WarSclerotic

Blindness that excuses Iran’s excesses | The Jewish Chronicle.

Don’t listen to the nuclear nonsense, screamed one of the main left-wing weeklies, the New Statesman, only days after a sober and authoritative International Atomic Energy Agency report had laid bare Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb.

Why do some of our intellectuals find it so very difficult to see dictatorship when it is clear, or to summon up the moral clarity to oppose it? This question has preoccupied me since 9/11. It led me to create the online journal Democratiya and to co-author the statement of principles for a new democratic left, The Euston Manifesto.

The Iranian revolution bamboozled left-wingers from the start. First, where class consciousness “should” have been, there was religious fervour. Second, because its world-view split the globe into just two warring camps – reactionary exploiting nations that must be opposed and progressive exploited nations (usually also romanticised as noble and authentic) that must be supported – the left struggled to see clearly the independent history and reactionary character of Islamism, or to grasp the importance of religion (actually, of ideas per se) in the modern world.

That revolutionary Iran could be a brutal and reactionary sub-imperialist power seeking regional hegemony did not compute to many commentators. The Manichean left could not even rouse itself to oppose the brutal tyranny of the regime because, when tyranny was opposed by America, it was miraculously reborn as “the resistance”. As for promoting democracy, well, we all know that doing so is “really” a neo-colonial plot, don’t we? So goes their narrative.

These theoretical blinkers meant that many went into denial about Iran. The social theorist Michel Foucault – one of the most influential thinkers on western campuses in the last 40 years – famously defended the Islamic revolution as an exciting new form of radical “political spirituality” and an “authentic” reaction to the corruptions of western modernity. By seeing only what he wanted to see, Foucault established the template for getting Iran wrong.

He defended the revolution, assuring us that “liberties will be respected to the extent that their usage will not harm others” while “minorities will be protected and free to live as they please on the condition that they do not injure the majority”. He carried on insisting that Political Islam was a liberatory force even as it began to exclude women from public life and force them into the chador.

What mattered to Foucault was not such details, but the fact that a that revolutionary enthusiasm had been reborn in the world. More recently, the global “intellectual rock star” Slavoj Zizek has praised Foucault’s approach, writing: “What matters is not the miserable reality that followed the upheavals, the bloody confrontations, the new oppressive measures, and so on, but the enthusiasm that the events in Iran stimulated in the external (western) observer, confirming his hopes in the possibility of a new form of spiritualised political collective.”

Once the Iranian revolution had been cast in this delusional and glowing half-light, all manner of nonsense became possible. Criticism of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie could be rejected as “western ethnocentrism”. Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hamas and Hizbollah, could become the “resistance” and be given a seal of approval.

Thus, in 2006 the leading American cultural theorist Judith Butler told a campus teach-in that “understanding Hamas, Hizbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important”.

Of course, opening a school can be progressive (though if the curriculum includes eliminationist antisemitism, then not so much). But Butler does not think Hamas and Hizbollah are progressive because of their social programmes.

She thinks they are left-wing because they oppose America. Iranian proxy-conducted terror against Jewish civilians, such as the massacre of 29 Jews in Buenos Aires in 1992, may tell us why Iran cannot be trusted with a rusty spoon let alone a nuclear bomb. But they carry no political weight for Butler.

Jean Bethke Elshtain – a brilliant moral and political thinker and author of the book Just War Against Terror – has explained how some intellectuals sustain these kinds of illusions and keep reality so securely at bay.

She claims that four strategies are used to bracket reality: distorting or ignoring facts, deploying twisted categories of a bygone era, taking refuge in false clarity derived from flawed analogies, and attacking the motivations of free societies such as America and Israel, while giving the benefit of every doubt to the fear societies (and their proxies) that attack the West.

These stratagems have been used in some recent articles by Mehdi Hasan, senior political editor of the New Statesman, whose work offers what the American president calls a “teachable moment”.

“There is no nuclear threat” wrote Hasan in the New Statesman on November 11, just days after the IAEA confirmed that, actually, there was. Less than a week later, in a Comment is Free article titled: “If you lived in Iran, wouldn’t you want the nuclear bomb?” he doubled down on his earlier denial, penning an astonishing defence of the Iranian regime premised on the claim that there was “still no concrete evidence that Iran is building a bomb”.

