WarSclerotic

Ticking clocks and threats – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

As new people take the top spots in the army and Mossad, Iran will continue to be a major focus of their concern. In addition, the possibility of Israeli military action must remain on the table.

By Amos Harel

It’s a safe assumption that outgoing Mossad chief Meir Dagan and outgoing Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, devoted considerable effort to thwarting the Iranian nuclear threat during their tenures. Dagan’s eight-year term ended yesterday; Ashkenazi’s four years will reach their conclusion in mid-February. There were significant developments regarding Iran during these years: breakdowns of the centrifuges, shipments that did not reach their destination, revelations of embarrassing intelligence information at critical moments – and even exploding scientists. The international media, and sometimes the Iranians themselves, attributed these events to various Western espionage agencies.

Ashkenazi and Dagan are both said to have followed a pragmatic, moderate line concerning key strategic issues that are worrisome to Israel. Despite almost unavoidable turf wars between the heads of the security branches, a well-coordinated alignment was fashioned between them, along with the head of the Shin Bet security service, Yuval Diskin (who will be concluding six years in office this May ). In the last part of their terms, the three established a strong, influential axis that was difficult to bypass on crucial decisions. The Iranian issue is now being passed on to their successors. It will occupy a high place on the agenda of the new Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, and of the chief of staff-designate, Yoav Galant.

To date, neither Pardo nor Galant has expressed himself publicly on the subject. Galant’s image here – and, perhaps more important, as perceived by Israel’s neighbors – is one of a charismatic commander driven by a “can do” mentality. Still, it would be wrong to infer, from his relative hawkishness on Gaza, his views about a future confrontation in Lebanon or with Iran. The weight of responsibility is very different when one holds the top job.

The year ahead will see a few processes converging. In the international arena, the impact of the sanctions on Iran will increase, and the United States will grope its way out of neighboring Iraq. In Israel, along with the changes in the top ranks of the defense establishment, there might be a reshuffle of the coalition and possibly elections.

A historic mission

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw his return to power after a 10-year break as the resumption of a historic mission to remove the nuclear threat. The impasse that has been created in negotiations with the Palestinians, combined with the feeling that Israel is now alone in dealing with Iran, contains a potential for misadventure.

Some of Netanyahu’s advisers speak contemptuously about ranking officers in the military “who don’t know how to do anything except preach peace with Syria and talk about the Iranian problem.”

It is, of course, important to create an Israeli offensive threat as a means of pressure on Iran. However, intelligence personnel in some Western countries are warning that a premature Israeli attack would terminate the possibility of diplomatic activity against Iran. In a speech he delivered two months ago in New Orleans to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, Netanyahu called on the Americans to create a concrete threat against Iran. The reprimand followed immediately: Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated in an interview that an attack would only allow the rulers in Tehran to regroup against their opponents.

Last week, in an interview with Israel Radio, the minister of strategic affairs, Moshe Ya’alon, who is also a member of the ministerial forum of seven, said it would take three more years for Iran to acquire offensive nuclear capability. (In Ya’alon’s case, there is a considerable disparity between his hawkishness in the Palestinian context and his approach to other issues. )

Netanyahu himself has not said much in public about Iran since the embarrassment in New Orleans. But his close associate, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, addressed the issue fairly extensively this week, in a conference held by the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. According to Barak, “Israel’s future in the region is in the balance.” He urged a bold political strategy that would restore the initiative to Israel, though he did not elaborate on it. Iran, he said, is a threat to the world order, is striving for nuclear arms and aspires to regional hegemony.

Last summer, Barak was disdainful of the results of sanctions against Iran. This week he admitted that they “have definitely scored achievements, but there is no chance that they alone will stop the Iranian effort. Far more acute sanctions – crippling sanctions – are needed.” He reiterated his view that no option must be ruled out. That is Israeli leaders’ code for a threat to attack Iran, but it is couched in language that will not result in a scolding from Washington.

The strong impact of the relatively sharp sanctions approved by the UN Security Council last June surprised both Israel and Iran.

“The effect has been stronger than we anticipated,” an Israeli political source who has been involved with this issue for many years admits. “Everyone understands today that the sanctions are working. The leadership there is under pressure. There has been a sharp rise in the price of gasoline and domestic electricity, and within two months there will be additional increases. The impact has not yet reached its peak.”

Gary Samore, President Barack Obama’s chief adviser on the subject of weapons of mass destruction, said last month at a Washington conference that the administration is “determined to maintain and even increase pressure” if Iran does not strike a deal with the international community.

In December, following lengthy pondering of the issue, Tehran returned to the format of talks with the six powers at a meeting in Geneva. The U.S. administration understands that the resumption of the talks reflects Iran’s desire to gain time, Samore remarked. Another round of talks is expected at the end of this month in Istanbul. By renewing the discussions, the Iranians are able to release a little pressure at home, while making a good-will gesture toward the West.

