WarSclerotic

Syrian tanks storm town near Turkey border.

By REUTERS  
06/18/2011 13:08 

Soldiers loyal to Bashar Assad burn houses, arrest 70; 19 protesters shot to death across country as bloody crackdown continues; Lebanese army responds with force to rallies in support of Syrian protesters.

AMMAN – Syrian troops and gunmen loyal to President Bashar Assad stormed a town near the Turkish border on Saturday, burning houses and arresting 70 people, witnesses said, in wide-ranging military assault to crush a three month uprising.

“They came at 7 a.m to Bdama. I counted nine tanks, 10 armoured carriers, 20 jeeps and 10 buses. I saw shabbiha (gunmen) setting fire to two houses,” said Saria Hammouda, a lawyer from the small town of Bdama.

The town lies 2 km from the Turkish border, in Jisr al-Shughour region, from where thousands of people have fled to Turkey following military assaults to quell dissent against 41 years of Assad family rule

In Lebanon, the Lebanese army clamped down on two sectarian districts of a northern city on Saturday after a rally in support of anti-government protesters in Syria triggered deadly clashes between rival gunmen.

Troops manned checkpoints and searched cars and houses in Tripoli’s Bab al-Tebbaneh neighbourhood, a Sunni Muslim stronghold, and Jabal Mohsen neighbourhood, whose residents hail from the same Alawite sect as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

19 Syrians died on Friday when Syrian government forces fired at demonstrators demanding the removal of President Bashar Assad in the biggest protest since unrest against Baathist rule erupted in March, activists said.

European powers, which had initiated a detente with Assad prior to the street protests to try to draw the Syrian leader away from Iran and also stabilize Lebanon, said Damascus should face tougher sanctions for the violence.

Tens of thousands of people rallied across the country, defying Assad’s military crackdown and ignoring a pledge that his tycoon cousin Rami Makhlouf, a symbol of corruption, would renounce his business empire and channel his wealth to charity.

“Protests last week were big and this week they are bigger still. The demonstrators have not held squares consistently yet in big cities like we had seen in Egypt, but we’re heading in this direction,” opposition figure Walid Bunni told Reuters by telephone from Damascus.

“The security grip is weakening because the protests are growing in numbers and spreading, and more people are risking their lives to demonstrate. The Syrian people realize that this is an opportunity for liberty that comes once in hundreds of years,” said Bunni, who was a political prisoner for eight years.

The worst bloodshed was in Homs, a merchant city of one million people in central Syria, where the Local Coordination Committees, a main activist group linked to protesters, said 10 demonstrators were killed. State television said a policeman was killed by gunmen.

One protester was also reported killed in the northern commercial hub of Aleppo, the first to die there in the unrest.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which operates from Britain, said it could confirm only 10 civilians killed overall in Syria.

The Syrian government has barred most international journalists from the country, making it difficult to verify accounts from activists and officials.

Syrian authorities blame the violence on “armed terrorist groups” and Islamists, backed by foreign powers.

Friday Muslim prayers have provided a platform for the biggest protests, inspired by revolts across the Arab world.

Witnesses and activists said tens of thousands of people protested in the southern province of Deraa where the revolt began, as well as in the Kurdish northeast, the province of Deir al-Zor, which borders Iraq’s Sunni heartland, the city of Hama north of Damascus, the coast and suburbs of the capital itself.

Two towns on the main Damascus-Aleppo highway north of Homs were also encircled by troops and tanks, residents said, five days after the army retook the town of Jisr al-Shughour, sending thousands feeling across the nearby border into Turkey.

Refugees from the northwestern region said troops and gunmen loyal to Assad, known as ‘shabbiha’ were pressing on with a scorched earthed campaign in the hill farm area by burning crops, ransacking houses and shooting randomly.

The International Federation for Human Rights and the US-based Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies said in a statement that, according to local sources, the Syrian forces killed more than 130 people and arrested over 2,000 in Jisr Shughour and surrounding villages over the last few days.