Hasan advised us to ignore the IAEA report because the leaders of the Islamic Republic – from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to the bombastic president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – had said “their goal is only to develop a civilian nuclear programme, not atomic bombs”.

It is important to register what Hasan was proposing – to put the word of Iran’s “Supreme Leader” above the considered judgment of the IAEA. The UN-affiliated body, which is responsible for monitoring the use of nuclear power, works by consensus and is careful to maintain the trust of all the major world powers.

It speaks in measured tones and avoids even the appearance of serving a political agenda. So when it concluded in its November 8 report that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device”, and that “some activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device continued after 2003, and that some may still be ongoing,” it is important to translate these lines from diplomatic-speak.

In the words of non-proliferation expert Mark Fitzpatrick, the report “destroys Iran’s pretension that its nuclear activities have been ‘purely peaceful’. In numbing detail it shows how Iran established a comprehensive programme to develop all the key technologies for an implosion-type nuclear weapon for its ballistic missiles.”

Or, as an Israeli official said, what Iran seeks is to be “the turn of a screwdriver away”. It is not there yet, but the world faces an excruciating dilemma.

The second reality-avoidance strategy involves the use of clapped-out categories developed in the 1960s. The philosopher Michael Walzer has argued that many intellectuals are hamstrung by “the third worldist doctrines of the 1960s and 1970s”.

The post-colonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak expressed the poverty of this world-view when she argued that to support white men saving brown women from brown men is to endorse the imperialist script. In this upside-down world, solidarity with gays and lesbians in oppressed nations is attacked as “pink-washing” imperialism. Truly, you could not make this stuff up.

Thus, Hasan casts Iran as a pure victim, besieged by evil neo-colonial enemies. America is a “military threat” and Israel is a “mortal enemy” with a “history of pre-emptive aggression”.

Iran, on the other hand, is depicted as “geographically encircled, politically isolated, and feeling threatened” while the Iranians (he blurs the regime and the people, another handy lawyer’s trick) are “frightened, nervous, defensive, perhaps with good reason”.

Iran is certainly isolated. But missing from Hasan’s account of Iran’s predicament are two things: Iran’s entire record of behaviour since 1978, and the comprehensive history of international efforts to befriend this proud people, to draw its rulers into the community of nations and to persuade the regime to give up its pursuit of the nuclear bomb.

The third way to make reality conform to ideology is to use flawed analogies to avoid awkward truths. Hasan asks why, given that America and Britain claim their nuclear weapons are a deterrent that stabilise international relations, should Iran not claim the same? He adds, as if this is a credible argument: “Apparently, what is sauce for the Anglo-American goose is not sauce for the Iranian gander.”

To grasp how dangerous this argument is we need to look to Natan Sharansky. The former Soviet prisoner knew a thing or two about political appeasement and the support it got from this kind of intellectual false equivalencing. In The Case for Democracy he wrote eloquently about the importance of moral clarity on “the black-and-white line that divides free societies from fear societies”.

Without it, he warned, we get “pacifists in the West march[ing] alongside emissaries of the KGB who, posing as peace activists, undermine the efforts of the free world to defend itself against Soviet aggression”. And in a world without moral clarity we end up asking why, when imperfect, erring liberal-democratic Britain has the bomb, why a gay-hanging, women-stoning, genocide-threatening sub-imperialist theocracy like Iran should not have one too.

After all, democratic goose, dictatorial ganders – what’s the difference? As Sharansky pointed out, the end result of this intellectual malady is to turn the “deep desire for peace … into a weapon of tyranny”.

The fourth set of blinders worn by many intellectuals takes the form of a pre-emptive premise. Because the motivations of the US, UK, and Israel are assumed to be venal (Elshtain reckoned only three were admissible – imperial ambition, lust for vengeance, and hatred of the “Other,”) one never has to attend to the actual character of the regimes or forces shooting at Americans, Brits or Israelis.

This kind of thing is dignified as “structural analysis” or “critical thinking” but it often amounts to little more than conspiratorialism-lite. Thus Hasan knows what’s really going on with this Iranian business. Breathlessly, he lets us in on the deep secret:

“The driver in all this is Israel,” he says. “A former senior MI6 official tells me.”

Common to all four kinds of reality-avoidance is a bone-deep refusal to grapple with the real-world dilemmas of foreign policy.