Obama is currently absorbing ongoing criticism in the realm of foreign policy, from the lack of response, to the provocations by North Korea, to the stalemate on the Palestinian question. As for Iran, “We have to be truthful,” the Israeli source says. “He is far more serious than his predecessor. The president stated from the outset that he would follow a combined path of dialogue and sanctions, and that is what he has done. The measures against Iran are more acute than anything we had in the past. The administration is delivering the goods.”

Israeli Military Intelligence describes the development of the Iranian threat in terms of clocks: the project clock, the sanctions clock and the regime-change clock. But if the first clock shows the hour is 9, the two others lag far behind. The hopes that were generated by the “green revolution” – the unrest following the presidential election in Iran a year and a half ago – have been shattered.

“I am not sure that the regime of the ayatollahs will be ruling in Iran 10 years down the line,” Barak said at the Tel Aviv University conference. “On the other hand, I also cannot say that it will fall in a year or two. It is impossible to bet on the toppling of the regime as a working assumption.”

Prof. Bernard Hourcade, a French expert on Iran, who took part in the conference, told Haaretz that “the Iranian clock is not in our [the West’s] hands. Iran already achieved significant nuclear capability the moment it upgraded the quality of its uranium enrichment. The main clock is the one that is ticking within Iranian society.”

According to Hourcade, a major consideration driving President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to preserve the hegemony of his camp in the next presidential elections, set for 2013 (Ahmadinejad himself cannot by law run for a third term ): “In order to present himself as a winner, Ahmadinejad needs an accomplishment. An agreement in which the international community recognizes Iran’s right to enrich uranium to a level at which it has no military use, and the lifting of the sanctions, could provide that accomplishment. The United States, too, is more amenable now to an arrangement along those lines, because it needs Iranian cooperation in order to leave Iraq peacefully.”

Hourcade cites a variation on the deal for the scientific research reactor in Tehran, an initiative the Iranians toyed with but which was dropped a year ago. At the same time, he admits that there is an inbuilt difficulty in trying to decode the intentions of the Iranian leadership at its diverse levels. A Western diplomat who took part in the most recent rounds of talks on a nuclear compromise says, “We know a lot less about Iran than we knew about China.”

Hourcade, a senior research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, agrees. He himself is retiring in March, and says he finds few experts of stature on Iran in the West. He used to be a welcome guest in Iran and actually lived there and managed a French institute during the first five years after the Islamic revolution. In recent years it has been intimated to him that he would not be welcome in the country. He is also not overly impressed by the quality of the information possessed by Western intelligence agencies. “They know how to blow up things, not analyze them,” he says.

The WikiLeaks documents have made clear the global situation with regard to the threat. In contrast to the situation that existed in late 2007 – when a U.S. intelligence report asserted that there was no proof of Iranian progress on nuclear weapons – the Western powers now seem to agree with the Israeli analysis of the danger, the timetable and, to some extent, the need for harsher sanctions. The documents also lifted the masks from the position of the Arab world. The Arabs view the Iranian nuclear project as a serious problem and would be happy if someone resolved it for them, preferably with the use of military force.

Paradoxically, all this leaves Israel, at the beginning of 2011, in a better place than it was before, despite the Iranians’ progress. Israel must see itself as part of a global effort to curb the nuclear danger, and not insist on making itself the bull’s-eye of Iran’s target. Israel’s response to the threat must be composed of more profound elements than simple specifications of bombing sorties: What’s needed is a combination of political initiative, preventive effort, upgraded defensive ability and a strike-back capability – but not the total subjugation of resources and initiatives to dealing with remote scenarios of a threat that Israel is unlikely to be able to cope with on its own.

EU to reject Iran invite to tour nuclear facilities – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

EU’s Catherine Ashton: Touring nuclear facilities is not our job; looking at sites and establishing what they are there for is for IAEA inspectors.

By Reuters

The European Union will turn down an offer from Iran to tour its nuclear facilities, the bloc’s foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton said on Friday.

“Yes, what I’ll be saying is the role of the inspections of nuclear sites is for the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and I do hope Iran will insure that the IAEA is able to go and continue its work,” she told Reuters after talks with Hungary’s Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi.

Earlier in the week, Iran invited Russia, China, the European Union and its allies among the Arab and developing world to tour its nuclear sites, in an apparent move to gain support ahead of a new round of talks with six world powers.

“My view is that though this is not an invitation that I’m taking a negative view of, it’s not our job and looking at the sites and establishing what they are is for inspectors,” Ashton said.

