and focus like a laser on Iran instead. Unless it’s defanged, no solution to any of the intractable regional disputes will be possible.

WPR Article | UAE Toughens Stance over Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions.

Tension between Iran and the United Arab Emirates is rising after the UAE became the first Gulf state to publicly signal endorsement of military force to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, should peaceful efforts to resolve the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program fail. The UAE also restricted Iran’s use of Dubai to imports goods sanctioned by the United Nations and the United States.

In a statement, the UAE Foreign Ministry described recorded remarks made by UAE ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, at a conference in Colorado as “inaccurate.” Nonetheless, the remarks offer a rare insight into the thinking behind closed doors of a key U.S. ally, and reflect mounting UAE frustration with Iran’s refusal to resolve a dispute over the Islamic Republic’s longstanding occupation of three strategic islands at the entrance of the Strait of Hormuz.

In his remarks, Otaiba described a nuclear-armed Iran as the foremost threat to the UAE, and one that needs to be neutralized at whatever cost. In doing so, he signaled growing recognition in the Gulf that the Obama administration was unlikely to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, something that many have argued would reduce regional tension and make Iran more amenable to a peaceful resolution of the nuclear standoff. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia stressed the importance of the linkage during his visit to Washington last month.

Otaiba’s remarks also indicated a preference between two perceived evils — a U.S. or an Israeli strike — should military action become a reality. Gulf officials fear that an Israeli strike would inflame popular emotions, particularly among Shiites, far more than a U.S. operation and would therefore put their regimes in a more precarious position. Ironically, Saudi Arabia last month denied reports that it would allow Israeli warplanes access to Saudi airspace in case of an Israeli pre-emptive attack.

Asked at the Colorado conference whether he would favor U.S. force to stop the Iranian nuclear program, Otaiba described the UAE as the country most threatened by Iran. Contrasting the threat against the UAE with the danger a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to the U.S., Otaiba said that a nuclear Iran would “threaten the peace process, it will threaten balance of power, it will threaten everything else, but it will not threaten you. . . . Our military . . . wakes up, dreams, breathes, eats, sleeps the Iranian threat. It’s the only conventional military threat our military plans for, trains for, equips for. . . . There’s no country in the region that is a threat to the UAE [besides] Iran.”

Otaiba’s remarks followed the disclosure via satellite imagery of Iranian military installations on Abu Musa, the largest of the three occupied islands. The installations included three missile launch pads, an elaborate underground market, and a sports field with the words “Persian Gulf” emblazoned on it — a provocative reminder of Iran’s hegemonic view of a region the Gulf states describe as the Arab Gulf. UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan last month stopped short of comparing Iran’s occupation of the islands to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. “Iran refuses to allow us to send teachers, doctors and nurses. I am not comparing Iran to Israel, but Iran should be more careful than others,” Al Nahayan said.

The UAE has worked to ensure that its security is closely linked to U.S. and European security interests. In May, French President Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurated France’s first military base in the region, in Abu Dhabi. The base, which comprises three sites on the banks of the Strait of Hormuz, houses a naval and air base as well as a training camp, and is home to 500 French troops. Alongside other smaller Gulf states, the UAE has also agreed to the deployment of U.S. anti-missile batteries on its territory. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are expected to spend up to $100 billion on arms procurement in the next five years.

Despite their differences over the pace of economic integration among the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the UAE and Saudi Arabia have adopted a tougher stance toward Iran than fellow member states Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar, some of whom have had recent problems of their own with the Islamic republic. Kuwait disclosed in May that it had dismantled an Iranian espionage group. By contrast, Bahrain, with a majority Shiite population, is believed to be close to signing a deal for the import of Iranian gas.

With his remarks, Otaiba signaled further that the UAE was willing to pay a price for stopping Iranian nuclear proliferation, and could afford to do so now that Abu Dhabi had cemented its predominance among the UAE emirates following last year’s financial crisis in Dubai. Iran has threatened retaliatory steps in response to the recent freezing by the UAE central bank of accounts of 40 entities and an individual blacklisted by the U.N. for assisting Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. There have also been contradictory reports recently that UAE airports had refused to refuel flights by the Iranian airlines, Iran Air and Mahan Air. Iran does $12 billion a year worth of trade with the UAE, and relies on freewheeling Dubai, as well as Ras al Khaimah, another UAE emirate, for the import of goods, many of which fall under U.N. or U.S. sanctions.

