WarSclerotic

DEBKA.

Netanyahu and Obama

President Barack Obama and his Iranian strategists, led by top adviser Daniel Shapiro, Middle East director at the National Security Council, assumed that Israel would be the toughest nut to crack when the deal with Russia went through for the activation of Iran’s nuclear reactor at Bushehr on Aug. 21.
Shapiro, who has a long personal acquaintance with the top Israeli political, military and intelligence chiefs, warned that Israel would not sit still for the plant to go operational. He therefore advised the president to forestall an Israeli operation against the reactor or some other strategic Iranian target with a very generous quid pro quo commensurate with the hazards perceived by Israel from its activation.
The official US and Russian claims that the reactor is just a power plant and therefore harmless – and anyway the spent fuel rods would be returned to Moscow – is refuted by the Netanyahu government, which diagnoses the reactor as an important link in the production of weapons-grade plutonium 239 and far from peaceful.
Yes, say the Israelis, it is a PWR-Pressurized Water Reactor type which uses uranium enriched to only about 4 percent. After its radiation in the reactor, the plutonium produced from this fuel would not be of the quality required to build an atomic bomb.
And yes, if the Iranians wanted to extract military-grade plutonium from this fuel, they would have to build a large separation plant and additional smaller processing facilities demanding sophisticated technologies unavailable to them at present.
Five major sticking points
At the same time, the Israelis have five very big caveats:
1. It is possible under certain operating conditions for the Bushehr reactor – even in its present incarnation – to be used to produce fuel of the “military” quality suitable for an atomic bomb.
2. The Iranians themselves are gearing up to start cutting Russia out of the picture and starting production of the nuclear fuel for activating the reactor locally.
Already, six days after receiving their first shipment of Russian fuel for Bushehr, the head of Iran’s nuclear program, Ali Akbar Salehi on Aug. 26 submitted a proposal to Moscow to “create a consortium under license” for Russia to share with Iran the work of producing nuclear fuel for this and future Iranian plants. Part would be produced in Russia and part in Iran.
After than, nothing will stand in Tehran’s way for taking charge of all parts of the production process. Iran’s commitments to inspections by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the NPT have never presented an obstacle to its well-documented practices of deception and concealment.
3. Iran is believed to be forging ahead with its military program at existing uranium enrichment facilities and others still undiscovered by Israel or the West. Iran has made no secret of its drive for technology to enrich uranium to a military level.
Western intelligence agencies are not sure what is going on at a mysterious place called Darkhovin on the Karun River just 20 kilometers south of Bushehr and not far from the Khuzestani capital, Ahwaz.
Under the control of the Revolutionary Guards – IRGC – it is suspected of being an underground nuclear weapons-related facility of an unknown nature, possibly a structure already built or in preparation for the extraction of plutonium 239 from the fuel rods provided by Russia. This has yet to be established.
Bushehr – the third missing link for high-grade plutonium production
There is no argument between Washington and Jerusalem about the true purpose of the heavy water facility in Arak which was obviously designed to produce weapon-grade plutonium.
According to our intelligence sources, no one in Washington can prove or disprove the theory put forward by Israeli experts that the completion of Bushehr gives Iran’s nuclear weapons program the missing link with Arak and Darkhovin to establish a three-way chain for the production of military-standard plutonium. Not enough is yet known to Israeli and Western intelligence about this.
The Americans and Russians maintain that only if Tehran is prevented from conducting uranium enrichment, will it turn to using the Bushehr reactor as a source of fissile material for nuclear weapons. This does not wash because the Iranians began pursuing the plutonium track parallel to the processing of uranium some time ago.
In fact, if Israel hadn’t three years ago attacked and destroyed the plutonium reactor North Korea was building in northern Syria as a component of the Iranian program, Iran would have already been in possession of enough plutonium to build at least one atom bomb.