In a letter made available Monday to The Associated Press, senior Iranian envoy Ali Asghar Soltanieh suggests the weekend of Jan. 15 and 16 and says that meetings “with high ranking officials” are envisaged.

While no reason was given for the timing of the offer, it comes just weeks before Iran and the six powers follow up on recent talks that ended with agreement on little else but to meet again.

The new round between Tehran, and the permanent UN Security Council members – the U.S. Russia, China, Britain, France – plus Germany, is tentatively set for Istanbul, Turkey in late January.

It is meant to explore whether there is common ground for more substantive talks on Iran’s nuclear program, viewed by the U.S, and its allies as a cover for secret plans to make nuclear arms – something Tehran denies.

Instead, the Islamic Republic insists its uranium enrichment and other programs are meant only to generate fuel for a future network of nuclear reactors.

The offer of a visit comes more than three years after six diplomats from developing nations accredited to the IAEA visited Iran’s uranium ore conversion site at Isfahan, which turns raw uranium into the feedstock gas that is then enriched. Participants then told reporters they could not make an assessment of Iran’s nuclear aims based on that visit to that facility in central Iran.

	EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton.

Analysis: No strike at Iran as Pardo takes Mossad baton.

Meir Dagan formally took leave of the Mossad on Thursday, passing the reins to Tamir Pardo, with Israel facing a strategic situation vastly different from when he was appointed in August 2002.

While the Palestinian terrorism that was running rampant when Dagan took office during the height of the second intifada has since largely been brought to heel, Hizbullah is much stronger than it was then, and Iran – of course – is inching closer to nuclear capability.

Pardo is not entering a vacuum; rather, he climbs to the top of the intelligence community pyramid with working assumptions already in place on a number of issues, notably including the following:

A strike on Iran

Although a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to Israel, at this time a military attack on its nuclear facilities would be counterproductive and would exact an enormous diplomatic, economic and military price.

Iran’s leadership, analysts say, would use an Israeli attack to unify the ethnically fragmented country around the government, and Teheran would leave the Non-Proliferation Treaty with international justification, saying that it had been attacked by a country with nuclear capability and now needed to gain similar capability to defend itself.

The Iranians – who are largely responsible for building up Hizbullah to such an extent that today it has more firepower than 90 percent of the countries of the world – would “call in their chips,” and the organization would launch massive rocket attacks against Israel’s home front.

It is probable some of the Hizbullah attacks would come from Syria, which means that Damascus would be drawn into the conflict. Hamas and Islamic Jihad would also join the fray in a battle that would not be waged against tanks and planes, but against the civilian population.

Iran and the US

There is no significant difference in Israeli and US intelligence assessments regarding Iran. The major difference is in the perception of the danger.

While Israel sees a nuclear Iran as an existential threat, the US doesn’t perceive Iran as an existential threat to the US. It views Teheran as an actor that works against its interests in the region, and it is clear to Washington that if Teheran gained a nuclear capability, it would trigger a wild nuclear arms race in the Middle East. But it is not concerned Iran will blow up Boston. Israel, however, takes the Iranian leadership at its word when it talks about wanting to rid the world of the “Zionist entity,” and does not rule out the possibility that the Iranians would use the bomb against Israel at some point.

The US, already spread extremely thin in the Middle East and paying about $1 billion a day to support its military operations in the region, is unlikely to take on another military action by attacking Iran. This is particularly true since Washington is increasingly facing tough going in Afghanistan, may be unable to withdraw all its troops as planned from Iraq, and is facing major problems now in Yemen, Somalia and Sudan.

Options on Iran

Barring US or Israeli military action against Iran, what is left is to change the Iranian government’s mind about the wisdom of pursuing a nuclear bomb, or to buy more time that may create other opportunities down the line. There are a number of tools that can be used to achieve these goals, analysts say and WikiLeaks cables indicate, including:

• International pressure on Iran to convince it – through sanctions – that the price it is paying to gain nuclear capability is too high.

• Keeping the Iranians from getting the parts to produce the bomb. Thousands of parts go into the production of a nuclear weapon, and not all of those can be produced in Iran. They need to be purchased from abroad, and if these parts are not available, then the program cannot go ahead as planned.

• Economic warfare – not just sanctions, but ensuring that banks don’t do business with the country, and preventing it from getting lines of credit.

• Fanning the ethnic chasms inside Iran, a country made up of 50% ethnic Persians, 25% Azeris, 7% Kurds and a smattering of Arabs, Turkmen, Balochi and other ethnic groups. The creation of ethnic tensions can rock the government.

• Covert actions to set back the nuclear project.

None of these tools by itself can slow down the Iranians, but taken together they can have, and have had, an effect. The fact is that when Dagan took over the Mossad in 2002, the assessments were that Iran would be able to produce a bomb by 2007. In 2007 this was adjusted to 2009, and now in 2011 the date being bandied about is the middle of the decade.

