WarSclerotic

DEBKA.

Admiral Kuznetzov

It was announced in Moscow on Tuesday, Nov. 29, that Russia’s envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin will pay visits to China and Iran in mid-January to discuss the US-backed global missile defense network.
” We are planning to visit both Beijing and Tehran soon under the Russian President’s directive, to discuss the planned deployment of a global missile defense network,” Rogozin said during a roundtable meeting at the lower house of the Russian parliament.
The diplomat added he would meet with Foreign Ministry and General Staff officials in China, and hold talks with the head of the Supreme National Security Council and diplomats in Iran.
That same day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had this to say on the Syrian question: “It’s not so much the (Syrian) authorities, but armed groups that are provoking the unrest.”
He urged all parties to pressure Syria’s political players to forgo violence, saying: “This has to do with what the authorities are doing, but even more, this applies to the armed groups that work in Syria and which maintain contacts with a host of Western countries and a host of Arab states. Everyone knows this.”
Lavrov was referring to the information reported exclusively by debkafile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly in mid-November, and confirmed in this issue, that military and intelligence officers from the US, Turkey, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan are coordinating and directing Free Syrian Army anti-Assad operations inside Syria.
Moscow blurs the size of the armada gathering opposite Syria
The Syrian question was the subject of a comment by the Russian foreign minister a day earlier too.
In reference to the sanctions imposed on Syria by the Arab League Lavrov stressed Monday before Arab ambassadors in Moscow that it was Russian policy to resolve internal problems “peacefully through national dialogue aimed at promoting civil harmony and without outside interference.”
This sounded like a warm-up for a Russia veto should the Arab League table an anti-Syria sanctions resolution at the United Nations Security Council.
Then Wednesday, Nov. 30, a high-ranking Russian Defense Ministry official told the Interfax news agency that a Russian battle group, consisting of three vessels led by the heavy aircraft-carrying missile cruiser Admiral Kuznetzov, would embark on a two-month Mediterranean voyage on December 6.
The number of Russian ships massing in the Mediterranean was left deliberately vague.
On Oct. 17, the Syrian news agency Sana reported Russian naval ships (no number) were due to arrive. Monday, Nov. 22, the presidential palace in Damascus disclosed that three Russian warships had entered Syrian waters opposite the port of Tartus.
No details were offered about the type of warship or their further movements, so that it is impossible to say for sure how many Russian vessels will be present in Syrian waters after the arrival of Admiral Kuznetsov group – five, six or more?
Medvedev and Putin strive to avoid another fiasco after Libya
There was plenty of diplomatic and military hustle and bustle in Moscow this week, from which DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Russian sources drew certain pointed conclusions:
1. The duo of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, who are due to change places after the next election, sat down and studied the lessons of their failure in Libya.
In the third week of August, Presidential Middle East Envoy Mikhail Margelov met Muammar Qaddafi‘s representatives on the Tunisian island of Djerba, after Washington had agreed to employ Moscow’s services as honest broker for cutting short the Libyan conflict.
Margelov then waited in vain for two days for rebel TNC representatives to arrive on the island. They never turned up. Instead, the Kremlin was chagrined to discover that British, French, Qatari and Jordanian special forces had spearheaded a lightning rebel push into Tripoli.
Moscow’s promised role of broker fell flat.
Since then, the Russian duo has vowed not be led by the nose again – either in Damascus or Tehran.
2. Russia’s diplomatic whiz kid Margelov looked this week as though he had been sidelined from his key role in the Arab Spring and left with scrappy missions on the fringes. His place has been taken by none other than Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov, who submits his reports directly to Medvedev and Putin.
Russia views Syria as a vital strategic partner
3. Russia’s top intelligence, military and munitions industries’ officials hold the President and Prime Minister personally responsible for Qaddafi’s fall and Moscow’s resulting strategic fiasco. To avert another such setback, hectic conferences on Syria and Iran take place behind closed doors in the Kremlin every two or three days. Ways and means are discussed for forestalling Western military intervention for Bashar Assad‘s ouster.
They are attended by Medvedev, Putin and Lavrov – or at least two of the three – as well as intelligence and military chiefs.
Assad’s Syria is regarded as a vital strategic partner on three grounds: a) His regime is seen as a key link in the anti-Western Middle East axis. Pro-Russian Damascus is held up as a counterweight to pro-American Ankara; b) It is Moscow’s main channel for influence in Hizballah, the Palestinian Hamas and Jihad Islami and the Palestinian Authority; c) Syria has granted Russia its last remaining military stronghold in the region at its Mediterranean ports.
The military relationship is longstanding and multifaceted.
For half a century Moscow has been Syria’s foremost arms supplier. In 2008, Russian began renovation work on Tartus military port long after its floating docks had fallen into disrepair, with a view to re-establishing a Russian presence on the Mediterranean. The Russian paper Izvestia reports that 600 technicians are at work upgrading the Tartus facilities, dredging the harbor and outfitting it for port calls by the Russian Navy.
Moscow seeks to prevent a pro-Westerner succeeding Assad
Hundreds of active duty Syrian officers are graduates of Russian military academies. This gives Moscow good insights into the Syrian Army’s ways. If the high command mounted a coup to overthrow the Assad regime, (See the separate item about Western-Arab intervention in Syria), Moscow’s ties with top Syrian officers would guarantee that a new military ruler in Damascus would not be anti-Russian, as in the case of Libya.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources in Moscow report that Medvedev and Putin are far from sure they can save Assad and prevent his regime from falling.
For this reason, the Kremlin is investing heavily in public rhetoric and diplomacy. The regime in Damascus has been strongly urged to eschew excessive violence against its opponents while, at another level, Russian diplomats have been in close touch with Syrian opposition leaders.
The Kremlin appears to be getting used to the notion that Bashar Assad a losing horse. But this does not necessarily mean that Syria is about to fall completely into the lap of the West.
Russian strategists are taking the long view and working overtime to prevent this happening.