Rather than “puzzle it through,” wrote Elshtain, too many prefer to “occupy a stance of lofty condemnation” and engage in “the verbal equivalent of a hit-and-run accident”.

For such people, politics is no longer a sphere of concrete responsibility (which would require obsessing about how we can prevent that regime getting that weapon) but a sphere for the performance of a fossilised left-wing identity.

Last week, the Foreign Secretary William Hague acted with moral clarity. By announcing to the House of Commons that the Iranian embassy in London would be closed in response to the state-sponsored assault on our embassy and, by previously deciding to sanction the Iranian central bank, a central artery of the regime, Hague invited the international community to end the diplomatic merry-go-round, to see Iran plain and to act, now and decisively, to confront it.

If we are to follow his lead, we must learn how to counter the intellectuals whose theoretical blinkers cause them to give succour to fear societies like Iran.

Professor Alan Johnson is a director and senior research fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre

Syria forces poised for bloody Homs assault: SNC.

Friday, 09 December 2011

There are fears of a brutal crackdown in Homs on demonstrators protesting against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. (Reuters)

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Syria’s opposition warned Friday of a looming “massacre” as it reported thousands of regime forces and militiamen encircled the protest hub of Homs for an expected final assault to crush dissent.

The Syrian National Council issued the alert ahead of nationwide protests following the main weekly Muslim prayers called for in support of a campaign of escalating strikes starting on Sunday.

In a statement, the SNC said President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was using the pretext of what it called a “terrorist” attack on an oil pipeline to overrun Homs, which has already been besieged for months.

“The regime (is) paving the way to commit a massacre in order to extinguish the revolution in Homs,” said the organization, a principle umbrella group drawing together Assad’s opponents.

Homs, an important junction city of 1.6 million residents mainly divided along confessional lines, is a tinderbox of sectarian tensions that the SNC said the regime was trying to exploit.

“The regime has tried hard to ignite the sectarian conflict using many dirty methods, which have included bombing and burning mosques, torturing and killing young men, and kidnapping women and children,” said the SNC.

“The regime also took a significant step … in burning oil pipelines in the neighborhood of Baba Amr to blame what the regime calls ‘armed gangs’; in an attempt to crush the peaceful uprising on the pretext of a war on terrorism.”

Witnesses on the ground in the central city have reported a buildup of troops and pro-regime “Shabiha” militiamen in armored vehicles who have set up more than 60 checkpoints, said the opposition group.

“These are all signs of a security crackdown operation that may reach the level of a total invasion of the city.

“We warn of the consequences of committing such a crime that could result in a massive number of casualties,” said the SNC.

“We hold accountable the regime, and behind it the Arab League and the international community of what could happen to innocent civilians in the next few hours or days, and the implications for the region as a whole in the near future.

“The Syrian National Council also calls on all relevant international organizations and human rights organizations to take immediate action to pressure the international forums to provide immediate protection to civilians in Homs in particular, and throughout Syria in general.”

The Assad regime’s crackdown on dissent since mid-March has hit Homs particularly hard and activists say a great number of defecting soldiers have set up camp there to protect the protest movement.

An explosion that tore apart a pipeline taking crude to an oil refinery in Homs from eastern Syria, in an attack the regime blamed on “armed terrorist gangs.”

But the Local Coordination Committees (LCC), which organizes anti-regime protests, accused Assad’s government of deliberately destroying the pipeline which serves a region seen as staunchly opposed to his rule.

Activists reported at least 20 people killed in Thursday’s violence alone, the majority of them in Homs. The regime’s crackdown on dissent has killed more than 4,000 people in Syria, according to U.N. figures.

U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay is due to address the Syria crisis on Friday and is expected to brief the U.N. Security Council by Tuesday at the request of France, Britain and German, diplomats said.

“It will be useful because it will allow the Security Council to examine its own responsibilities” in the crisis, said a U.N. diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity.

Diplomats said they notice signs of a shift in attitude by opponents of U.N. action against President Assad. However Western governments are waiting to see what impact Arab League sanctions have on Syria.

The Arab League is leaning on Iraq to persuade Syria to allow observers or else face more sanctions, but the regime has taken a defiant stance this week, with Assad himself denying responsibility for violence by his forces.

Syria’s foreign ministry said in a statement that it is studying a response from the Arab League to conditions sought by Damascus to accept a delegation of monitors.