“There will be backlash, and there will be problems with people protesting and rioting and [being] very unhappy that there is an outside force attacking a Muslim country,” Otaiba was quoted as saying in Colorado. “That is going to happen no matter what.”

But he added, “If you are asking me, ‘Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran,’ my answer is still the same: We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.”

James M. Dorsey, a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, writes about ethnic and religious conflict.

Photo: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touring Iran’s uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, Iran, 2008 (Photo by the Web site of the president of Iran).

Our World: A war on whose terms?

We are entering troubling times. The conviction that war is upon us grows with each passing day. What remains to be determined is who will dictate the terms of that war – Iran or Israel.

Iran has good reason to go to war today. The regime is teetering on the brink of collapse. Last week, the bellwether of Iranian politics and the commercial center of the country – the bazaar – abandoned the regime. In 1979, it was only after the bazaar merchants abandoned the shah that the ayatollahs gained the necessary momentum to overthrow the regime.

Last Tuesday the merchants at the all-important Teheran bazaar closed their shops to protest the government’s plan to raise their taxes by 70 percent. Merchants in Tabriz and Isfahan quickly joined the protest. According to the Associated Press, the regime caved in to the merchants demands and cancelled the tax hike. And yet the strike continued.

According to The Los Angeles Times, to hide the fact that the merchants remain on strike, on Sunday the regime announced that the bazaar was officially closed due to the excessive heat. The Times also reported that the head of the fabric traders union in the Teheran bazaar was arrested for organizing an anti-regime protest. The protest was joined by students. Regime goons attacked the protesters with tear gas and arrested and beat a student caught recording the event.

Crucially, the Times reported that by last Thursday the bazaar strike had in many cases become openly revolutionary. Citing an opposition activist, it claimed, “By Thursday, hundreds of students and merchants had gathered in the shoemakers’ quarter of the old bazaar, chanting slogans [such] as, “Death to Ahmadinejad,” “Victory is God’s,” “Victory is near” and “Death to this deceptive government.”

The merchants’ strike is just one indication of the regime’s economic woes. According to AP, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is under pressure to carry out his pledge to cut government subsidies for food and fuel. Although he supports the move, he fears the mass protests that would certainly follow its implementation.

FrontPage Magazine’s Ryan Mauro noted earlier this week that there is growing disaffection with the regime in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps itself. A recent documentary produced by the Guardian featured four IRGC defectors speaking of the discord in the ranks. The regime is so frightened of defection among the IRGC that it has removed many older members and replaced them with poor young men from the countryside.

The regime’s fear of its opposition has caused it to crack down on domestic liberties. Last week the regime issued hairstyle guidelines for men. Spiked hair and ponytails are officially banned as decadent.

On Sunday Mohammed Boniadi, the deputy head of Teheran’s school system, announced that starting in the fall, a thousand clerics will descend on the schools to purge Western influence from the halls of learning. As he put it, the clerics’ job will be to make students aware of “opposition plots and arrogance.”

These moves to weaken Western influence on Iranian society are of a piece with the regime’s new boycott against “Zionist” products. Late last month Ahmadinejad signed a law outlawing the use of products from such Zionist companies as Intel, Coca Cola, Nestle and IBM.

ALL OF these moves expose a hysterical fear of the Iranian people on the part of their unelected leaders. Regime strongmen themselves acknowledge that they have never faced a greater threat. For instance, the Guardian quoted IRGC commander Maj.-Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari saying recently, “Although last year’s sedition did not last more than around eight months, it was much more dangerous than the [Iran-Iraq] war.” As is its wont, the regime has chosen to defend itself against this threat by repressing its internal enemies and attacking its external enemies. In an article last month in Forbes, Reza Kahlili, a former CIA spy in the IRGC who maintains connections inside the regime, claimed that the IRGC has set up concentration camps throughout the country in anticipation of mass arrests in any future opposition campaign against the regime.

