WarSclerotic

Obama abandons Mideast – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Op-ed: President’s plan of rapprochement with Islam collapsed and he has no alternative

Guy Bechor

After dozens of years of intensive American activity in our region – pressures, schemes, deals, mediation, diplomacy, threats, concessions, doctrines – a disturbing silence suddenly prevailed. The current US President, Barack Obama, disappeared from the Middle Eastern landscape while creating a power vacuum.

Arab regimes hated George W. Bush, but they also feared him and were cautious. Obama simply doesn’t exist. Syria allows itself to disregard the US; the same is true for Iran, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Erdogan, and others. The Turkish flotilla affair is an example of this. Obama should have immediately sent his secretary of state to Ankara and to Jerusalem in order to end the matter quickly, yet nobody arrived from the US, and the region suffered great damages.

Once upon a time, moderate Egyptians, Saudis, Moroccans, Jordanians, and Palestinians would rush to Washington to coordinate positions, receive instructions, and engage in consultations. Today they no longer bother to do it, because it’s a waste of time. They have a feeling that the young president fails to understand what they’re facing, so what’s the point?

Everyone has a feeling that Obama is talking but not acting. Benjamin Disraeli once said: “Never argue…only give results,” yet Obama does not have even one Middle Eastern result to show. He excels at speeches, fancy words, and hollow slogans, yet in our region Arab regimes disparage speeches, intellectuals, and words and this is exactly the way he’s perceived over there: As an intellectual, in the negative sense of the word.

We saw a signal, using Mideastern codes, when Egyptian President Mubarak did not welcome Obama in Cairo last June at the president’s speech to Muslims, where he sought to turn a new leaf in US-Muslim relations. Mubarak knew it would end badly and even refrained from appearing in the same hall when Obama delivered his speech.

The Israel miscalculation

As he approaches the halfway mark of his presidency, Obama’s plan of rapprochement with Islam has collapsed and he has no other plan, no agenda, and no direction. He is helpless vis-à-vis Iran, and the tough sanctions imposed on Tehran by Congress last month were approved against his will.

Iran too knows that this president cannot order a military move. Had it been President Bush, Tehran would be much more concerned now. Meanwhile, as Obama announced his desire to pull the American army out of Iraq, Sunni terrorism is running wild there yet again, more brutal and violent than ever.

Obama thought that if he distances from Israel a little, he would win the sympathy of the moderate Arab camp. The result was bitter: He dismantled the moderate Arab camp while losing Israel. Right now there is no longer a moderate Arab camp, after Qatar and Jordan drew away, and after elements such as Lebanon or the Palestinian leadership chose to sit on the fence.

The American president’s lost direction played a role in the weakening of this camp, as a weak and confused US gives way to a strong, threatening Iran, with no certainty that there’s someone out there who would safeguard Gulf states. Yet it’s not only about Iran: Turkey too is taking a radical turn and attempting to form a radical alliance of its own in the region, while correctly interpreting the American vacuum.

Of all people, it is a member of the Democratic Party who prompted such unprecedented rise in the brutality of the Arab regimes around us. Bush eroded them when he demanded democracy, and that was a mistake, yet Obama just left them alone, and that was a mistake in the opposite direction; now, they are exploiting the opportunity.

And so, a wave of repression is currently sweeping through the Middle East. Arrests, torture, disappearance of opposition activists, threatened media, and crowded jails – all of this is happening because of the absence of American supervision, monitoring, and possibility interest as well. This vacuum draws negative forces, and these grow stronger and more provocative.

Yet here comes a warning: Those who run away from the Middle East are destined to have the Middle East haunt them.

The Bomb Squad.

• Michael Crowley
• April 21, 2010 | 6:55 pm

Grappling With Goldberg on the Idea of Israel Attacking Iran – International – The Atlantic.

Aug 14 2010, 11:00 AM ET | Comment

Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the latest Atlantic, on whether Israel will (or should) attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in the coming months, is the best article I’ve read on the subject–shrewd and balanced reporting combined with sophisticated analysis of the tangled strategic dilemmas.

Whatever you think should be done about the Iranian program to build an A-bomb …, read his piece before thinking about it much more.

Or to put it more delicately, is it meant to condition the American public and politicians to the prospect of an attack on Iran? Many people have portrayed it as such. I disagree. I think that those reading the piece as a case for bombing Iran are mainly reacting to arguments about the preceding war.