4. Israel objects to Bushehr additionally because it provides a clandestine training ground for turning out a whole generation of Iranian nuclear scientists and technicians qualified to reinforce the clandestine production taking place at Natanz and Arak. The US government, like Israel, is well aware of the dangerous overlap of skills required for civilian and military nuclear projects and the consequent danger of proliferation presented by such a training program.
Bushehr gives Iran leeway to conceal more facilities, train more technicians
5. Some of the hazards presented by Iran’s active reactor in Bushehr should be obvious even to the layman and require no special expertise beyond common sense.
Even taking the naïve view that the plant has no military attributes and the Iranians will never use it to produce plutonium 239, its activation still renders it safe from attack because of the threat of environmental contamination. Since it is immune to attack, Iran can freely and safely transfer to the Bushehr reactor compound as many of the banned elements of their military program as they wish – and may have already done so – or even a complete arsenal of bombs.
These forbidden facilities will not be accessible to Russian and IAEA inspectors because they are concerned only with keeping the Iranians from misusing the spent fuel rods and will not go around the subsidiary installations surrounding the central core of the reactor.
Despite these formidable reservations, the administration was surprised to find two of Binyamin Netanyahu’s emissaries to Washington, Yitzhak Molcho and National Security Council Adviser Dr. Uzi Arad, ready for a deal whereby Israel would abstain from striking – or even protesting against – the Bushehr reactor so as not to raise the level of Middle East military tensions. In return, they asked the Obama administration to tone down his vocal advocacy of Palestinian statehood and his backing for the Palestinian demands in the forthcoming negotiations regarding permanent borders between Israel and the Palestinian state, the future of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees’ claim to return to their pre-1948 homes.
Netanyahu assumes a deal with Obama – and gets it wrong
Yet, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Jerusalem sources, on Friday, August 20, with the Bushehr startup only hours away and too late to stop, the Obama administration began reneging on the deal.
At a State Department press conference at which US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and special enovy Senator George Mitchell announced the start of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in Washington on Sept. 2, Mitchell spoke of American “bridging proposals” if necessary.
This was a diplomatic euphemism for a free US hand to inject its own proposals in an impasse. Since the beginning of the week, US sources have made it abundantly clear that such “bridging proposals” will represent independent Obama administration policies superimposed on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with regard to the key issues of permanent borders, Jerusalem, and security concerns.
To Israeli sources, made sensitive by long experience to big power attempts to impose solutions governing their security on the dispute with the Palestinians, Mitchell’s words felt like a betrayal of the tradeoff deal the Netanyahu government entered into for lining up behind Washington on the Bushehr project.
Dispelling any doubts in that regard, Washington stepped in again Monday, Aug. 23, to announce that prolonging Israel’s 10-month freeze on settlement construction after its expiry on Sept. 25, would top the agenda of the direct negotiations beginning next week.
Suddenly, the Netanyahu government felt cornered by Obama.
A standoff just beginning
After opting for inaction on the Bushehr reactor, he is to stand face to face with the Palestinians on Sept. 2 bereft of the US backing which he believed he had secured in return. This brings the US president and the Israeli premier into a new standoff which may be just beginning, DEBKA-Net-Weekly reports from both capitals.
Claiming Obama did not stand by his side of their understanding, Netanyahu threatens to abandon his promise to abstain from attacking Bushehr or other Iranian nuclear plants.
Israel’s revival of its military option for Iran weighs heavily on the administration in Washington and figured large in the American media this week. Obama took action by sending two big guns to Jerusalem to try and hold Israel in check: International Atomic Energy Agency Director Yukiya Amano, who explained that under his stewardship the nuclear watchdog’s treatment of Iran would be quite different from the lenience shown by his predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei, followed by presidential adviser Daniel Shapiro. He came bearing security gifts – both for Israeli restraint on Iran and as a softener for Netanyahu to be generous with concessions to the Palestinians in the negotiations opening in Washington on Sept. 2.
(There mission is covered in more detail in HOT POINTS of Aug. 25 below)