As for the outside world, Iran is ratcheting up both its nuclear brinksmanship and its preparations for yet another round of regional war. In an announcement on Sunday, Iran’s atomic chief Ali Akbar Salehi told the Iranian news agency ISNA that Iran has produced 20 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20 percent. Salehi also said that Iran is building fuel plates to operate a nuclear reactor.

Iran’s nuclear progress has frightened the Arab world so much that for the first time, Arab leaders are giving public voice to the concerns they have expressed behind closed doors. In public remarks last week, UAE Ambassador to the US Youssef al-Otaiba made a series of statements whose bluntness was unprecedented. Otaiba said that the Arab states of the Persian Gulf cannot live with a nuclear Iran, that he supports military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities and that if the US fails to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, the Arab states of the Gulf will abandon their alliances with the US in order to appease Iran. Otaiba rejected the notion that a nuclear-armed Iran can be contained stating, “Talk of containment and deterrence really concerns me and makes me very nervous.”

Otaiba’s concerns were echoed last Friday by Kahlili in a public lecture at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He asserted that if Iran develops a nuclear arsenal it will use it to attack Israel, the Gulf states and Europe.

IRAN IS seeking to divert international attention away from its internal troubles and limit the possibility of a strike against its nuclear installations by inciting war with Israel. On Sunday the regime announced that Ahmadinejad will soon visit Beirut. Recent activities by Iran’s Hizbullah proxy in Lebanon indicate that if his visit goes through – and even if it doesn’t – the announcement signals that Iran intends to fight another proxy war against Israel through Hizbullah.

As the IDF announced in a press briefing last Wednesday, Iran has tightened its control over Hizbullah forces. It recently sent Hossein Mahadavi, commander of the IRGC’s Jerusalem Force, to Beirut to take over Hizbullah’s operations.

As for Hizbullah, it is poised to launch a witch-hunt against its domestic opponents.

Hizbullah MP Muhammad Ra’ad said earlier this month that the proxy army will “hunt down,” collaborators. As MP Sami Gemayel noted in an interview with LBC translated by MEMRI, this that means is that Hizbullah is poised to conduct mass extrajudicial arrests and wholesale terrorization of Lebanese civilians.

Likewise, Hizbullah-allied former Lebanese minister Wiam Wahhab effectively called for armed attacks against UNIFIL forces in south Lebanon in a recent television interview translated by MEMRI. His remarks followed some 20 Hizbullahordered assaults on UNIFIL forces in Shi’ite villages in recent days. French forces were the victim of two of those assaults and Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri travelled to Paris last week in the hopes of convincing the French government not to remove French forces from the country.

And of course, all of these provocations are being carried out as Hizbullah deploys its forces south of the Litani River.

According to the IDF briefing last week, those forces have some 40,000 short- and medium-range missiles at their disposal.

Those missiles have been augmented by hundreds of guided long-range missiles north of the Litani with warheads capable of bringing down skyscrapers in Tel Aviv.

Moreover, they are further augmented by Syria’s massive Scud missile and artillery arsenals and by a frightening potential fifth column among Israeli Arabs in the Galilee. Sunday’s assault on police forces operating in the Syrian-allied Druse village of Majdal Shams on the Golan Heights is a mild indicator of what is liable to transpire in Israeli Arab villages in the North in the next war.

For its part, the IDF is seeking to deter such an attack. Wednesday’s briefing, in which the IDF made clear that it knows where Hizbullah has hidden its missiles, was aimed at deterring war.

Unfortunately, the IDF’s warnings will likely have no effect on Hizbullah. If Hizbullah goes to war, it will do so not to advance its own interests, but to protect Iran. Here of course, there is nothing new.

Four years ago this week Hizbullah launched its war against Israel and not because doing so served its interests.

Hizbullah launched its war against Israel because Iran ordered it to do so. Then as now, Iran sought a war with Israel in Lebanon to divert international attention from its nuclear weapons program. And now, with the Iranian regime besieged by its own people as never before, and with just a short period required for it to cross the nuclear threshold, Iran has more reason than ever to seek a distraction in Lebanon to buy time for itself.