Jeff Goldberg was a big proponent of invading Iraq, as I was not — and those who disagreed with him about that war have in many cases taken the leap of assuming he’s making the case for another assault. I think this is mainly response to byline rather than argument. If this new article had appeared under the byline of someone known to have opposed the previous war and to be skeptical about the next one, I think the same material could be read in the opposite way — as a cautionary revelation of what the Netanyahu government might be preparing to do. Taken line by line, the article hews to a strictly reportorial perspective: this is what the Israeli officials seem to think, this is how American officials might react, this is how Israeli officials might anticipate how the Americans might react, these are the Israeli voices of caution, here are the potential readings and mis-readings on each side.

The nuke nerds — you know who you are, people — have failed to contribute effectively to the Iran policy conversation. Too often, it seems, we’re just talking to each another in our own special jargon of UF6, SWUs, SQs, LWR, NPT, NFU, BOG, NSG, and so on and so forth. Amid these minutiae, the larger debate has managed to bypass what I’d consider the hard-won insights that this community has produced on the Iran question over the last several years.

The point of this magazine, as I understand it, is airing real and honest debate about the great issues of our time. I think Jeffrey’s piece is a classic example of what should be published under such a philosophy, and am proud that this magazine is pioneering the debate we need to have. We do not, moreover, believe in a collective line. We believe in open discourse. And there is no subject as grave as the one Jeffrey has grappled with or that this country will have to confront in the months and years ahead.

Underneath Lebanon, Israel sees hidden battlefield | World news | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle.

By MATTI FRIEDMAN Associated Press Writer © 2010 The Associated Press

Aug. 14, 2010, 1:04PM

MOUNT ADIR, Israel — With tensions mounting along their shared border, Israel’s military says Hezbollah is moving fighters and weapons into the villages of south Lebanon, building up a secret network of arms warehouses, bunkers and command posts in preparation for war.

The Israeli military has begun releasing detailed information about what it calls Hezbollah’s new border deployment, four years after a cross-border raid by its guerrillas triggered a 34-day war.

A reminder of the volatility came on August 3, when Lebanese troops fired at Israeli soldiers clearing brush on their side of the border. One Israeli officer was killed, another badly wounded, and a retaliatory helicopter strike killed two Lebanese soldiers and a reporter.

Hezbollah, which is armed by Iran and Syria and is more powerful than the Lebanese military, stayed out of the Aug. 3 fight. But its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, threatened that he would intervene next time. He has also said that if war breaks out again his forces will fire rockets into Tel Aviv.

Neither side has signaled that another war is imminent, but the Israelis’ unusual openness about what they claim to know of Hezbollah’s preparations seems to have two goals: to show the reach of their intelligence, and to stake their claim that if another war breaks out and many civilians die, it will be because Hezbollah placed its armaments and fighters in their midst.

Israel’s military says Hezbollah has changed strategy since the last war, moving most of its fighters and weapons from wooded rural areas into villages. It says the aim is to avoid detection and use to civilians for cover if war erupts.

The military says all of this exists under the nose of 12,000 international peacekeepers who, by their own count, conduct up to 340 patrols a day in south Lebanon but are hobbled by a hostile population and rules preventing them from searching private property.

In an interview with The Associated Press on Mount Adir, a hill overlooking the border, an officer from the military’s Northern Command pointed through the summer haze at the village of Aita al-Shaab.

One of its southernmost buildings, a white structure housing mentally handicapped children, is a Hezbollah lookout post, the officer said. Several guerrilla command posts are in civilian buildings in the center of Aita al-Shaab, she said, with several dozen fighters able to move among houses through underground tunnels. The military would not allow her name to be used because of the sensitivity of her job.

The village also houses a network of warehouses holding arms trucked in from Iran via Syria, she said, some in stand-alone structures and some in smaller stashes in garages, basements and buried under backyards.

The officer said the guerrillas now have 5,000 fighters operating in the buffer zone between the border and the Litani River — a strip ranging from 5 kilometers to 30 kilometers (3 miles to 18 miles) wide — which is supposed to be free of militant activity under the 2006 cease-fire. In late 2009, Nasrallah said Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal stood at 30,000. Israel says it’s now about 40,000.

Israel’s intelligence probably comes from surveillance flights over Lebanese territory, spy satellites and Lebanese agents. But the military provides no proof of its claims, saying that could compromise its sources, and the peacekeeping force says it sees no evidence of new military infrastructure. Hezbollah officials did not respond to requests for comment on Israel’s accusations.

It’s difficult to independently confirm the allegations on the ground. The south Lebanese, mostly Shiite like Hezbollah, tend to support the movement and rarely criticize it publicly or volunteer information. Hezbollah members or supporters often attach themselves to journalists entering villages, shadowing them and discouraging photography.