There are serious schisms among the ruling elite in Iran about whether the price of building a bomb is worth it, and the Iranians are well aware of what the Arab world thinks about the program and their designs in the Middle East. The WikiLeaks revelations that showed the loathing of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia toward Iran didn’t tell Teheran anything it didn’t already know.

Syria

The WikiLeaks cables revealed differences of opinion in the Israeli government about whether it would be possible to pry Damascus out of the Iranian orbit. There is wide agreement, however, that just as the Syrians are demanding an Israeli agreement to leave the Golan Heights in exchange for peace as a condition for talks, Israel needs to place its own preconditions on the table: the disarmament of Hizbullah, and Syria leaving the Iranian orbit.

The Syrians have said themselves that they are not willing to make either move, and one influential school of thought in Jerusalem posits that even a peace treaty with Israel would not compel them to do so.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

While Israel has never claimed responsibility for the Mahmoud al- Mabhouh assassination in Dubai, the world widely sees it as responsible.

The whole affair – including allegations that Israel used European and Australian passports to carry out the hit – are not seen as having caused Israel any long-term intelligence damage.

Israel’s intelligence relationship with Britain, which kicked out an Israeli intelligence officer as a result, is considered better. While the Irish expelled a diplomat reported to be connected to the Israeli intelligence community, the Mossad had no presence there.

While the Mabhouh incident attracted a great deal of media attention, it did not cause damage to the country’s intelligence relations with key countries around the world.

Gilad Schalit

While not opposed to releasing terrorists to secure the release of captive soldier Gilad Schalit, the Mossad under Dagan was opposed to releasing 450 hardened terrorists to the West Bank, because of a concern that this would lead to the murder of scores of Israelis.

The 400 terrorists who were released in 2004 to gain the return of businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum and the bodies of three IDF soldiers are believed to have been directly or indirectly involved in the killing of 231 Israelis.

Outgoing Mossad chief: Iran won’t have nuclear capability before 2015 – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Meir Dagan tells Knesset committee that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back several years after a series of malfunctions.

By Yossi Melman

Meir Dagan, who retired from his post as Mossad chief on Thursday after eight years, does not believe Iran will have nuclear capability before 2015.

In a summary given to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Dagan said Iran was a long way from being able to produce nuclear weapons, following a series of failures that had set its program back by several years.

	Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan
	Photo by: Nir Keidar

Dagan handed over the job to his successor, Tamir Pardo, in the Prime Minister’s Bureau Thursday morning, after having parted from the ministers during last Sunday’s cabinet session.

The former Mossad chief had said on various occasions in the past that Israel should go to war only if attacked, or if in immediate danger of survival.

Dagan concluded his term saying Iran was still far from being capable of producing nuclear weapons and that a series of malfunctions had put off its nuclear goal for several years. Therefore, he said, Iran will not get hold of the bomb before 2015 approximately.

According to a Wikileaks report, Dagan told a senior American official that it would take a series of coordinated moves to stop the Iranian nuclear program. He reportedly suggested increasing the economic sanctions against Iran, preventing the export of products required for the nuclear project to Iran, covert warfare, and encouraging minority and opposition groups to topple the Iranian regime.

Dagan’s work with Pardo over the past several weeks included trips abroad to present his successor to counterparts around the world. Their trip to England did not reflect the crisis between London and Jerusalem over the Mossad’s alleged use of British passports in the assassination of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last year in Dubai.

President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and senior defense and security officials will soon attend a farewell event for Dagan as well. Such events have become customary since 1995, when the government decided to expose the identity of the heads of both the Mossad and the Shin Bet security service.

Reputation restored

During his term, Dagan restored the Mossad’s reputation as an omnipotent organization whose reach extends to the ends of the earth − a myth that has contributed to Israel’s deterrence. Under his command, the espionage agency also regained its dominant status in the Israeli intelligence community and became a central player in the international arena. This was demonstrated in the numerous tete-a-tetes Dagan held with former U.S. President George Bush and other state leaders in Europe and the Middle East.

Dagan’s term centered around two main issues: the Iranian nuclear program; and the assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders and Iranian scientists, most if not all of which have been attributed to the Mossad.

The Israeli intelligence community’s assessments of Iran’s nuclear capability have changed during Dagan’s tenure. In 2003, Israeli intelligence officials thought Iran would have its first bomb by 2007. In 2007, they thought it would be 2009, and a year later they put it at 2011. Now the date has moved to 2015. These adjustments were not the result of mistaken evaluations, but due to the difficulties Iran has encountered in advancing its program, largely because of the Mossad’s efforts.