The number of refugees who had crossed over from Syria has reached 9,600, and another 10,000 were sheltering by the border just inside Syria, according to Turkish officials.

Syrian rights groups say at least 1,300 civilians have been killed and 10,000 people have been detained since March.

Why Meir Dagan speaks out – JPost – Opinion – Columnists.

Photo by: Ariel Jerozolimski

By DAVID HOROVITZ 
06/17/2011 16:38

Editor’s Notes: There has been widespread criticism, but no plausible explanation, for the ex-Mossad chief’s anguished repeated warnings against an Israeli military strike on Iran. Don’t we owe this remarkable individual rather more than a rush to condemnation?

  Meir Dagan is no fool.

He may be feisty and opinionated.

He may have long had his critics, and has attracted many more by going public in recent weeks with his warnings against a military strike on Iran, his complaints over Israel’s failure to utilize avenues for potential diplomatic progress with the Palestinians, and his intimations that Israel’s current political leadership may not be sufficiently competent.

But you don’t run the Mossad for eight years, retaining the respect of an elite body of supremely confident and capable operatives, and preside over innumerable successful missions, many of them so sensitive as to remain classified for years to come, if you’re not resourceful, innovative, skilled and exceedingly smart.

So Dagan would certainly have known, before he chose to speak out, that a central, certain impact of his repeated don’t-hit-Iran pleas would be to reduce the credibility of Israel’s claim to be keeping the military option on the table.

The only time that the ayatollahs halted their nuclear drive – freezing their weapons program and suspending uranium enrichment – was in 2003, when they feared that the United States, having come for Saddam Hussein, was heading their way next. Since then, Tehran has grown increasingly confident that no one is going to intervene militarily, with the very vaguely possible exception of Israel.

The American National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, which outrageously minimized the Iranian nuclear threat, cut the ground out from under any conceivable military option for the Bush administration. The chances of President Barack Obama sending US troops into action against the ayatollahs’ program were always slim to nil, and Tehran thinks that slim left town when Washington failed to champion the Iranian people’s revolt against the faked presidential elections two years ago.

Israeli political, diplomatic and security leaders, led by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, have made anguished appeals to innumerable international players in the last few years, publicly and privately, to at least attempt to project a credible military threat precisely because only a genuine fear of attack is likely to deter the Iranians. You may not really intend to use force even if the Iranians continue to defy diplomatic and economic pressure, runs the Israeli argument in essence, but at least try to sound like you might.

Paradoxically, as a hugely frustrated Israel has been attempting to make clear to an often indifferent international audience, the less concerned the Iranians may be about the prospect of any such military attack, the more likely it is that one may actually prove necessary – as a last resort when everything else has failed to stop them.

All of this the super-smart Dagan had doubtless fully internalized long before he elected to depart from years of silence and brief a group of journalists off-the-record, in January, as he stepped down from the agency. “Don’t hurry to attack Iran,” he was quoted as telling them. Various actions had pushed Iran “away from the bomb until 2015 at the earliest,” he reportedly elaborated. “One should attack only if the sword is at the throat.”

And the same arguments would have been just as clear to the ex-Mossad chief when, nonetheless, he returned to his theme two weeks ago. Speaking publicly this time, at a conference in Tel Aviv, he declared that the idea of an Israeli Air Force attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was “the stupidest thing I have ever heard.” He then added that anyone seriously considering any such strike needed to internalize that he would be “dragging Israel into a regional war that it would not know how to get out of. The security challenge would become unbearable.”

NOT ONLY is Dagan smart, however. He is also, by all accounts, a man who carries an unusually heavy sense of responsibility for the well-being of the Jewish people. This is no self-interested, narrow-minded or politically motivated figure. This is a man whose lifelong orientation is to protect his nation from any repeat of the murderous malice that engulfed us 70 years ago and that struck directly at his own family too.