Pro-democracy activists, meanwhile, urged citizens to rally on Friday in support of a “dignity strike … which will lead to the sudden death of this tyrant regime.”

The LCC has called on citizens to strike from Sunday with sit-ins at work and the closure of shops and universities, before the shutdown of transportation networks and a general public sector strike.

Turkey not to stand by if Syria poses risks to region’s security; imposes new sanctions.

Al Arabiya

Friday, 09 December 2011

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Turkey had a “responsibility” and the “authority” to tell Damascus “enough” if it was putting his country’s security at risk. (Reuters)

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Blast wounds French UNIFIL troops in Leban… JPost – Middle East.

    TYRE – A roadside bomb wounded five French peacekeepers in southern Lebanon on Friday, in the third attack this year on United Nations forces deployed near the frontier with Israel.

The blast hit a jeep carrying French UNIFIL troops on the outskirts of the Mediterranean port city of Tyre.

“I can confirm that a UNIFIL vehicle was hit by an explosion in Tyre,” UNIFIL spokesman Andrea Tenenti said. “Five peacekeepers were injured.”

The attack follows bombings in May and July against French and Italian peacekeepers and comes as the United Nations prepares a review of its 12,000-strong operation, which was beefed up after the Second Lebanon War in 2006.

A Reuters reporter saw a jeep with its windows blown out and several wounded peacekeepers at the scene minutes after the explosion in the Burj al-Shamali district on the eastern edge of Tyre.

Most of the injuries were light but medical sources said one of the UNIFIL soldiers was badly wounded.

Security sources said two passersby were also hurt.

Italy reduced its contribution to UNIFIL to 1,100 soldiers from 1,800 after six of its peacekeepers were wounded in May, although diplomats said the decision to cut its contingent had been taken before the attack.

Two months later six French soldiers were wounded in another attack.

International community: Attack is ‘disgraceful’

Tenenti said Friday’s bombing would “not divert us from our task” and Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati also said the peacekeepers would continue their mission.

“Lebanon considers these attacks as targeting its own security and stability, not only UNIFIL,” Mikati said. “These attacks will not have an influence on UNIFIL’s work in the south, nor on the French contingent… Lebanon, as a state and people, are in solidarity with the international forces and condemn attacks against them.”

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman alleged that the attack was designed to force UNIFIL’s withdrawal from the country and to obstruct its work in the South, according to the Lebanese Daily Star newspaper.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said Paris would “not be intimidated by such disgraceful acts”, urging Lebanon to bring the perpetrators to justice and ensure the safety and freedom of movement of UN forces.

The UN Security Council called in August for a review of UNIFIL operations in Lebanon by the end of the year, aimed partly at assessing whether the Lebanese army could assume greater role in operations. Diplomats say the results of the review are unlikely to be issued for several months.

The border area has remained relatively quiet since 2006, although 10 Palestinian demonstrators were killed in May after troops fired upon protesters near the shared border at Marun Aras.

Last year a senior IDF officer, two Lebanese soldiers and a Lebanese journalist were killed when Lebanese and Israeli troops clashed at the border.

Lebanon news – NOW Lebanon -Jumping into the fire.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a rare public appearance this week. He has been invoking his followers as of late to sacrifice for the resistance. (AFP photo/Anwar Amro)

Anyone monitoring Hezbollah’s rhetoric over the last several days could not but notice a spike in its apocalyptic pitch. Perhaps it was the religious occasion of Ashura, but more likely, it was the result of the tense regional situation, namely the increased paranoia in Tehran. Convinced that an attack against them is imminent, the Iranians are now preparing for war and publicly declaring that Hezbollah, and thus Lebanon, will be their first line of defense. That is why in his most recent speeches, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has been preparing the Shia community in advance for the ruin that awaits them as a consequence.

All talk of Hezbollah’s “Lebanonization” and its supposed definition as a “national resistance” aside, the reality is that the group’s first and foremost task is to be Iran’s long arm. The Iranians are now making this fact known explicitly. Two weeks ago, Yahya Rahim Safavi, former commander of the Revolutionary Guards and military adviser to Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei, declared  that in case of an Israeli attack on Iran, the Iranian retaliation will come from Lebanon, “because all the Zionist cities are within the range of our ally Hezbollah’s Katyushas.” In other words, the order has been given and Hezbollah is up to bat.