DEBKA.

Small units of Western Special Forces began filtering into Syria this week, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military and intelligence sources report. Their task was to mark out targets for aerial sorties and naval bombardments of President Bashar Assad‘s armed forces and government sites across the country, to be executed by the US and other NATO countries, including Turkey, Britain, France, Holland and Italy.
These advance units, no more than 6 to 8 men each, are also sussing out strategic sites in northern and central Syria for capture by the incoming Western and Arab armies.
Attached to each unit is a former Syrian officer, a deserter to the Free Syrian Army headed by Col. Riad al-Asaad, and an interpreter.
These defectors are well grounded from their regular military service on the locations to which the Western units are assigned and they know what parts of the army and local populace those units can count on for cooperation against Assad.
(Monday, Nov. 28, debkafile reported exclusively that a group of military officers from NATO and Persian Gulf nations had quietly established a mixed operational command at Iskenderun in the Turkish Hatay province on the border of North Syria. They hail from the United States, France, Canada, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with Turkish officers providing liaison.)
As this issue closes, we can also reveal the establishment of an intelligence-logistical headquarters for these forces in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli. The government in Beirut appears to be ignoring its presence.
Full civil war would call for substantial reinforcements
This outfit has two tasks: The first, to take charge of Syrian army deserters, sort them according to military skills and transfer them to the military training camps organized by the Turkish army and central intelligence agency, MIT. The second is to organize the flow of weapons from Lebanon and Turkey to the Free Syrian Army fighting inside the country.
Finally, this headquarters is also responsible for charting plans of operation to meet two possible eventualities:
1. The outbreak of a full-scale Syrian civil war.
This would necessitate large-scale Western and Arab reinforcements. Some of these special forces units would be airlifted or transported by rail from Europe, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, to land at small Syrian military and civilian airfields controlled by the advance guard of small special forces units already in the country. Others would be dropped by sea on Syrian beaches.
Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan have begun setting up arms and logistical supplies dumps for their use.
The Iskenderun planners expect the bulk of the Syrian army to remain loyal to Bashar Assad in the early days of the campaign and engage the foreign forces in combat. But as the conflict drags out into several weeks, they count on a swelling outflow of defectors to the rebels’ side.
Responding to different kinds of coup
2. The outbreak of mutiny in the Syrian army and security services.
This could take three different forms:
– A Syrian Army high command conspiracy to overthrow Assad. Preparations are underway to strengthen potential coup leaders with international and Arab support and bonding them with the Free Syrian Army rebels and Syrian opposition factions.
Attempts by Assad loyalists to suppress the putsch will be fought with advanced technology and intelligence resources.
– A Syrian Alawite coup to keep this 3.5 million-strong community in power without Assad by installing another Alawite figure in Damascus in his stead. In that case, the Western-Arab plan would be to isolate the anti-Assad Alawite conspirators in order to save Syria from all-encompassing civil war.
– The survival of the Assad regime against Western-Arab military intervention and his ability to cling to power for another six months at least.
To meet these variable scenarios, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources report three plans of action have been charted:
One: Foreign troops will be deployed the full length of Turkey’s 800-kilometer long border with Syria, a line that stretches between the Mediterranean and the intersection of the Syrian, Iraqi and Turkish frontiers.
Two: Those troops will seize control, with local rebel help, of the main protest centers in the North, such as Idlib, Rastan and Homs, and then move in on Aleppo, northern Syria’s largest city whose metropolitan area has a population of over 2.5 million, mostly Sunni Muslims and Kurds.
Bisecting Libya finished Qaddafi. So why not Assad?
Severing Aleppo from the body of Syria and placing it under Western military protection would constitute the harshest economic sanction yet meted out to the Assad regime. It would cut off his access to financial resources for funding his military crackdown on the uprising against his rule.
Three: These movements would essentially divide Syria in two: a northern entity under anti-Assad opposition rule covering an area with a population of 6.5 million, 30 percent of the country’s total of 23 million. They will be kept going by assistance coming in from Turkey and Lebanon; and a southern entity, left initially under the rule of Bashad Assad in Damascus, until the northern sector can evolve into a beachhead for capturing the south as well.
Plans have matured for the seizure of one airport or more in northern Syria for the landing of cargo planes carrying logistical supplies to the Western and Arab forces in the field. A sea port is also to be commandeered on Syria’s Mediterranean coast for ships to unload essential supplies for the northern population.
Even if only a part of this master-plan comes to fruition, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources note, Syria will be partitioned in a manner that recalls the bisection of Libya last March, when a provisional rebel administration ruled from Benghazi and the Muammar Qaddafi regime held on for a time in Tripoli.
The Libyan experience taught the West and the Arabs emirs that a ruler’s days are numbered when international backing – especially by the global financial system – is withdrawn and swings around to back an opposition administration setting up a rival shop in the same country.