This is the intelligence chief, remember, who, as our military correspondent Yaakov Katz reported in March of last year, kept a photograph on his office wall of an elderly bearded Jew, forced to kneel at the feet of a pair of Nazi soldiers. “Look at this picture,” Dagan would urge his visitors. “This man, kneeling down before the Nazis, was my grandfather just before he was murdered. I look at this picture every day and promise that the Holocaust will never happen again.”

The last thing such an Israeli patriot, such a grandson, would ever do, surely, is risk putting the Jewish nation into greater renewed danger. And to do so knowingly, calculatedly, repeatedly… well, it would simply defy rational explanation. It would beggar belief.

SO WHAT, then, are we to make of the sight, and more relevantly the sound, of Meir Dagan breaking cover, leaving his habitual silent habitat, to repeatedly deride the notion of a solo Israeli military option for Iran, when he knows the Iranians will interpret this as widening their path to the bomb still further? How are we to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable?

Dagan, it might be noted, is not the first intelligence chief to take a stand against ostensible government thinking about targeting an enemy nuclear program. That’s not the issue. Yitzhak Hofi, who headed the Mossad in 1981, vehemently opposed that June’s Menachem Begin-ordered strike on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear facility at Osirak. It was argued that Iraq was not yet close to building a bomb, and that a furious response from the Reagan administration – which, of course, did not materialize – would cause more harm to Israel’s national security than Saddam’s program could. But Hofi protested behind closed doors. Dagan has smashed the mold in bringing his bitter objections, ahead of time, into the public arena.

From inside the government, one withering explanation for his outbursts has been that he is acting for selfish, partisan purposes – that here is a man a few months out of his prestigious job, now beginning the journey into the political arena. These are the opening salvoes of his Knesset campaign, intended to discredit the leaders he hopes to usurp.

But how demeaning, how petty, and how impossible that is to square with the portrait of the Dagan we have known hitherto – the picture of Meir Dagan, defender of the Jews. Would he really risk undermining Israel’s deterrent capacity in the face of Iran’s nuclear drive for the sake of narrow political ambition?

A more plausible answer stems from the fact that Dagan’s central preoccupation as head of the Mossad lay in finding the means to thwart Iran, and if not thwart then at least delay the ayatollahs, without the necessity of overt military action. That’s what Ariel Sharon hired him to do in 2002, and what Sharon and subsequent prime ministers kept reappointing him to keep on doing. And if the foreign reports – naturally unconfirmed by Israel – are any guide, his agency has indeed managed to stave off that Islamist bomb by some years via a variety of subtler interventions, such as the Stuxnet computer virus, the assassination of certain figures central to the program and the sabotaging of key equipment.

According to all manner of reports, the Mossad has been provided with considerable additional budgetary resources for this mission. More than on any other single issue, therefore, it is on thwarting Iran that the agency’s prestige stands or falls. Now, though, Dagan is gone from the Mossad, and his concern – the concern that has led him to speak out – is that its ability to keep on keeping Iran from the bomb is underappreciated, and that the temptation to resort to military action is thus unjustifiably on the rise.

Another possible explanation derives from a fault that might be difficult for so successful a Mossad chief to avoid, even a Mossad chief as utterly devoted to the cause of his people as this one: hubris.

Dagan came in for no little criticism after the assassination of the self-confessed murderer and Hamas missile importer Mahmoud Mabhouh in Dubai in January 2010. With the Dubai police claiming to be hot on the trail of what they said was the Mossad gang responsible for the hit, photos of the alleged team ranged across the front pages of the world’s newspapers, and a series of aggrieved nations taking diplomatic measures against Israel for the alleged abuse of their nationals’ passports, it was widely suggested that Dagan had underestimated the Dubai cops’ capacity for effective detective work and paid too little heed to the operation’s potential international fallout. Dagan had been in the job too long, anonymous ex-Mossad insiders sniped. He had become dangerously over-confident.