The problem is that, for Hezbollah, this order comes at a rather bad time, as the Party of God is facing serious constraints and uncertainties, especially as its Syrian ally struggles for its life, putting in question the group’s strategic depth in Syria. Moreover, Nasrallah now must mobilize a reluctant Shia community, still reeling from the utter devastation of the 2006 war, to follow the party into the abyss for the sake of its Iranian patron.

It is against this backdrop that Nasrallah’s Ashura speeches this past week, including his rare public appearance with the celebrating crowd in Beirut on Tuesday, are best understood.

Of all those speeches, perhaps most telling was the one Nasrallah gave on the third night of Ashura, last Monday. The overriding motif of the address was the perseverance of the faithful regardless of the hardships they must face and the sacrifices they must make. Nasrallah made it amply clear that what was expected of the believers was nothing short of self-sacrifice. To drive the point home, he referenced a story from Shia tradition about how the faithful—men, women and children—willingly jumped into a pit of fire rather than renounce their Imam.

Nasrallah then tied the ancient lore to the present, revealing the core of what he expected from his followers. “We, the men, women and children who held steadfast in the July [2006] war, are not frightened by their war or their weapons … In these hard times, facing all the challenges, dangers and slander, and facing the excessive strength and cunning of the enemy and the scarcity of supporters and defenders, we say to Hussein, we will not abandon you, or your religion, or your banner, or your Karbala, or your goals, even if we were to be cut, sawed, and our women and children banished,” Nasrallah shouted, rallying his supporters, welding their religious and communal identity with Hezbollah.

Similarly, there was little subtlety when Nasrallah made a surprise appearance in Dahiyeh on Tuesday. The purpose behind that was to bind himself, Hezbollah and the Shia community in one fate—which is decided for them in Tehran. “I have chosen to be among you today for a few minutes … so the whole world can hear and we can renew our pledge,” he told the crowd. At the heart of this pledge of allegiance (bay’ah) are Hezbollah’s weapons. “We will hold on to our resistance and to the weapons of the resistance,” he said.

Why is Nasrallah so keen on reaffirming his community’s allegiance to his party at this juncture? The episode of the Katyusha rockets that were recently fired on Israel is instructive. Hezbollah denied responsibility, and blame was thrown at an obscure Sunni Islamist outfit with alleged ties to al Qaeda. Many saw the episode as more of a Syrian attempt to remind the world that Bashar al-Assad could still light up the front with Israel, as well as to warn them that what might come after him would be al Qaeda jihadists. The Syrian regime’s publicists didn’t even bother with nuance in making this point.

But the Syrian angle was likely secondary. Furthermore, the accused Sunni group has denied responsibility for the attack. Most probably, Hezbollah launched the attack, much in line with Safavi’s threat that immediately preceded it, in retaliation for the mysterious explosions that have rocked Iranian facilities in the last month. But the subdued manner in which this was done is the most interesting aspect of the episode.

Hezbollah’s caution does away with an enduring and destructive myth from the 1990s, which holds that Hezbollah managed to achieve a “balance of terror” with Israel. In reality, Nasrallah knows full well what will befall the Shia community, indeed all of Lebanon, once Hezbollah attacks Israel on behalf of Iran, which is one reason why the party remained mum about the Katyusha attacks.

With the prospect of the decimation of his Shia followers, it becomes easier to understand why Nasrallah is practically beseeching them, preemptively, to persevere in the face of inevitable devastation and, literally, jump with him into a pit of fire. For that is what he and his superiors in Iran will bring raining down on their heads.

Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay.

DEBKA.

Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu

As Iran nears a nuclear arms capability, the state of play between the United States and Israel on whether or not to strike Iran before it reaches its objective was clearly defined in a scene first revealed here by DEBKA-Net-Weekly on the sidelines of the Halifax International Security Forum on Nov. 18:
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stuck out his right hand for Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to shake to confirm they were agreed that Israel would not attack Iran; Barak refused to shake. He said he and Prime Minister Binjamin Netanyahu were not prepared to make this commitment because they do not believe the Obama administration is committed to keeping a nuclear weapon out of Iranian hands.
“You can live with the Iranian nuclear weapon,” Barak told Panetta. “We can’t.”
Panetta’s angry reply – “We didn’t send you (Israel) Patriot missile batteries with American troops for them to be hit by Iranian missiles” – didn’t budge Barak from his position.
The American and Israeli defense chiefs knew beforehand they were heading for a difficult encounter.
On his way to Halifax, Panetta tried to soften Israel up into seeing things Washington’s way by a warning:
“To go beyond (sanctions and diplomacy) raises our concerns about the unintended consequences that could result. … There are going to be economic consequences to that, that could impact not just on our economy but the world economy.”
The US: Destroying Iran’s nuclear program would be futile
It was noted in Jerusalem that the Defense Secretary did not bother to seek an Israeli pledge to consult with Washington before striking the Islamic Republic. He went straight to the point and said bluntly President Obama is asking you not to attack Iran.
At subsequent interviews with senior American officials, the Israelis did not mince words either: You keep on saying the military option is on the table, but then in the next breath you explain why it shouldn’t be exercised. So the option is not really there at all, just empty words.
The gap between Washington and Jerusalem widened further Thursday, Dec. 8, when Israel saw the Obama administration had decided against a commando or air operation to recover, or destroy, the top secret systems of the stealth reconnaissance drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, whose capture Iran announced Sunday, Dec. 4. This US restraint strengthened the tendency in Israel to stop waiting for American action to get rid of Iran’s nuclear program. Many Israelis could not understand how the US was willing to take the risk of leaving in Iranian hands the drone systems which could tell Tehran what targets were under surveillance for attack. Rather than fighting to remove them, Washington had reconciled itself to revising from scratch all its operational planning for dealing with Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
This was taken in Israel as a sign that the US had withdrawn from the covert war against Iran’s nuclear program for the foreseeable future and distanced itself still further from Israel’s military plans for Iran.
On Wednesday, August 7,US Senators Carl Levin and John McCain talked frankly about gaps in US knowledge on Israel’s thinking and intentions regarding a strike against Iran.
Senator Levin said: “I don’t think the administration knows what Israel is going to do. I’m not sure Israel knows what Israel is going to do… Keep the bad guys guessing.”
No real military obstacles to an attack
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Washington sources report that the two senators put their fingers on reality.
Contrary to the picture of amity on Iran which US officials try hard to present the public, the Obama administration and the government in Jerusalem are poles apart on the pros and cons of attacking Iran’s nuclear installations and its consequences.
The US defense secretary has become increasingly outspoken on this score.
In a speech at the Brookings Institute on Friday, Dec. 2, he spoke out against an Israeli attack warning that it would hold up Iran’s nuclear progress by a year to two “at best” and would not be able to reach all of Iran’s sensitive nuclear sites.
But when American and Israeli military pros talk in private, they admit there is no military or intelligence obstacle to stop them reaching any key site they target and destroying them all.
Where they differ is in their assessments of the consequences of a successful attack.
The Americans maintain that destroying the Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and materials will not wipe the nuclear knowhow from Iranian brains. In the space of a year or two, their scientists and engineers would have their nuclear systems up and running again and back to the point in their nuclear development which the military strike had interrupted.
Israel: An attack could undermine the ayatollahs’ regime
The Israeli side challenges the Americans on three points:
1. Enlisting the professional manpower for reconstituting all the nuclear teams, rebuilding the infrastructure and obtaining replacements for the nuclear equipment would take much longer that the year or two cited by Panetta. In any case, Tehran cannot be sure of finding the right people the next time round.
2. It is impossible to predict how the destruction of the national nuclear program will affect the stability of the Islamic regime in Tehran. The Americans believe it will solidify popular support behind the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guards, whereas the intelligence reaching Israel points strongly to popular uprisings flaring in parts of the country.
The Islamic government would then have its hands too full with survival against widespread disaffection to have time to spare in the immediate term for restoring its nuclear program.
3. Even if they do, say the Israelis, they won’t be able to go back to full operation all at once at every site, whether bombed or newly-established. It will therefore be a lot easier for a repeat assault to pick off the few functioning installations as they go on stream.
Over and above the fundamental differences on Iran, both sides agree that security and intelligence ties between the United States and Israel have never been so extensive and cordial. The Obama administration is letting Israel have all the hi-tech systems, munitions and intelligence it needs for attacking Iran. Up until now, Washington has not turned down a single Israeli request.
When politics raises its head, so too does distrust
Officials close to the White House consider Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ungrateful for refusing to accede to Washington’s request for a commitment not to attack Iran.
Some fault Netanyahu’s aides with advising him to distance himself from President Obama because they foresee the Republicans returning to the White House in a year, whoever is picked to run against him.
But other administration circles tell the US President that Netanyahu is distrustful because he doesn’t believe Obama will stand by his pledge to keep Iran from becoming nuclear power.
The distrust lingers even when administration officials report that Obama is willing to go all the way with harsh sanctions including an embargo on Iran’s energy exports and imports and its central bank – both of which Israel has long demanded as the only sanctions liable to bite.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources in Washington, senior administration officials are now telling their Israel counterparts that it doesn’t matter if Israel refrains from giving them notice of an attack on Iran because the Americans will find out anyway. Before going into attack mode, Israel would need to make extensive preparations to defend the civilian home front against potential missile retaliation by Iran and its allies, Syria, Hizballah from Lebanon and the Palestinian Hamas from the Gaza Strip.
When we see those preparations beginning, we’ll know that an attack is around the corner, said one US official and we’ll know what to do.