DEBKA.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Iran is in the throes of a mega manhunt to ferret out the army of double agents and inside traitors Tehran is convinced has infested the upper reaches of government, Revolutionary Guards and armed forces.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Tehran sources report the hunt was on less than 12 hours after the huge explosion which Nov. 12 ravaged the top-security Moadress missile base at Al-Ghadir, in Malard province, 45 kilometers from Tehran, and wiped out its top command.
The sweep is still ongoing two weeks later as we write this – expanded, in fact, since Monday, Nov. 28, to finally get to the bottom of the mostly unpublished explosions and other mysterious attacks on military and nuclear installations in the past year.
The dragnet was extended after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the heads of the Iranian intelligence and security services, under Minister of Intelligence Heydar Moslehi, became convinced that one and the same unseen hand was orchestrating most of the devastation.
The probe has recalled into focus the Oct. 12, 2010 explosion, which killed at least 32 Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) missile chiefs at a military barracks and training center in the western city of Khorramabad. Almost half of Iran’s stock of Shihab-3 ballistic missiles was destroyed in that blast.
(See DEBKA-Net-Weekly 466 of Oct. 22, 2010: An Undeclared Covert War Takes its Toll on Iran – Whose Rockets Knocked out Iran’s Ballistic Missile Launchers?).
That strike is thought to have kicked off the series of mostly undisclosed assaults besetting additional military and nuclear facilities ever since.
Bombings, fires, assassination and coup attempts
For example, unexplained technical glitches cropped up while the centrifuges for enriching uranium were being reassembled after their transfer to the secret underground facility at Fordo near Qom. Some broke down leaving far fewer working machines than Iran’s nuclear planners had projected.
Then, too, fires with no apparent cause, shut down certain IRGC bases for many months.
Monday, Nov. 28, the Washington Post carried this item:”At least 17 gas pipeline explosions have been reported since last year (in Iran), compared with three in 2008 and 2009. At the same time, nearly a dozen major explosions have damaged refineries since 2010, but experts say it is complicated to determine the cause of such incidents. (Iranian)… officials have blamed industrial accidents for most of the blasts, saying they were caused by such deficiencies as ‘bad welding’ or ‘substandard manufacturing.’ But media restrictions and the lack of independent investigations have made it hard to verify the claims.”
The sources of the WP report knew they were pouring salt on the most sensitive questions vexing Iran’s leaders: Is the regime under attack by clandestine plotters planted inside IRGC military installations by alien foes? Or, worse still, was the missile base blast contrived for the assassination of the supreme ruler and elimination of the top echelon of Iran’s armed forces?
Answers to these agonizing questions are desperately sought by the interrogation of a widening circle of detainees
The missile base blast targeted Khamenei for a coup d’etat
The IRGC intelligence investigation has turned inward. Suspicion focuses on a probable insider group or groups which have penetrated the corps at all levels, driven by a conspiracy to eliminate the country’s Islamist leaders at the first opportunity and effect regime change – in other words, a coup d’etat.
The Nov. 12 missile base blast prompted this suspicion, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources report, because it was timed to coincide with the pre-scheduled attendance of Ayatollah Khamenei and the entire top level of Iran’s military and IRGC command at the unveiling of a new surface-to-surface missile model capable of reaching western European’s main cities.
It so happened that the celebratory inauguration was called off the day before the event over a hitch in mounting the warhead (packed with conventional explosives – a step ahead of a nuclear payload) on the missile.
Brig. Gen. Hassan Moghadam, head of the missile program, and a top team of engineers and team leaders were summoned to the base to fix it. Twenty-four hours later, they still hadn’t figured out what was causing the problem when they were struck down by the fatal explosion.
With little physical evidence to work on, Iranian intelligence investigators have narrowed down the cause of the deadly blast to two theories:
1. The plotters had planted a defect in the missile or its warhead. They feared that if the experiment went ahead, the defect would be uncovered, and so decided to let the premeditated explosion go ahead even though Khamenei was out of range. Wiping out the executive level of Iran’s missile program and a good part of the secret base was deemed important enough to go through with the mission.