As anyone familiar with the sometimes strained interface between Israeli political leaders and Israeli security chiefs will tell you, the latter are generally of the withering opinion that the former don’t know what they’re doing and that the country would fall apart were it not for the wiser heads at the helm of the Mossad, the Shin Bet and the IDF. Dagan gave considerably more than a hint of that conviction himself two weeks ago in Tel Aviv, with this devastating observation: “I feel obligated to express my opinion on certain matters. The prime minister and defense minister are the ones in charge, but sometimes good sense and a good decision don’t have anything to do with being elected.”

Have we, therefore, been witnessing the irresponsible rantings of a man who has allowed his remarkable achievements to inflate his ego to bursting point? Is he now incapable of properly balancing concerns he may have about the deficiencies of others with the wider national good? Has he, in short, lost all sense of perspective?

Or, finally, ought we to take Dagan’s warnings at face value and regard them as reasonable and credible? Should we conclude that here is a highly intelligent figure, wholly dedicated to the best interests of the Jewish nation, who has realized that Israel’s current leadership simply cannot be trusted to heed private, unarguable warnings against the catastrophic consequences of a military strike on Iran, who is worried that such an unthinkable strike may indeed be imminent, and who has exhausted all the other discrete means at his disposal? Is he now utilizing his personal weapon of last resort – a public appeal, backed up by his peerless credibility – desperately praying that this will succeed where all else has failed to drag Israel back from the brink?

That last explanation may reflect best on Meir Dagan. But if he’s right, it suggests a dire reality for the rest of us. And, like all the other speculative interpretations presented here, it seems deficient.

For one thing, there is absolutely no indication that Israel is currently contemplating a strike at Iran – not with the sanctions option still being pursued, with avenues still presumably open for further sabotage, and with the “Arab spring” rendering the region so thoroughly unpredictable. For all we or anyone else knows, the improbable scenario of the Syrian people taking their lives into their hands to try to oust the Assad regime, at a price of more than 1,000 dead and counting, may yet be replicated in Iran, potentially obviating the need for devastatingly high-risk military intervention.

And for another, if the untouchable men in the decision-making hot seats have, nonetheless, made up their minds to strike, how successful is an ex-Mossad chief’s plea to the impotent public likely to prove?

WHICH LEAVES me with the fervent hope that Dagan, the master intelligence operative, who is regarded by many insiders as one of the greatest Mossad chiefs, is playing a more subtle game, pursuing a smarter strategy, than anyone has yet figured out. And that somewhere down the line we will realize – as we did, after all, when news first broke of the tantalizing non-military strike that was Stuxnet – that something was afoot that we hadn’t thought possible or maybe even dreamed of.

Then we will understand why it was that Meir Dagan broke years of silence in 2011 and chose to speak out brutally against the notion of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. And those who criticized him and doubted him will belatedly recognize that they owed this remarkable man a little more credit, and that in everything he said and did, he remained true to the promise he would habitually issue when he showed visitors in his Mossad office that heartbreaking photograph of his grandfather.

Column One: A do-or-die moment – JPost – Opinion – Columnists.

In Syria, dictator Bashar Assad’s violent repression of the popular revolt against his tyrannical, minority regime has exposed the Syrian leader as a vicious murderer. While there is some room for hope that the Syrian people may successfully overthrow him, given the US’s refusal to provide any tangible assistance to the regime opponents, it is hard to see how such a happy future could come about.

For his part, Assad is the beneficiary of a steady stream of support from the Iranian regime. The mullahs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will ensure that he never runs out of bullets to kill his people.

As to the Palestinian Authority, this week’s Fatah-Hamas coalition negotiations in Cairo revealed the depth and breadth of Hamas’s control over the unity government now being formed. Despite massive American pressure, Hamas successfully vetoed Fatah’s bid to retain Salam Fayyad as prime minister in the unity government.

Moreover, in the face of significant international pressure, Hamas maintains its refusal to accept the so-called Quartet conditions of recognizing Israel, ending terrorism and agreeing to respect all previous agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israel.