DEBKA.

Saudi King Abdullah

Saudi King Abdullah is certain that by embracing the Bushehr gambit, President Barack Obama has maneuvered himself into a Russian-Iranian trap. Both are cheating, the monarch believes, and using the start-up of the Bushehr reactor on Aug. 21 to move in on America’s most vulnerable interests in the Persian Gulf and Middle East.
However, Abdullah and his military and intelligence aides are reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Gulf sources as having concluded that Obama is so fixated on the Iranian strategy he is pursuing with Russian help that he is blind to any counter-indications to the wisdom of this course and deaf to cautionary advice.
The Saudis are profoundly concerned by the way Tehran is exploiting this fixation and America’s non-response to its aggressive moves.
They point to the explosion on the supertanker M. Star as it sailed through the Straits of Hormuz through Omani territorial waters on July 28 with 200,000 barrels of oil for Japan. The United States was expected to react harshly to an attack on one of the worlds’ most important oil supply routes. After all, America has assumed the role of naval and aerial protector of freedom of navigation through these waterways. However, the Saudis noted, barely a murmur was heard from Washington. Nor was it highlighted by the American media.
Saudis worried enough to launch their own inquiry
The US still had nothing to say when on August 4, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an obscure militant group suspected of links to al-Qaeda claimed on an Islamic website that “martyr-hero Ayyub al-Taisha” blew himself up aboard the Japanese M. Star.
It remained silent when two days later, on Aug. 6, the United Arab Emirates Coast Guard reported that specialized teams in the Port of Fujairahm where the damaged tanker docked after the attack had found evidence of a terrorist attack on the ship. They omitted to mention that the team of specialists was composed entirely of experts from US Fifth Fleet headquarters at Manama, Bahrain.
The Saudis were worried enough to launch their own inquiries both into the source of the attack and the reason for Washington’s lack of response.
In the second week of August, shortly before Moscow announced it was about to load fuel on the Bushehr reactor and make it operational, the Director of Saudi General Intelligence, Prince Moqrin Abdul Aziz, presented his report to the king.
His findings were unequivocal: The Japanese supertanker was not attacked by Al Qaeda but by an Iran-based Sunni-Salafi Saudi Arabian, who takes his orders, funding and explosives for terrorist operations from the Al Qods Brigades, the intelligence and terrorist arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
The attack was therefore the product of a three-tiered Iranian conspiracy, which aimed to incriminate a Saudi national in a plot devised to compromise the United States on two counts: The start-up of the Bushehr reactor just ahead would show the Gulf region that America had given up on halting Iran’s nuclear program and, meanwhile, the United States had shown itself incapable of securing the Straits or Hormuz and safeguarding the world’s most important energy supply route.
Riyadh: Iran now believes Obama is a pushover
In the view of Saudi intelligence experts, Obama and his advisers, by refusing to hear how Iran is using its Bushehr success to hurt America and by adhering to a policy of engagement, are destined to miss the objects of their Iranian strategy, namely, understandings with Tehran on Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Just the opposite, Tehran will now assume that the Americans are pushovers and will let it get away with its drive for a nuclear bomb and its plans to evict the United States from the region and take over.
Last week, in a secured phone call to the White House, King Abdullah tried to open Obama’s eyes to the risks he saw in his current strategy for Iran. Without bringing up the subject of the Iranian-orchestrated attack on the Japanese tanker, the king explained that Iran was using the president’s preoccupation with his Bushehr stratagem for a Syrian-aided push to eradicate US influence in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority.
He warned that the plan he and the president had evolved for enlisting Syrian President Bashar Assad to promote US and Saudi interests – a tradeoff for restored Syrian influence in Lebanon – was proving regrettably short-lived.
(See DEBKA-Net-Weekly 455 of July 30: New US-Saudi Strategy for the Middle East – Assad Offered High Status in Beirut and Baghdad for Dumping Tehran and Hizballah).
Obama refuses to heed the Saudi King
Tehran, riding high on its Bushehr success and Washington’s recognition of Iran as a regional power (State Department spokesman Philip Crowley”…Iran certainly sees itself as a regional power”) was able to pull Assad away from the Saudi-US ambit and back into the Iranian fold, Abdullah reported to Obama.
The fleet-footed Iranians made sure Assad did not slip out of their grasp again. Acting on the powerful regional impact of the Bushehr launch, they put Gen. Mohamed Ali Jafari, the supreme commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, on a special plane to Damascus.
Our Gulf sources report that Ali Jafari suggested that Assad persuade the Gulf and Saudi governments to withdraw their support for a possible US or Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites. Instead, they should switch their backing to Iran’s bid to displace the US in the effort to instal a stable government in Baghdad and end the crisis in Lebanon.
Abdullah offered ideas for American-Saudi steps to counter the Iranian momentum. Obama turned him down. Neither side revealed how the call ended, except to say that it was cut short because the two leaders could not find a common language.

DEBKA.