2. The plotters, who were part of the group huddled around the problematic missile, or even a member of the technical team, did nothing to trigger the explosion. In the event, it was inadvertently touched off by Gen. Moghadam himself when he tampered with the mechanism – not imagining it was booby-trapped.
A cabal of disenchanted stalwarts turned secret enemies
This suspicion led Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to widen the circle of suspects.
The investigation is now heading off in two directions: The first – considered most unlikely – that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s loyalists hoped to kill Khamenei and provisionally seize power, drawing IRGC support by promising to uphold all its privileges.
Ahmadinejad has fallen out of favor with the Supreme Leader. Khamenei’s followers may be promoting this theory in order to finish him and his faction off once and for all.
The more plausible avenue of investigation postulates a large-scale penetration of the military establishment and the IRGC by an army of double agents, based on once-loyal citizens recruited by Iran’s enemies during supplementary military training and other courses overseas.
Some of them completed academic studies in Western countries; others went to Russia and China for instruction in sensitive military and nuclear subjects. While outside the country, Western and Middle East spy agencies are believed to have made opportunities to approach these Iranians and rope them in as undercover agents.
As well-known stalwarts of the regime, these individuals were long considered above suspicion. But they are suspected of becoming secretly disenchanted with the rulers. Over time, they appear to have come to believe it was their duty to stop a regime that was leading the country inexorably toward disasters, namely, a major armed conflict over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Moles with inside knowledge of the security services and their methods
According to this hypothesis, the real threat to the Islamic regime is not posed by the opposition Mojadhedin-e Khalq, whose ability to penetrate the ruling establishment is often exaggerated, but, contrary to assessments in the West, by patriotic Iranian officers who have despaired of the regime ever mending its ways.
The very existence of a cabal of disaffected officers and officials suspected of operating undercover at the heart of Iran’s armed forces is the regime’s biggest nightmare.
These secret foes are almost impossible to identify and stop. They are highly motivated and as established insiders, know how to work under cover undetected and fully conversant with Iranian security services’ methods of investigation.
In the past year, Heydar Moslehi’s men have detained and interrogated hundreds of these kinds of suspects. Until the blast at the missile base this month, twelve former security officers and government officials turned dissidents were still under detention on charges of collaborating with the enemy. Their custody was kept a closely guarded secret in the hope of flushing out more such moles.
However the latest spate of attacks show Moslehi’s effort to have been a drop in the ocean and the number of suspects unmasked no more than a fraction of the legion of moles still at large. They must now be presumed to have reached as high as the Supreme Leader’s inner circle whence they continue to spill vital state secrets to their foreign handlers.
Some must be expected at a given point to turn to assassinating leading officials.
Assassination fears haunt Iran’s top men
This working hypothesis is not new to Iran’s political, religious, military and intelligence leaders. They have been haunted by this ever-present peril since Nov. 29, 2010, when two Iranian scientists were attacked minutes apart while driving in their cars on two busy streets in northern Tehran.
Dr. Fereidoun Abbassi-Davani survived the attack to win the appointment of Director of Iran’s Nuclear Commission, but Prof. Majid Shahriari, who also taught physics at Shahid Beheshti University, did not.
At the time, the attacks were generally reported to have been carried out by motorcyclists who attached sticky bombs to the scientists’ cars. DEBKA-Net-Weekly later discovered the attackers used guns.
The Iranian investigators concluded at the time that the attacks were planned by hostile agents who had burrowed deep into the heart of the IRGC. No outsiders could have known enough to pass the up-to-the minute detailed information on the targets’ movements needed by the gunmen.
It was decided that the twin assassination plot against Iran’s key nuclear scientists plot must either have been conceived by a foreign element running double agents, or that it was an inside job planned by a secretly disaffected high Iranian official.
Either way, IRGC chiefs were forced into accepting that the corps, the armed forces command, the Basij military, and even the Supreme Leader’s bureau, must be riddled with double agents.
They are turning every stone to find those hidden hands.