South Lebanon is festooned with posters of the bearded, turbaned Nasrallah, but the only visible hint of Hezbollah fighters are the bearded men in civilian clothes who travel on motorbikes or in cars and occasionally approach reporters working in the area.

In July, looking to build its case that Hezbollah is digging in among civilians, the military released maps, photographs and a 3-D simulation of the streets and houses of another Lebanese town, Khiam.

The simulation shows one arms storeroom, a squat, freestanding building colored red, located 130 meters (150 yards) from a school, colored blue. A map on the military’s Web site purports to pinpoint 12 arms storerooms and three command posts in the town.

The Israeli implication is clear: If another war erupts, many civilians will die.

In 2006, Israel responded to the Hezbollah border raid with a heavy bombardment of the south and then invaded, while Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into northern Israel. The fighting killed 160 Israelis and around 1,200 Lebanese, according to official counts from each side. Israelis were dismayed to find their military suffering from organizational and supply problems, and were infuriated by international censure over the civilian death toll. That criticism was repeated even more forcefully over Israel’s Gaza offensive two winters ago.

But the Lebanon border has been largely quiet since 2006. Hezbollah has not fired a rocket in the past four years — though Palestinian militant groups have — and the Israeli officer killed in early August was the military’s first fatality on the frontier since 2006.

UNIFIL, the international peacekeeping force, “has not found any evidence of new military infrastructure in its area of operations,” said spokesman Neeraj Singh. “Only on a few occasions, UNIFIL found armed elements in the area with personal weapons like AK-47s.”

While saying UNIFIL had made “significant progress” in helping the Lebanese army secure the south, he acknowledged that the peacekeepers are barred from searching private property, where the Israelis say much of the evidence of the guerrillas’ presence would be found.

Some indications of Hezbollah activity in the south have surfaced unintentionally. When a building at Khirbet Silim exploded on July 15, 2009, peacekeepers identified it as an actively maintained Hezbollah arms warehouse. Another storehouse blew up in October, the Israelis say, and in December, according to Singh, peacekeepers caught a “group of individuals” with about 250 kilograms (550 pounds) of explosives.

UNIFIL’s performance has implications beyond south Lebanon. If the Israelis turn out to be right about the Hezbollah buildup, it will undermine their trust in international forces to police other volatile areas, such as Gaza and the West Bank, under a peace treaty.

In preparation for a new round against Hezbollah, the Israeli military has simulated parts of south Lebanon at a training base called Elyakim, about an hour’s drive south from the border. A second facility in central Israel is nearing completion.

One day in late July, near a mock Lebanese village of gray concrete, a company of sweating Israeli infantry recruits staged a maneuver through thick Lebanese-style undergrowth, complete with rockets hidden in the bushes and bombs camouflaged as rocks.

A square metal cover on the earth opened onto a concrete tunnel where Lt. Natan Mann stood in the dark, drilling his men for the real thing.

“The army has made tactical changes and changes in its mindset,” said Mann, 23, one hand on the plastic grip of his rifle. “We’re either at war, or we’re training for war.”

It would be foolish for the world not to heed Netanyahu’s warning » Standard-Times.

SAN ANGELO, Texas — JERUSALEM — When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had to use mostly small arms to repel attacks by six Arab armies. Today, however, Israel feels, and is, more menaced than it was then, or has been since. Hence the potentially world-shaking decision that will be made here, probably within two years.

To understand the man who will make it, begin with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s belief that stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program is integral to stopping the worldwide campaign to reverse 1948. It is, he says, a campaign to “put the Jew back to the status of a being that couldn’t defend himself — a perfect victim.”

Today’s Middle East, he says, reflects two developments. One is the rise of Iran and militant Islam since the 1979 revolution, which led to al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah. The other development is the multiplying threat of missile warfare.

Now Israel faces a third threat, the campaign to delegitimize it in order to extinguish its capacity for self-defense.

After two uniquely perilous millennia for Jews, the creation of Israel meant, Netanyahu says, “the capacity for self-defense restored to the Jewish people.” But note, he says, the reflexive worldwide chorus of condemnation when Israel responded with force to rocket barrages from Gaza and from southern Lebanon.

There is, he believes, a crystallizing consensus that “Israel is not allowed to exercise self-defense.”

From 1948 through 1973, he says, enemies tried to “eliminate Israel by conventional warfare.” Having failed, they tried to demoralize and paralyze Israel with suicide bombers and other terrorism.

“We put up a fence,” Netanyahu says. “Now they have rockets that go over the fence.” Israel’s military, which has stressed offense as a solution to the nation’s lack of strategic depth, now stresses missile defense.