The Associated Press: Congress rebuffs easing of Iran sanctions.

By DONNA CASSATA, Associated Press – 1 minute ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans and Democrats determined to look tough on Iran and avoid any election-year challenges to their pro-Israel bona fides are rebuffing Obama administration pleas to ease proposed penalties on Iran’s central bank.

The administration argues that the crippling penalties would undercut a carefully calibrated international effort targeting Tehran and would drive up oil prices, a potential economic boon that would help finance Iran’s suspected pursuit of a nuclear weapon while hitting cash-strapped Americans at the gas pump.

Just weeks after announcing a new round of restrictions, President Barack Obama on Thursday dismissed “some of the political noise out there” and said his “administration has systematically imposed the toughest sanctions on Iran ever.”

Obama said he was considering all options for dealing with Iran, but declined to be more specific.

Lawmakers are pressing ahead with penalties against foreign banks that do business with Iran’s central bank, a plan that the Senate resoundingly endorsed last week on a 100-0 vote.

“The administration does understand the centrality of this issue to forcing Iran. They would like to do it unimpeded by congressional mandates. That’s true of every administration,” Rep. Howard Berman of California, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an interview. “On this, we’re not going to just roll over and take their suggestions.”

The showdown between the administration and Congress encompasses policy realities and political maneuvering.

Tough economic penalties are the most viable option short of a military strike. Looking ahead to the 2012 elections, Republicans and Democrats are intent on presenting a record of hawkishness toward Iran and unwavering support for Israel, mindful of the importance on American Jewish voters and their financial contributions to the political parties.

The sanctions measure sponsored by Sens. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Bob Menendez, D-N.J., was added to a broader defense bill that’s now the subject of closed-door negotiations between the House and Senate. Lawmakers hope to produce a final version of the policy legislation next week.

Few lawmakers, even Democrats, have argued the administration’s case for weakening the penalties.

“I think Democrats are scratching their heads that the administration is leading them into a policy provision which not a single Democratic senator can support,” Kirk said in an interview. He said he spoke to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., on Thursday and he indicated that the House negotiators would accept the sanctions provision.

The Kirk-Menendez measure would go after foreign financial institutions that do business with the central bank by barring them from opening or maintaining correspondent operations in the United States. It would apply to foreign central banks only for transactions that involve the sale or purchase of petroleum or petroleum products.

The petroleum penalties would only apply if the president, in six months, determines there is a sufficient alternative supply and if the country with jurisdiction over the financial institution has not significantly reduced its purchases of Iranian oil. It also allows the president to waive the penalties based on national security.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, in a Dec. 1 letter to senators, said the administration opposed the measure in its current form because it would undermine its effort to bring international pressure on Iran. He also warned that the penalties could actually boost oil prices and benefit Iran financially.

“Iran’s greatest economic resource is its oil exports,” Geithner wrote. “Sales of crude oil line the regime’s pockets, sustain its human rights abuses and feed its nuclear ambitions like no other sector of the Iranian economy.”

The administration is seeking both substantive and technical changes, including delaying implementation of all the penalties for six months. Berman favors speeding up the penalties to four months.