Given Hamas’s maintenance of its annihilationist goals toward Israel and Fatah’s inability to convince Hamas to accept its minimal demands, it is obvious that Hamas is the stronger force in the Palestinian unity government. It is also clear that this government will not under any circumstances agree to make peace with Israel.

AND YET, in the face of these realities, US President Barack Obama is intensifying his pressure on Israel to agree to the now-powerless Fatah’s preconditions for negotiating. Indeed, he has adopted Fatah’s preconditions as his own.

Obama is demanding that Israel agree to surrender its right to defensible borders by insisting that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accept the pre-1967 boundaries – that is the 1949 armistice lines – as the starting point for future negotiations. Since Obama surely recognizes that a Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority will not accept Israeli control over anything from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley, he knows that he is requiring that Israel surrender its right to defensible borders before it even begins negotiating.

It is not surprising that the unity talks that crowned Hamas the king of Palestinian politics have taken place in post-Mubarak Egypt. Despite the rosy, post-Mubarak scenarios put forward during the revolution in January by American liberal and neo-conservative intellectuals, post- Mubarak Egypt is shaping up to be a dangerous, frightening place.

With the supposedly liberal Wafd Party merging with the Muslim Brotherhood this week, the Brotherhood took a significant step toward consolidating its rise to political leadership of the country in the elections scheduled for September.

The ruling military junta’s decision to arrest Israeli-American Ilan Grapel on trumped-up espionage charges last week is just one more signal that post-Mubarak Egypt is turning its back on Egypt’s peace with Israel.

And as The Washington Times reported last week, the US has been reduced to begging the Egyptian military authorities to re-arrest a number of top jihadist terrorists freed from Egyptian prisons in the aftermath of Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. Yet, not only have the terrorists not been re-jailed, some of them have formed new political parties and are slated to run in September’s elections. Clearly, the US is also being betrayed by the new regime.

If the Muslim Brotherhood controls the next Egyptian government, Egypt will join Lebanon and Turkey as the newest member of the growing club of nations ruled by Islamic radicals. This week, Lebanon’s Hezbollah-appointed Prime Minister Najib Mikati finally formed his Hezbollah- controlled government.

Hezbollah has now officially swallowed Lebanon. The regional and indeed global repercussions of the development are simply mind-boggling.

Then there is Turkey. This week, the Turks went to the polls and re-elected Prime Minister Recip Erdogan and his radical Islamic AKP party to lead the country for a third term. In his victory speech, Erdogan signaled his Islamist and neoimperialist ambitions by stating that former Ottoman empire-controlled cities from Sarajevo to Jerusalem, from Damascus to Beirut to Ramallah should all be cheering his victory. Turkish intellectuals like Sinan Ulgen, who heads the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, are arguing for a more independent Turkish role within NATO.

Both nuclear-armed Pakistan and Yemen are quickly approaching the day when they will be led by al Qaida or its affiliates. The forced departure of Yemini President Ali Abdullah Saleh two weeks ago after he was wounded in an attack on the Presidential Palace was seen as a major victory for al Qaida. Al Qaida forces continue to attack government installations in Aden and other cities throughout the country.

As for Pakistan, the US’s assassination of Osama bin Laden last month exposed the dirty secret of Pakistani military collaboration with al Qaida for all to see. This week’s arrest of five Pakistanis accused of acting as informants to the US in its bid to locate the al Qaida chief is further proof – if any was needed – that the $21 billion in military and economic assistance the US has showered on Pakistan since 2002 has bought it precious little in the way of strategic support or partnership from Islamabad. Recent reports indicate increased concern that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal may eventually fall under the control of al Qaida sympathizers.

AMAZINGLY, WHILE all of these developments are alarming, and while all of them have justifiably dominated much of the coverage of the Middle East in recent weeks and months, the fact is that all of them pale in comparison to what is happening in Iran. And this story is receiving only scant and generally superficial attention from the international media and the major governments of the Western world.