That, however, cannot cope with Hamas’ tens of thousands of rockets in Gaza and Hezbollah’s 60,000 in southern Lebanon. There, U.N. resolution 1701, promulgated after the 2006 war, has been predictably farcical.

This was supposed to inhibit the arming of Hezbollah and prevent its operations south of the Litani River. Since 2006, Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal has tripled and its operations mock resolution 1701.

Hezbollah, learning from Hamas, now places rockets near schools and hospitals, certain that Israel’s next response to indiscriminate aggression will turn the world media into a force multiplier for the aggressors.

Any Israeli self-defense anywhere is automatically judged “disproportionate.” Israel knows this as it watches Iran.

Last year was Barack Obama’s wasted year of “engaging” Iran. This led to sanctions that are unlikely to ever become sufficiently potent. With Russia, China and Turkey being uncooperative, Iran is hardly “isolated.”

The Iranian democracy movement probably cannot quickly achieve regime change. It took Solidarity 10 years to do so against a Polish regime less brutally repressive than Iran’s.

Hillary Clinton’s words about extending a “defense umbrella over the region” imply, to Israelis, fatalism about a nuclear Iran. As for deterrence working against a nuclear-armed regime steeped in an ideology of martyrdom, remember: In 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini said:

“We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

You say, that was long ago? Israel says, this is now:

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, says Israel is the “enemy of God.” Tehran, proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened and vowing to complete it, sent an ambassador to Poland who in 2006 wanted to measure the ovens at Auschwitz to prove them inadequate for genocide.

Iran’s former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is considered a “moderate” by people for whom believing is seeing, calls Israel a “one-bomb country.”

If Iran were to “wipe the Zionist entity off the map,” as it vows to do, it would, Netanyahu believes, achieve a regional “dominance not seen since Alexander.” Netanyahu does not say Israel will, if necessary, act alone to prevent this. Or does he?

He says CIA Director Leon Panetta is “about right” in saying Iran can be a nuclear power in two years. He says 1948 meant this: “For the first time in 2,000 years, a sovereign Jewish people could defend itself against attack.” And he says: “The tragic history of the powerlessness of our people explains why the Jewish people need a sovereign power of self-defense.”

If Israel strikes Iran, the world will not be able to say it was not warned.

George Will is a Washington columnist and television commentator. Contact him at georgewill@washpost.com.

3 Reasons Israel will attack Iran – CSMonitor.com.

A long article out this week in The Atlantic argues there’s a good chance Israel will attack Iran over its nuclear program next summer. While there are strong grounds for doubt, here are some reasons author Jeffrey Goldberg could be right.

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer
posted August 13, 2010 at 5:12 pm EDT

Boston —

#3 Holocaust denial and Holocaust fears

Visitors walk under pictures of Jews killed in the Holocaust, in the Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem.
(Gil Cohen Magen/Reuters/File)

Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. But Israel quite simply doesn’t believe the Islamic Republic and fears what a nuclear weapon in the hands of a government with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the top of the heap could mean for them.

Israel is a country whose national psyche was crafted by the Holocaust and has said time and again that it will take preemptive action if it thinks the nation is threatened. Fear of Iran has been a long-running theme for the country – in the wake of 9/11 Israeli officials mused that Iran might have had a hand in the attack (it didn’t) and since, they’ve kept up a steady stream of warnings about what a nuclear-armed Iran would mean for the Jewish state’s future.

“Iran is developing nuclear weapons and poses the greatest threat to our existence since the war of independence. Iran’s terror wings surround us from the north and south,” Benjamin Netanyahu said shortly after regaining the premiership last year.

The “never again” credo of Israel drives alarm inside the country’s security establishment. While most Iran watchers believe that an Iran with a few nuclear weapons wouldn’t launch a first strike on Israel – something sure to bring withering retaliation – the presence of Mr. Ahmadinejad at the top of the government (thought he’s still subordinate to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader) has some Israelis fearing irrational behavior.

#2 Fear that Iran is ‘meshugana’

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attends an official meeting with his Ginea Bissau counterpart Malam Bacai Sanha in Tehran Monday.
(Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters)

If the public statements of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a number of Israeli officials are taken at face value, they believe irrational behavior on the part of Iranian officials could lead them to use a nuclear weapon if they ever obtain it.

Iran says it has no intention of building a bomb, and senior clerics there have said the use of nuclear weapons are un-Islamic and forbidden, but many Israeli leaders don’t buy that.

Mr. Netanyahu told Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg for a separate article last year: “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs… When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.”