Barack Obama

The comprehensive strategy US President Barack Obama crafted and packaged for halting Iran in mid-momentum toward a nuclear weapon was kicked off at the UN Security Council on June 9 by tough sanctions, followed up by US and European penalties and assorted complementary steps.
Russia was brought into the picture early on.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s analysts track the unfolding of this package and note how it sprang leaks along the way. In the first place, Tehran was posited as being deterred enough by Russia and China voting for the UN sanctions and the US and European Union follow-ups (on June 25 and July 26) to start thinking about backing off from its nuclear aspirations, especially uranium enrichment.
To keep the ayatollahs on the run, Washington turned up the military heat. On Aug. 1, Admiral Mike Mullen Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff commented: “I think the military options have been on the table and remain on the table. It’s one of the options that the president has.”
Then, administration spokesmen flooded the media with remarks about possible US and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear installations, backed by a hectic spate of exchanged visits between US Pentagon and military officials and Israeli counterparts and a quick succession of joint American-Israeli military exercises.
The two most prominent were: Juniper Stallion 2010 (June 9-12), in which the USS Truman naval strike force and Israeli air and naval forces drilled in the Israeli Negev an attack on targets in Iran; and a joint exercise in the first three weeks of August in which about 200 US Marines conducted counter-insurgency and other training with Israeli Special Forces.
This was the public face of Obama’s Iran policy.
The carrots behind the tough facade
After the stick, a quite different package made up mostly of carrots was dangled before Iranian officials in private conversations held in Europe via Russian go-betweens.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources in Washington, Moscow, Tehran and Jerusalem, it represented a deal traded between President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Washington on June 24 at what became known as the ‘Hamburger Summit’ for the meal they shared at Ray’s Hell Burgers in Arlington, Virginia. They produced what was supposed to be the clincher: After delays without number, Moscow would get the Iranian nuclear reactor finished and rolling at Bushehr – so granting the Iranian regime a nuclear achievement of the first rank. The regime could then take the stage for its people and the Muslim public worldwide as the Middle East’s first nuclear power in possession of a working reactor.
This incentive, the US president calculated, would bring Iran to the talks with the P5+Germany in early September sporting a laurel crown endowed by Washington and Moscow and take its seat as the equal of all the participants. The International Atomic Energy Agency would also have to treat the Islamic Republic with the proper deference. Once the revolutionary rulers of Iran had gained the international respect they craved, they were bound to be amenable to discussing limitations on their military nuclear program – or so the White House figured.
They would also be offered the incentive of being left in possession of the technology for assembling nuclear weapons and enough enriched uranium to fuel them, provided they pledged not to cross the threshold into constructing a bomb or developing missiles to deliver them.
(Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta disclosed on June 27 that Iran has enough fissile material for two atomic bombs, and it could develop nuclear weapons in two years).
Some of the rosy varnish has dimmed
By letting Tehran get away with the Bushehr reactor, Washington also dropped another inducement into Iranian ears that if they played ball with the Obama strategy, they might at some point be rewarded with American nuclear reactors along with civilian nuclear technologies.
In the two and a half months since this policy went into action, some of the rosy expectations have faded for Washington’s realists. Still, they admit that even if not every last objective is reached, there was bound to be some progress in relations with Tehran and headway toward a solution of the Iranian nuclear controversy.
Moscow’s role has been pivotal.
What stood out was the way Washington and Moscow agreed on the stages for Russia to get the Bushehr reactor on stream and at what points it would release to Iran the equipment and technology, the lack of which kept the reactor unfinished and idle year after year. The two powers were therefore able to line up behind tough dictates for the Iranians who, to put it mildly, were not exactly thrilled by this collaboration and did their best to break it up – first, by harsh threats about the detriment to Iranian-Russian relations.
(On Friday, July 23, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned his Russian counterpart against joining an American “plot.” Our enemies, he said at a youth festival in Tehran, “have started a new propaganda war against Iran, which is written and directed by the US and staged by the Russian president. The two nations of Iran and Russia are friends and we hope that this friendship continues but the question is why the Russian president gets involved in this American play and jeopardizes his [country’s] interests,'” Ahmadinejad asked).
Iran tries to put the squeeze on Moscow – and fails
Next, the Iranians tried to build on their surrender to US-Russian stipulations on Bushehr to squeeze benefits from Moscow – for example, a demand to hand over the five advanced Russian S-300 interceptor missile systems sold them in 2007and withheld ever since. They tried arguing that there was no point in having a functioning nuclear reactor if it was inadequately protected.
The Kremlin was unmoved, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s sources in Moscow report. Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin brushed the Iranians off with the comment that if they decided against activating the Bushehr reactor, fine, that was their affair. But then Moscow would no longer be responsible for its operation.
The ever-practical Iranians accepted defeat on this point – which may turn out to be the only real benefit from Obama’s Iranian strategy. It was also the first time the US and Russia had joined forces on a nuclear issue and had their way. This success could lead to cooperation on many other issues as well.
At the same time, Moscow has its own fish to fry. After endorsing sanctions at the UN, the Russians are not averse to helping Iran break them, although to a lesser extent than China, Brazil, Turkey and India.
Having presented in general terms the strategy Obama crafted for dealing with Iran, DEBKA-Net-Weekly will devote the next articles to such questions as: What dangers are intrinsic in active Iranian nuclear reactor at Bushehr? Can certain US circles be believed when they claim that “just like Bushehr, Iranian enrichment is no threat”?
How is the new Iranian reactor regarded in Israel? Did it bring an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and a Middle East war closer or push it farther into the future?
How has it affected Tehran’s attitude toward the Obama administration? And how will the Islamic Republic use the Obama strategy to turn the tables on him?
And, not so incidentally, what made the Saudi King Abdullah angry enough to hang up on President Obama in the middle of a phone call?