Monday, The Wall Street Journal editorialists summarized the major developments on this front. First, last week the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency released previously classified sections of its latest report on Iran. The report says that in the last six months, Tehran enriched 970 kilos of uranium to reactor-grade levels, bringing its publicly known stockpile of low enriched uranium to 4,105 kilos.

Iran also has enriched 56.7 kilos of uranium to the 20% level, from which it is a relatively simple matter to increase enrichment levels to the 90% needed to make a nuclear bomb.

Iran has also installed upgraded centrifuges in its until recently secret enrichment facility at Qom.

Rand Corporation scholar Gregory S. Jones wrote this month that Iran has reached nuclear breakout capacity. In his words, “Iran can now produce a weapons’s worth (20 kilograms) of HEU [weapons-grade uranium] any time it wishes. With Iran’s current number of operating centrifuges, the batch recycling process would take about two months.”

Apparently owing to their certainty that Iran is an unstoppable nuclear power, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards took their guard down in a recent issue of their in-house journal. The magazine published an article describing the day after Iran performs a nuclear test.

And the beat goes on. Yesterday, Iran successfully launched a second spy satellite into space.

The launch indicates that Iran is acquiring greater prowess in developing intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities. Such capabilities along with Iran’s nuclear program and global ambitions constitute a clear and present danger to Europe and the US.

Iran’s steady progress toward a nuclear arsenal was made all the more frightening in the face of the recent comments by retired Mossad director Meir Dagan. In a shocking breach of protocol and in apparent violation of the law, the man who until a few months ago stood at the helm of Israel’s efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions attempted to take Israel’s military option for striking Iran’s nuclear installations off the table. In press interviews, Dagan stated that it would be disastrous for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear installations.

Dagan failed to note that it would be far more disastrous to allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

At this point, it is inarguable that the policy of sanctioning Iran favored by the US and Europe has failed to dampen Iran’s commitment to developing nuclear weapons. It has also failed to significantly slow Iran’s progress towards the atom bomb. Obviously, the only possible way to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons at this late hour is to attack its nuclear installations.

For years, Israel’s governments have taken a back seat to Washington on Iran. From Ariel Sharon to Ehud Olmert to Netanyahu, since Iran’s nuclear program was first revealed in 2003, Israel has allowed itself to believe that the US could be trusted to take the greatest threat to Israel’s survival off the table.

The belief that the US would lead a military strike against Iran was always based more on blind faith than fact. When, in 2003, George W.

Bush decided to work through the UN Security Council on the issue. despite Russia’s open assistance to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and China’s growing addiction to Iranian natural gas, it was already apparent that the US was not serious about preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And when, in late 2007, the US’s National Intelligence Assessment published the demonstrably false claim that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, it became clear to anyone willing to see that the US had decided not to take any significant action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This dire state of affairs was reinforced with the inauguration of Obama as US president in 2009.

Obama’s sole policy for dealing with the nuclear weapons-seeking and openly genocidal Iranian regime is appeasement. And Obama doesn’t seek to appease the mullahs in order to convince them to end their nuclear program.

For Obama, appeasement is an end in and of itself. This is why – even after Iran has spurned all his offers of appeasement and has been caught red-handed repeatedly aiding Iraqi and Afghan forces killing US servicemen, and despite Iran’s swift progress toward a nuclear arsenal – Obama refuses to even state openly that he would use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

What this means is that – as was the case in May 1967, when the combined Arab armies gathered with the express purpose of wiping the Jewish state off the map – today again, Israel is alone at its hour of greatest peril. All of the lesser threats now gathering from Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey will become insurmountable if Iran becomes a nuclear power.

As was the case in May 1967, Israel has arrived at a do-or-die moment. And we should all pray for the strength and courage of our leaders, our soldiers and our nation at this time.

caroline@carolineglick.com