While that seems an extreme characterization, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never seems to pass up a chance to fuel Israeli fears. Mr. Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust “a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim” and once referred to Israel as a “tumor” that should be “wiped off the map” – though some say that’s a mistranslation, and a better one would be “vanish from the map of time.”

Wayne White, a former senior State Department intelligence analyst focusing on the Middle East, says that the Iranian government isn’t monolithic in its views and that “regime survival” is a top priority for most senior figures, including Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. But he says the antics of Ahmadinejad are a constant irritant that increase the likelihood of conflict. “He’s absolutely the worst nightmare for anyone trying to move this forward,” he says. “His rhetoric has been outrageous since 2005.”

To be sure, some Israeli officials don’t precisely share Prime Minister Netanyahu’s view. In a speech last year, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said his fear was that a nuclear armed Iran would some day arm a stateless terrorist group. As for the regime itself? “I don’t think that the Iranians, even if they got the bomb, they are going to drop it immediately on some neighbor. They fully understand what might follow. They are radicals but not total meshuganas,” he said, using a Yiddish word that means “crazies.”

#1 A nuclear Iran would shift the regional strategic balance

In this Nov 2009 photo released by the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency, Iranian technicians work with foreign colleagues at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, just outside the southern port city of Bushehr, Iran.
(Mehdi Ghasemi/ISNA/AP)

One thing everyone who debates whether Iran is seeking a nuclear bomb, and what to do about stopping them if they are, agrees on is this: A nuclear-armed Iran would profoundly shift the strategic balance of the Middle East.

Israel, with an arsenal of 100 or so nuclear bombs and the missiles to deliver them, is the region’s only current nuclear power. While that sole status doesn’t give it carte blanche to do as it pleases, the day Iran has a nuclear weapon is the day Israel’s ability to directly attack Iran – or perhaps other regional countries – is taken off the table.

Iran in turn would be able to act with greater freedom in what it sees as its own sphere of influence. This alarms many of Arab states in the region, who many predict would start considering nuclear weapons programs of their own in response. The last thing Israel wants is a nuclear arms race in a neighborhood where a number of regimes still don’t recognize its right to exist.

The more nuclear countries there are, the greater the chance, however unlikely, that someone will push the button first, or that a terrorist group could somehow get its hands on a bomb. Defense Minister Ehud Barak explained one of Israel’s greatest fears this way last year: “It’s not just the end of any nonproliferation regime,” he said of Iran obtaining a bomb. “I believe that it starts the countdown that… would lead, within another half a generation, to a crude nuclear device in the hands of some terrorist group.”

U.S., Israel Build Military Cooperation – WSJ.com.

Amid Fitful Diplomatic Relations, White House Fosters Defense Ties to Reassure a Pivotal Ally, Advance Mideast Peace

TZEELIM, Israel—While the U.S. and Israeli diplomatic relations weather their choppiest phase in years, behind the scenes, military commanders from the two countries have dramatically stepped up cooperation.

The intensified partnership is part of the Obama administration’s broader policy of boosting military support for American allies in the Mideast amid heightened tensions with Iran and its allies such as Hezbollah and Hamas, according to U.S. officials. The Obama administration believes it may also help induce Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make concessions in talks with Palestinians, these officials said.

U.S. military aid to Israel has increased markedly this year. Top-ranking U.S. and Israeli soldiers have shuttled between Tel Aviv and Washington with unusual frequency in recent months. A series of joint military exercises in Israel over the past monthshas included a record number of American troops.

This month, about 200 U.S. Marines joined a battalion of Israeli soldiers for an all-night march through the Negev desert, the culmination of three weeks of joint drills. As dawn approached, they crept up on a mock village, an Israeli military-built recreation of a typical Palestinian hamlet, used for combat training.

Explosions, triggered by pyrotechnics engineers, shook the night. Soldiers from another Israeli unit, playing the role of Arab guerrillas, crouched in the fake village’s narrow allies and empty cinderblock homes. They shouted “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for “God is Great,” and rattled off rounds of blank ammunition from machine guns at the invading U.S. and Israeli forces.

Behind a dune on the village’s edge, a U.S. Marine company commander conferred with his Israeli counterpart before the two barked orders—the Marine in English, the Israeli in Hebrew—to soldiers scattered behind them. As dawn gave way to the Negev desert’s grinding August heat, the forces battled house-to-house in mock battle, as Israeli and Marine generals watched on from the sidelines.

The exercise was the biggest U.S.-Israeli joint infantry exercise ever, according to officials. By comparison, at the same exercise last year, there were only around 20 U.S. Marines involved. In the fall, there will be an even bigger joint infantry exercise involving tanks and armored vehicles, officials said.