Former Mossad chief briefed comptroller about Iran strike plans – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

‘I’m very troubled,’ Meir Dagan said. ‘What I understand [from Barak’s statement] is that Israel must act within that time frame. I don’t share that appraisal.’

By Amos Harel

He may have been retired for a year, but former Mossad chief Meir Dagan is still a top media favorite. Without any media adviser, Dagan delivers his same message with the same impact, grabbing headlines every time he grabs microphone.

His first television interview – for Ilana Dayan’s “Fact” program on Channel 2 Wednesday – was a case in point. As in his previous statements, made in lectures and forums described as “closed” yet quoted in the media, Dagan devoted a considerable part of his address to dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, now the focus of a raging controversy in the Israeli leadership.

	Former head of Mossad Meir Dagan.
	Photo by: Ofer Vaknin

On his resignation from the position of Mossad chief Dagan reportedly told confidants he intends to do everything he can to prevent an irresponsible decision regarding Iran.

Now Dagan is making no effort to conceal his fears of the duo Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak in this regard. In the interview to Dayan last night he castigated Barak’s statement last month about Israel having a time window of less than a year for a military move to stop the nuclearization.

“I’m very troubled,” he said. “What I understand [from Barak’s statement] is that Israel must act within that time frame. I don’t share that appraisal.”

Between the lines, Dagan indicated he was considering a political career after the “cooling-off period” in about two years. He is aware of the public’s respect for him as a man of action who fought against terror, and according to foreign sources acted to thwart Iran and Syria’s nuclear programs. He also has an account to settle with Netanyahu, who did not make life easy for him in his last year in the Mossad.

