WarSclerotic

Ahmadinejad urges Egypt to rebuild ties – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Iranian president tells Egyptian academics bilateral cooperation will see emergence of new power which will force ‘Zionists’ out of region, urges Cairo to sever ties with US

News agencies

ranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged Egypt on Wednesday to rebuild diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic, saying the emergence of a new “great power” would force “Zionists” to leave the region.

At a meeting with Egyptian academics, clerics and media representatives in Tehran, Ahmadinejad pushed his plan to rebuild links with Cairo after the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February.

“I proudly announce that we are ready to give all our experiences to the Egyptian nation … if there is an investment opportunity in Egypt we are proudly willing to do that,” state broadcaster IRIB quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

Under Mubarak, Egypt was a close US ally which maintained its 1979 peace treaty with Israel and shared Saudi Arabia’s suspicions of Iran and its alleged nuclear weapons program.

Ahmadinejad in Tehran (Photo: EPA)

“Our enemies do not want us rebuild our ties because they know a great political and economic power will emerge from our cooperation,” Ahmadinejad said.

“Then all the Zionists along with other enemies of nations must leave and escape this region.”

Ahmadinejad said an alliance with Iran would remove Egypt’s need to rely on US support.

“If we stand together, there is no need for their (American) help because Iran and Egypt have needs which can be met by relying on each other’s capabilities,” he said.

Ties between Cairo and Tehran were severed after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution and Egypt’s signing of the peace treaty with Israel. Although Egypt and Iran do not have full diplomatic relations, each has a diplomatic mission in the other’s capital.

‘Islamic awakening’

Tehran sees improved ties with Egypt as a desirable outcome of what it calls the Arab world’s “Islamic awakening”, which it hopes will reduce US influence and unite Muslim countries.

Last week Egyptian authorities briefly detained and questioned an Iranian diplomat on suspicion of spying. He was released when his diplomatic status was confirmed and returned to Iran.

Two Iranian naval ships passed through Egypt’s Suez Canal in February, the first to be allowed to do so since the Islamic revolution, a move Israel described as a “provocation”.

On Tuesday Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi was reported as saying that Tehran was “optimistic” about boosting ties with Egypt.

“We are optimistic about the future of ties between the two countries,” Salehi was quoted as saying by state television’s website.

Reuters and AFP contributed to this report

Australia to UN: Refer Assad to I… JPost – Diplomacy & Politics.

  The UN should consider referring Syrian President Bashar Assad to the International Criminal Court, Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said on Wednesday, according to an AFP report.

Rudd said he had widened sanctions on Syria to include more individuals associated with the Assad, and that he would discuss additional legal steps with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

“I believe it is high time that the Security Council now consider a formal referral of President Assad to the International Criminal Court,” Rudd was quoted as saying to the National Press Club. “I am corresponding with the UN secretary general today and the president of the Security Council today on that matter.”

Rudd’s comments come after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday said the reported torture of a Syrian boy shows the “total collapse” of Syrian authorities’ willingness to listen to anti-government protesters.

In some of her harshest comments about Syria’s crackdown on the protests, Clinton suggested the Assad government’s hold on power was weakening, while a US spokesman described the 13-year-old boy’s reported treatment as “horrifying” and “appalling.”

“Every day that goes by the position of the government becomes less tenable and the demands of the Syrian people for change only grow stronger,” Clinton said.

Also commenting on the torture of the 13-year-old boy, Rudd was quoted by AFP as saying, “When you see the large-scale directed action by a head of government against his own civilian population, including the murder of a 13-year-old boy and his torture, then the deepest question arises in the minds of the people of the world as to whether any claim to legitimacy remains,” Rudd said.

The Australian foreign minister added that the “brutal act” was carried out by a “desperate regime,” and that he believed the boy’s death would “further galvanize the international community in their attitude to the brutality being deployed in Syria at present by the regime against innocent people.”

In the latest round of violence on Monday, four civilians were killed with when Syrian security forces entered the central town of Talbiseh to crush dissent against Assad, a human rights group reported.

Obsessed with Israel, Western Leaders Ignore Iran’s Nukes « Commentary Magazine.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be laughing his head off. As Abe noted yesterday, the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report unveiled evidence that Iran has been working on technology to arm its missiles with nuclear warheads. It also disclosed evidence of Tehran’s work “on a highly sophisticated nuclear triggering technology that experts said could be used for only one purpose: setting off a nuclear weapon.” If a smoking gun were needed, this is it.

Yet the “international community” hasn’t uttered a peep about the report. It’s too busy obsessing over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead.

Two days after the report’s publication, the G8 met in Deauville. Its concluding statement devoted six paragraphs to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, notable for both their specificity (“we express our strong support for the vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace outlined by President Obama on May 19, 2011”) and their urgency (“The time to resume the Peace Process is now.”)

In contrast, Iran’s nukes merited exactly one content-free paragraph:

We note with deep concern the recent report by the IAEA which underlines that Iran is not implementing a number of its obligations, that areas of concern remain regarding possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme and that the Agency is therefore unable to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities. . . . We regret that while Iran finally met twice with China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union High Representative, following their intensive diplomatic efforts and the adoption of measures in UNSCR 1929, it was not possible to reach any substantive result, Iran having not yet entered into a genuine dialogue without preconditions. Depending on Iran’s actions, we will determine the need for additional measures in line with the dual-track approach.