In October, a missile-defense exercise between the U.S. and Israeli militaries, brought in more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers, making it the single biggest U.S.-Israeli joint military exercise in the two nations’ histories.

Two joint U.S.-Israel committees, the U.S.-Israel Joint Political Military Group and the Defense Policy Advisory Group, which were established years ago and had fallen into disuse, have been beefed up with senior officials, including Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy, the top-ranking civilian at the Pentagon, Israeli and U.S. officials said.

The military cooperation began to intensify even as diplomatic relations between Washington and Israel frayed. The effort stems from policy directives the White House gave the Pentagon early in Mr. Obama’s presidency to “deepen and expand the quantity and intensity of cooperation to the fullest extent,” according to a senior administration official.

Officials in Washington and Israel continue to say they haven’t ruled out a military strike against Iran amid Tehran’s nuclear standoff with the West. But the new cooperation appears to be part saber-rattling at Iran and part reassuring Israel that the U.S. is fully committed to its security.

The senior U.S. official said President Barack Obama felt the increased military support is necessary to assure Israel’s security against mounting regional threats, including Iran and its allies: Syria, the Gaza-based Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon. “History has shown that Israel is more willing to take risks for peace when it feels it is capable of addressing its security needs,” the official said.

U.S. military aid to Israel reached a high of $2.78 billion in 2010, up from $2.55 billion in 2009. It is slated to jump to $3 billion in 2011. The Obama administration has also requested an additional $205 million to fund a short-range rocket defense shield known as Iron Dome.

Washington’s stepped-up military support comes amid similar moves to strengthen military ties with America’s Arab allies in the region, including those that don’t maintain ties with Israel.

This week, the Obama administration said it intended to provide new Patriot missile batteries to Kuwait. And Washington is readying a $60 billion sale of advanced F-15 fighter jets and attack helicopters to Saudi Arabia.

Some outside observers say there may be an ulterior motive for the increased cooperation: To better keep tabs on Israel at a time when many in Washington are concerned that Israel could launch a military strike, unilaterally and without warning, against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“We want to keep Israel in the box militarily, and a strong personal and organizational relationship gives us leverage,” said Jeff White, who spent 34 years with the Defense Intelligence Agency, before joining the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank.

The senior administration official said the relationship isn’t a means for the U.S. to keep Israel in check, but rather about sharing intelligence and consulting on strategy, for instance vis-à-vis Iran. He said that due to the closeness of the relationship, the administration believes there is no chance of misunderstandings or surprises by Israel.

The Obama and Netanyahu administrations clashed soon after both leaders took power, amid different approaches to dealing with the Palestinians and the Mideast peace process. Washington has tried to mend the rift, recently extending a warm reception to Mr. Netanyahu at the White House.

U.S. and Israeli officials both say the improved military coordination began even as political relations between the two countries were nose diving. But the administration appears now to be showcasing the military support more as part of its efforts to patch over past differences.

Many details surrounding the U.S.-Israeli military cooperation remain classified, but some have emerged publicly. In the past year, record numbers of soldiers from both countries have participated in joint drills. In the exercises, the two militaries have been drilling as a coalition force, battling a common enemy for the first time, just as the U.S. does with its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, according to U.S. and Israeli commanders.

Meanwhile, visits by the Israeli and American military brass have jumped dramatically. Since becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2007, Adm. Michael Mullen has made four visits to Israel, two of them this year alone. Before Adm. Mullen, no chairman of the joint chiefs had visited Israel for over a decade.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has visited Washington four times so far this year, a schedule unmatched by any recent Israeli defense minister.

“There’s been a constant stream of American officers coming through,” said one senior Israeli army officer. “I haven’t seen anything like it in my 20 years in the army.”