Dagan believes with all his heart that he has a duty to prevent a military attack at this time. He may be expected to continue warning against this in future as well.

“The defense minister, prime minister and finance minister will not be able to stop me from expressing my opinion. We are not living in a non-democratic state,” he said.

After Dagan’s resignation Haaretz learned that he met Yaakov Or, head of the security division in the State Comptroller’s Office. The conversation’s content is classified, but it may be assumed that they discussed this issue. Shortly before that Dagan met the comptroller, Micha Lindenstrauss, and former Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.

Dagan, Ashkenazi and former Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin forged a strategic alliance regarding Iran, as a counterbalance to the line espoused by Netanyahu and Barak, who supported the military option in principle. After his discharge, Ashkenazi tried to interest Lindenstrauss in the leadership’s decision-making process vis-a-vis top security issues.

Dagan has been slamming Netanyahu and mainly Barak since the meeting with journalists he called in the Mossad headquarters on the day he resigned in January. Still, there is a difference between briefing reporters or a blurred video clip from a university lecture and a prime-time television interview.

Dayan places Dagan’s statements in the context of the Mossad’s apparent achievements during his term, “according to foreign media reports,” such as the assassination of Hezbollah senior operative Imad Mughniyeh, the mysterious malfunctions in the Iranian nuclear industry and the assassinations of the nuclear scientists in Tehran. This adds to Dagan’s credibility and weight as a public figure.

Barak understands that too. After Dagan’s previous statements Barak accused him of irresponsibility and causing damage to Israel’s deterrence. Meanwhile Barak himself got entangled in superfluous commentary about the attack’s timing and the number of expected casualties, as well as in his slip of the tongue saying if he were Iranian, he’d want a bomb as well.

In an interview to Israel Radio Wednesday morning, Barak refrained from criticizing Dagan directly and said those who say dealing with Tehran isn’t an Israeli matter may lead to the international community’s acceptance of Iran’s production of nuclear weapons.

In closed talks, both Netanyahu and Barak repeatedly address Dagan’s statements. Both seem worried not only of the damage to Israeli deterrence but to the former Mossad chief’s influence on public opinion.

Dagan last night expressed concern for possible mistakes made by Israel’s leadership. He explained that if a decision takes shape to attack Iran, it is up to him to warn of the imminent disaster. He said an offensive now would be entering “a regional war with eyes wide open. This is necessary only when we’re attacked or when the sword begins to cut the flesh.”

He added that Iran would react with missile fire, as would Hezbollah, Hamas “and in view of Syria’s problematic situation, there’s a good chance the Syrians would join in” to divert attention from the riots against the regime.

“I can’t predict the number of fatalities in such an attack,” he said, in a barb aimed at Barak.

US offers ‘bunker busters’ to UAE over I… JPost – International.

    WASHINGTON – The Obama administration has proposed selling 600 “bunker buster” bombs and other munitions to the United Arab Emirates, which lies across the Gulf from Iran, to deter what it called regional threats.

Iran is widely suspected of seeking to develop nuclear arms through a program that Tehran says is for peaceful power generation only.

The proposed $304 million sale would include 4,900 tail kits built by Boeing Co that turn unguided free-fall bombs into guided weapons and 4,300 “general purpose” bombs, the Defense Department said in a mandatory arms sale notice dated Wednesday.

The deal would boost UAE’s ability “to meet current and future regional threats” and to help deter aggression, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in the note to lawmakers.

The BLU-109 “Hard Target Penetrator” bomb, or bunker buster, is a 2,000-pound (900-kg) weapon designed to smash into buried enemy command posts, munitions depots and other hardened targets before using a delayed fuse to explode.

Iran’s nuclear facilities are widely dispersed around the country, some of them in fortified bunkers underground.

Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, is a tail section containing technology that uses global positioning system (GPS) data to home in on a target from up to 15 miles away.

UAE operates Lockheed Martin Corp’s F-16 “Block 60” fighter aircraft, the most advanced F-16 model flown.

Lawmakers have 30 days to accept or reject a foreign military sale after formal notification. None has been rejected to date after formal notification.