Translation: At some unspecified future time, the G8 may—but then again it may not—decide on some unspecified new measures against Iran. But there’s no hurry, because it still hasn’t even concluded that Iran is pursuing nukes. The G8 is merely “unable to conclude” the opposite.

The same warped perspective characterized Obama’s May 19 speech. Granted, it predated the latest IAEA report, but Iran’s nuclear program isn’t new. Yet in a major Middle East policy address, Obama devoted exactly half a sentence to it: “Our opposition to Iran’s intolerance and Iran’s repressive measures, as well as its illicit nuclear program and its support of terror, is well known.” No hint of urgency there, or of any plans to stop the program.

In contrast, the president devoted 12 full paragraphs, almost one-fifth of the speech, to detailing his vision of an Israeli-Palestinian deal, which he deemed “more urgent than ever.”

Objectively speaking, Iran is by far the more important problem. Its strategic location on the Persian Gulf enables it to shut off much of the world’s oil supply at will, and even without nukes, it has fomented terror worldwide; with nukes to deter attack, Iran would have the West at its mercy. Israel, by contrast, controls no vital natural resources; its location is strategically insignificant; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hasn’t spread beyond its own borders in decades.

Yet the West continues blithely pursuing its pet obsession, leaving Tehran free to laugh all the way to the bomb.

Obama’s new security staff may approve attack on Iran – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Obama has chosen the summer of 2011, about a year before the election season warms up in 2012, to refresh his national security staff, a move that may have serious repercussions on Israel.

By Amir Oren

Israeli acquaintances of General Martin Dempsey, the chairman-elect of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, speak extremely highly of him. He is a pro, keeps away from politics and from self-aggrandizement, a military authority, and serious. President Barack Obama announced his appointment, which has to be approved by the Senate, four months before the term of office of Admiral Michael Mullen ends. Alongside him, and slightly above him, Dempsey will encounter a new Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, the successor to Robert Gates who will retire at the end of the month.

	General Martin Dempsey.
	Photo by: AP

Obama has chosen the summer of 2011, about a year before the election season warms up in 2012, to refresh his national security staff. Within a few short months, he released his national security adviser, the retired General James Jones, in favor of his deputy, Tom Donilon; he parted from Gates; he transferred Panetta from the CIA to the Pentagon and General David Petraeus from commanding the forces in Afghanistan to the CIA; and he signed another round of senior military appointments. His image as supreme commander was strengthened following the success of the campaign against Osama bin Laden.

Dempsey, like Petraeus and others of their generation, is a thinking officer who reads and writes a great deal. As head of Tradoc, the Training and Doctrine Command of the ground forces, he aimed at enhancing it as an organization that can learn new things, and adjust to surprises and new and unknown rivals. Most of his time in the past two decades has been devoted to the Middle East – as an operations officer with the armored corps in the 1991 Iraq war, as a planner in the joint chiefs of staff, as the head of the American delegation that upgraded the Saudi Arabian national guard, as the commander of an armored division in Iraq in 2003, as the person responsible for training the new Iraqi army, and as the replacement for a commander who was ousted in the Central Command that covers Iran and Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

Dempsey is familiar with the Israel Defense Forces both from his days in Tradoc that first gained praise for studying the lessons of the Yom Kippur War just when the young Dempsey, a fresh Second Lieutenant from West Point, preferred the armored corps to the other corps, and from exchanges of information and opinions between the ground forces of both armies in recent years. The IDF has a permanent liaison officer with Tradoc at its headquarters in Virginia. Tradoc has also studied in depth the lessons of the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Operation Cast Lead and the war against terrorism in the territories.

The head of the chiefs of staff does not command the corps but serves as the senior military adviser to the president. During the 1990s, only generals from the ground forces served in this position – Colin Powell, John Shalikashvili, and Hugh Shelton (whose bureau Dempsey headed ). In the past decade, only officers from the Air Force, Marines and Navy were appointed. Dempsey’s appointment reflects the decisive part played by the ground forces, which Dempsey headed for only a few weeks, in American intervention overseas, mainly in the Middle East. It is deeply involved with its current assignments and does not have strength for further involvements.

Therefore the changes in leadership at the Pentagon are not merely an American story. The chance that Dempsey, at the start of his term of office, would advise Obama to attack Iran, or to permit Israel to do so, is not high. The outgoing head, Mullen, is likewise not enthusiastic about that but his ties with the IDF’s general staff are close and it can be assumed that, if Benny Gantz was persuaded to sign a plan by Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, Mullen would not be happy but would also not torpedo it.

The conclusion is that between the end of June and Gates’ retirement, and the end of September and Mullen’s retirement, the danger that Netanyahu and Barak will aim at a surprise in Iran is especially great, especially since this would divert attention from the Palestinian issue. As the Supreme Court explained to Moshe Katsav’s lawyers, some plans for summer vacations might be canceled.