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

A couple of puzzling occurrences in the West this week touching on the controversy over Iran’s nuclear goals can be traced to a single event in Tehran.
This event was behind the otherwise inexplicable remark by British Prime Minister David Cameron on August 4. In his first British “PM Direct” event in Brighton, he listed reasons for keeping lines open to Turkey, one of which was, “like the fact that Iran has got a nuclear weapon.”
Was this a slip of the tongue by an inexperienced leader – or a giveaway?
The latter, say DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s intelligence and Washington sources. Cameron spoke out of knowledge gained from his last intelligence update before his appearance.
That day, too, in Washington, a group of regular White House correspondents were invited to a briefing on the Iranian nuclear issue with President Barack Obama‘s policy team leaders. To their surprise, the president himself walked in. He proceeded to make a strong point of sanctions and international isolation succeeding better than expected in hurting the Iranian economy and making the Tehran regime’s day-to-day life more difficult.
He explained his tactics of diplomatic engagement, which have been depicted as failing, were not intended to lead to dialogue with Iran, but to isolate the Islamic Republic internationally.
In Obama’s view, that tactic was beginning to work.
The reporters took this as a reference to the unilateral sanctions the European Union had imposed on Iran’s energy and banking industries and the widening rift between Moscow and Tehran.
White House mystifications
The President and his advisers belittled Iran’s consent to resume talks with the P5-plus-1 (the US, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany) next month as nothing important or new. Washington saw no cause for making dramatic gestures or concessions to win Iran around, he said.
Just the reverse: The president commented wryly that the Iranians were masters of deception and he had no expectation they would come to terms on their nuclear objectives.
The correspondents present were not let into the reason for Barack Obama’s personal appearance at a fairly routine briefing or what was behind his remarks.
In its editorial two days later, The New York Times highlighted two lines from the presidential briefing:
“It is very important to put before the Iranians a clear set of steps that we would consider sufficient to show that they are not pursuing nuclear weapons” was one. And the other was: “They should know what they can say ‘yes’ to.”
The New York Times them commented: “So we were surprised that Mr. Obama would not provide specifics on what the ‘pathway’ might entail. That’s the kind of detail that Iranian leaders need to know now when they appear to be debating whether to engage Washington. If Mr. Obama didn’t want to share the information publicly with journalists, we hope he is sharing it privately with Tehran.”
DEBKA-Net-Weekly confirms that, while making it clear by half-a-dozen artful formulations that there was no new US diplomatic offensive in the offing, the strategists who stayed behind to answer the journalists’ questions after the president left, left them unsatisfied about the purpose of the odd briefing.
Ahmadinejad drops a virtual N-Bomb
Our Washington sources, however, tie Obama’s remarks to a revealing comment by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s chief of staff Esfandyar Rahim Mashai on July 31, to which the US president felt bound to respond. What Mashai said was this:
“The West raised no objections to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s candid avowal that the Islamic Republic could build a nuclear bomb.”
What avowal?
On February 7, said Mashai, Ahmadinejad made a speech at the National Center for Laser Science and Technology. This talk went unnoticed by US intelligence agencies, he claimed.
“One of the points Dr. Ahmadinejad made during his visit to this center was the possibility of enriching (uranium) to 100 percent, which means building an atom bomb.”
“Interestingly, not a single foreign publication made a hullabaloo or raised an uproar (over this dramatic revelation),” Mashai noted. “This shows,” he concluded, “that they (the US) are not worried about an atom bomb, because essentially, Dr. Ahmadinejad said this to test them (the US) in order to see what degree of worry they have about Iran producing an atom bomb.”
Five days later, President Obama made his worry known to Tehran by means of his otherwise unexplained press briefing.
In the meantime, US intelligence analysts and Iran strategists had been busy trying to figure out why the admission of an Iranian nuclear bomb capability had been allowed to slip off Ahmadinejad’s well-oiled tongue and why he had let his chief of staff Iran go to the trouble of bringing the hitherto strenuously-denied goal of Iran’s nuclear program out in the open.
Obama picks it up and throws it back
Mashai was the most high-ranking, authoritative Iranian official to publicly put into words the goal of Iran’s enrichment program as being to build an “atom bomb.”
Every Iranian official has to date emphasized the purely peaceful nature of their nuclear program.
Yet Mashai deliberately called attention to the little-noticed Iranian president’s remark about “enriching (uranium) to 100 percent which means building an atom bomb.” (In Farsi: ke maani an sakht-e bomb-e atomi ast.)
On August 3, President Obama learned that what the Iranian president had been after was a sort of oral nuclear test designed to take the measure of the Obama administration’s potential response to the real thing.
If Tehran got away with that test, US intelligence agencies reckoned, it would continue to go forward steadily up to the point where Iranian leaders judged the time right and its interests best served by shifting from a spoken test to a nuclear test proper.
In taking over the White House news briefing in person, Obama sought to show Tehran that its challenge would meet a strong response.
A week later, on Wednesday Aug. 11, no less than Iran’s Chief of Staff Gen. Hassan Hassan Firouz-Abadi reproved the president’s senior aide for committing “a crime against national security”, thereby confirming that the presidential challenge had been a test of America’s responsiveness.
The general’s reproof also had an ulterior motive linked to the infighting within the Iranian revolutionary regime, which is exclusively revealed in the next article in this issue.

Column One: Guide to the Perplexed.