“The UAE government continues vital host-nation support of US forces stationed at Al Dhafra Air Base, plays an important role in supporting US regional interests, and has proven to be a valued partner in overseas operations,” the notice to Congress said.

The top US military officer said on Wednesday he did not know whether Israel would alert the United States ahead of time if it decided to take military action against Iran.

Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Reuters that sanctions and diplomatic pressure was the right path to take on Iran, without ruling out military action as a last resort.

US Senate OK’s sanctions on Iran… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

    WASHINGTON – The US Senate unanimously approved tougher sanctions against Iran on Thursday, voting to penalize foreign financial institutions that do business with Iran’s central bank, the main conduit for its oil revenues.

The Senate acted despite warnings from Obama administration officials who said threatening US allies might not be the best way to get their cooperation in action against Iran.

Administration officials said they were indeed looking to sanction Iran’s central bank, but in a calibrated manner, to avoid roiling oil markets or antagonizing allies.

The United States already bars its own banks from dealing with the Iranian central bank, so US sanctions would operate by dissuading other foreign banks from doing so by threatening to cut them off from the US financial system.

The United States and its Western allies have supported multiple rounds of sanctions on Iran, seeking to persuade it to curtail its nuclear work. Washington suspects Tehran of using its civilian nuclear program to develop an atomic bomb, although Iran says its program is solely to produce electricity.

The Senate voted 100-0 for an amendment sponsored by Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, and Senator Mark Kirk, a Republican, that would allow the US president to sanction foreign banks found to have carried out a “significant financial transaction with the Central Bank of Iran.”

“We seek to break the stable financial intermediary in between Iranian oil contracts and the outside world, so that it will just be easier to buy oil from elsewhere,” Kirk said in debate this week.

The sanctions were approved as an amendment to a huge defense bill that passed later on Thursday in the Senate. Similar provisions have passed a House of Representatives committee, increasing the likelihood that some version will be sent to Obama for his signature into law — or possible veto.

On Nov. 21, the United States, Britain and Canada announced new sanctions on Iran’s energy and financial sectors, but the Obama administration stopped short of targeting Iran’s central bank, a step that US officials said could send oil prices skyrocketing and jeopardized global economic recovery.

“The Obama administration strongly supports increasing the pressure on Iran, and that includes properly designed and targeted sanctions against the central bank of Iran, appropriately timed as part of a carefully phased and sustainable policy toward bringing about Iranian compliance with its obligations,” US Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier on Thursday, several hours before the Senate vote.

Senate move gives world oil markets time to adjust

The Senate amendment provides a six-month grace period before sanctions would kick in for petroleum transactions with Iran’s Central Bank, a move that appeared designed to give world oil markets time to adjust.

It includes a “waiver” letting the president suspend the sanctions if he deems it vital to US national security.

“Our judgment is that the best course to pursue at this time is not to apply a mechanism that puts at risk the largest financial institutions, the central banks, of our closest allies,” Undersecretary of the Treasury David Cohen told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Sherman and Cohen drew a rebuke from Menendez, who argued he had agreed to make changes in the amendment to suit the Obama administration only to find that it still rejected the legislation.

“I am extremely disappointed,” Menendez said. “At your request, we engaged in an effort to come to a bipartisan agreement that I think is fair and balanced and now you come here and vitiate that very agreement.”

“You should have said we want no amendment, not that you don’t care for that amendment,” he added.

The Obama administration’s chief concerns appear to be that the amendment could be a blunt instrument that might send oil prices higher and undercut support for sanctions among US allies, whose backing has been vital to pass four U.N. Security Council sanctions resolutions against Iran.

While the Obama administration steps carefully, some countries in Europe are seeking to push forward a Europe-wide boycott of Iranian crude imports. EU foreign ministers in Brussels failed on Thursday to move forward with a plan backed by France and Britain to ban shipments, but agreed to examine expanding sanctions.

Tightening financial sanctions have already complicated Iran’s oil trade. Last December, India’s central bank scrapped a clearing house system with Iran, forcing refiners to scramble to arrange other means of payment in order to keep shipments flowing.

It is unclear whether further sanctions on financial dealings would affect shipments to countries like China, Iran’s biggest buyer.