Four years ago, Israel was taken in by Iran’s Lebanese proxy war. Rather than keeping its eye on Teheran, it swallowed Hizbullah’s bait and waged a war against hapless Lebanon while leaving Iran and its Syrian toady immune from attack. The results were predictably poor and strategically disastrous.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak has given Iran every reason to believe that Israel will respond in an identical manner if Hizbullah strikes again today. In repeated statements over the past several months, he has maintained that Israel will blame Lebanon – not Iran or Syria – for any Hizbullah action against it.

Four years ago, Israel was reined in by the Bush administration. Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice ordered Israel not to attack Syria despite the fact that without Syrian support for Hizbullah, there could have been no war. Israel obliged her both because its leaders lacked the strategic sense to recognize the folly of Rice’s demands and because the Bush administration was Israel’s firm ally.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu just returned from yet another visit with US President Barack Obama. Although the background music was cheerful, from statements by both men it is clear that Obama is not a credible ally. He does not understand or accept the strategic logic behind the US alliance with Israel and will not support Israel in future armed conflicts.

Indeed, in the face of the growing Iranian menace, Obama insists on limiting his interests to the irrelevant faux peace process with Fatah while allowing Iran and its proxies to run wild.

What this means is that for better or for worse, under Obama the US is far less relevant than it was four years ago. And this frees Netanyahu to fight the coming war on Israel’s terms. Iran’s domestic troubles and the Arab world’s genuine fear of a nuclear armed Iran provide Israel with a rare opportunity to radically shift the balance of power in the region for the better. It is time for Netanyahu to lead.

Russia: Iran moving closer to nuclear weapons, sanctions could work – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Medvedev’s remarks reveal growing Russian impatience with its longtime ally Iran in its dispute with the international community over its nuclear program.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday Iran was gaining the ability to build a nuclear bomb, remarks welcomed in Washington as a sign of growing international unity behind a tough line toward Tehran.

Medvedev’s comments were the strongest criticism of Iran’s nuclear program to emerge from the Kremlin under either Medvedev or his predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

A major goal of U.S. President Barack Obama’s “reset” of relations with Moscow has been winning Russian backing for a tougher international line toward Iran.

“It is obvious that Iran is moving closer to possessing the potential which in principle could be used for the creation of nuclear weapons,” Medvedev told a meeting of Russia’s ambassadors in Moscow.

“Iran is not acting in the best way,” Medvedev said. He called on Tehran to “show openness and cooperate” with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The United States, major European Union powers and Israel say they suspect that Iran is trying to build atomic weapons under the cover of its civilian nuclear program. Iran denies this and says it has a right to nuclear power.

“This is about as blunt as Medvedev has ever been about Iran’s nuclear program and should be taken as a good sign of increased international unity on Iran’s nuclear program,” an Obama administration official said in Washington.

Urged on by the Obama administration, Russia voted for a United Nations Security Council resolution on June 9 to impose new sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. Medvedev said he was still sceptical of sanctions but they could prod diplomacy.

“I have said before that sanctions as a rule do not have the desired results. Their role is to send a signal, to stimulate the negotiating process,” Medvedev said.

Moscow has been Tehran’s main nuclear partner, building Iran’s first nuclear power plant near the city of Bushehr, which is set to begin operations later this year. Russia was also swift to congratulate Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on a disputed election victory last year.

But Russia has been dismayed by Iran’s failure to disclose full details of its nuclear work and Medvedev has expressed growing concern in recent months about Tehran’s nuclear aims.

Kremlin officials were furious when the Iranian leader admonished Medvedev in May for bowing to what Ahmadinejad said was U.S. pressure to agree sanctions.

The Kremlin chief, who diplomats say still defers to Putin on major policy issues such as Iran, said last month he was alarmed by U.S. assertions that Iran had enough fuel for a nuclear weapon.

Resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue would involve a great deal of patience and energy, but the consequences of failure to deal with it would be grave, Medvedev said.

“At the moment, patience is demanded and the speediest resumption of productive dialogue with Tehran,” Medvedev said.

“If diplomats let this chance go, then this will become a collective failure for the entire international community.”

	Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
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