Photo by: Associated Press

By CAROLINE B. GLICK
08/13/2010 15:25

Are there any circumstances in which US President Barack Obama will order a military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations?

John Bolton: Russia’s Loading of Nuke Fuel Into Iran Plant Means Aug. 21 Deadline for Israeli Attack.

News that Russia will load nuclear fuel rods into an Iranian reactor has touched off a countdown to a point of no return, a deadline by which Israel would have to launch an attack on Iran’s Bushehr reactor before it becomes effectively “immune” to any assault, says former Bush administration U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton.

Once the fuel rods are loaded, Bolton told Fox News on Friday afternoon, “it makes it essentially immune from attack by Israel. Because once the rods are in the reactor an attack on the reactor risks spreading radiation in the air, and perhaps into the water of the Persian Gulf.”

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared in March that Russia would start the Bushehr reactor this summer. But the announcement from a spokesman for Russia’s state atomic agency to Reuters Friday sent international diplomats scrambling to head off a crisis.

The story immediately became front-page news in Israel, which has laid precise plans to carry out an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities while going along with President Obama’s plans to use international sanctions and diplomatic persuasion to convince Iran’s clerics not to go nuclear.

Bolton made it clear that it is widely assumed that any Israeli attack on the Bushehr reactor must take place before the reactor is loaded with fuel rods.

“If they’re going to do it that’s the window that they have,” Bolton declared. “Otherwise as I said before, once the rods are in the reactor, if you attack the reactor you’re going to open it up and radiation will escape at least into the atmosphere and possibly into the waters of the Persian Gulf.

“So most people think that neither Israel nor the United States, come to that, would attack the reactor after it’s been fueled.”

Bolton cited the 1981 Israeli attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor outside Baghdad and the September 2007 Israeli attack on a North Korean reactor being built in Syria. Both of those strikes came before fuel rods were loaded into those reactors.

“So if it’s going to happen in Bushehr it has to happen before the fuel rods go in,” Bolton said.

The conversation that touched off the de facto deadline for Israeli military action was a telephone conversation with wire services involving Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for Rosatom, the Russian Energy State Nuclear Corp.

Novikov said: “The fuel will be loaded on Aug 21. This is the start of the physical launch” of the reactor.

“From that moment the Bushehr plant will be officially considered a nuclear-energy installation,” Novikov said, adding that the head of Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko, will visit Bushehr Aug. 21 to conduct a ceremony for the event.
According to Bolton, once the reactor is operational, it is only a matter of time before it begins producing plutonium that could be used in a nuclear weapon.

“And in the normal operation of this reactor, in just a fairly short period of time, you could get substantial amounts of plutonium to use as nuclear weapons,” Bolton told Fox.

Russia, which is operating under a $1 billion contract with Iran, has spent more than a decade building the reactor. If Russia moves forward with its plan to fuel the reactor, it could be seen as a major setback to the Obama administration’s strategy of engaging Russian leaders in order to win their cooperation.

“The U.S. urged them not to send the Iranian’s fuel rods,” Bolton said. “They did that. The Obama administration has urged them not to insert the fuel rods in the reactors, but as they’ve just announced that will begin next week. What that does over time is help Iran get another route to nuclear weapons through the plutonium they could reprocess out of the spent fuel rods.”

The developments mean Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon may face a stark choice: Attack the Bushehr reactor in the next 8 days, or allow it to become operational despite the certainty it would greatly enhance Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons.

Russian leaders have said the Bushehr reactor project is being closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog group. According to Iran’s ISNA news agency, IAEA inspectors will be on hand to observe the fuel-rod loading process that is now scheduled to begin Aug. 21.

According to Russian officials, Iran has promised in writing to send all spent fuel rods from Bushehr back to Russia for reprocessing, to ensure they cannot be used for nuclear weapons.

Bolton said the reactor has been “a hole” in American foreign policy for over a decade.

The failure to demand it be shut down began in the Bush years, he said, and continues with the Obama administration “under what I believe is the mistaken theory that Iran is entitled to the peaceful use of nuclear energy.”

“I don’t think Iran is entitled to that, or I don’t think we ought to allow it to happen, because they’re manifestly violating any number of obligations under the non-proliferation treaty not to seek nuclear weapons. But this has been a hole in American policy for some number of years, and Iran and Russia are obviously exploiting it,” Bolton said.

Russia’s move would put Iran “in a much better position overall,” he said, adding, “I think this is a very delicate point, as I say, it closes off to the Israelis one possible target for pre-emptive military action.

U.N. sanctions against Iran, he said, “have not had and will not have any material effect on Iran’s push to have deliverable nuclear weapons.”