In arguing for tougher sanctions, lawmakers cite the recent International Atomic Energy Agency report that Iran is suspected of clandestine work that is “specific to nuclear weapons,” its alleged role in the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in the United States and the attack on the British Embassy in Tehran.

U.S.-Iranian relations have been put further on edge by Iran’s capture of a high-tech, stealth CIA drone on a surveillance mission over Iran.

Two weeks ago, the administration announced a new set of penalties against Iran, including identifying for the first time Iran’s entire banking sector as a “primary money laundering concern.” This requires increased monitoring by U.S. banks to ensure that they and their foreign affiliates avoid dealing with Iranian financial institutions.

Arguing that it isn’t enough, the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and advocacy group American Jewish Committee, endorsed the tougher congressional penalties without any changes.

“Most of us know in the end that the forces in Iran are not going to go quietly into the night,” said Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., in an interview. “We may have to send them into the night not so quietly.”

‘Risk of Israel, US strike on Iran has tripled’ – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Senior risk analyst at Barclays Capital says chances of military operation increased from 5-10% to 25-30% in past year

Reuters

The chance of a military strike on Iran has roughly tripled in the past year, the senior geopolitical risk analyst at Barclays Capital said on Thursday.

New York-based analyst Helina Croft, writing in a note titled ‘Blowback: Assessing the fallout from the Iranian sanctions’, said even increased sanctions without an all-out military strike was increasing the risk of a spike in oil prices.

“We still contend that the risk of either an Israeli or US strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities remains low, but it has risen, in our view, from 5-10% last year to 25-30% now,” Croft said.

“In terms of supply-demand balances for the oil market, an oil embargo or sanctions on the Iranian central bank would essentially lead to a dislocation in trade flows, rather than lost outright production… However, the effect on oil prices could be significantly different.”

Sanctions to increase oil exports

Croft said increased sanctions from the US and European Union targeting Iran’s oil sector and central bank would likely, initially, have the primary effect of driving its oil exports east to Asia.

“If EU sanctions on Iranian oil were aimed at significantly reducing the flow of revenues to Tehran, they would perhaps seem no more likely to be successful than US sanctions have been since 1988,” the note said.

“An inevitable knock-on effect of an EU embargo would be to push more Iranian oil eastward, without removing Iran’s ability to market all its crude available to export. In other words, the concentration of Iran’s buyers would increase, but the total volume would not be affected.”

Croft and Sen argued European refiners in the Mediterranean would be hardest hit by an increase in sanctions as they would be forced to scramble to find alternative sources of crude. Greece, in particular, has found the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) one of the few suppliers willing to provide it with crude on “open credit”.

On Thursday US President Barack Obama said the United States was considering all options on Iran and would work with allies, including Israel, to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Iran says its nuclear program is only to meet energy needs, and is not aimed at acquiring nuclear weapons.

DEBKA.

Bashir Assad

If a full-scale civil war erupts in Syria – and the nine-month old uprising is veering in that direction – President Bashar Assad, his family and his still loyal generals are reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s exclusive sources to be planning to leave Damascus and head out to the northwestern Alawite (Al-Ansariyyah) Mountains.
This is the only densely forested region along Syria’s Mediterranean coast. From there, the Assads will continue to fight for their survival.
The Al-Ansariyyah range averages 32 kilometers (20 miles) in breadth and a peak elevation of just over 1,200 meters. The tallest mountain, Nabi Yunis east of Latakia, is 1,562 meters (5,125 feet) high. The range slopes down from its northern tip to an average altitude of 900 meters (3,000 feet) and 600 meters in the south.
Our military and intelligence sources have discovered the Syrian engineering corps working in the forested areas of those mountains on the construction of a fortified encampment, partly inside caves and tunnels. They are enclosing its perimeter with anti-tank defenses armed with anti-air batteries.
When finished, the camp will be one of the most heavily fortified strongholds in the Middle East.
In support of the Syrian dictator, large groups of Alawite families began moving in the last week of November from the plains around Latakia, Hama and Homs to new homes in the encampment – apparently on a signal from Assad’s intelligence and security services.
The Alawites who cannot leave their towns or villages for some reason are being moved into fortified precincts close to their homes.
Alawites split for and against Assad
This massive relocation encompasses some million Alawites, or a third of the 3.5 million members of this minority sect, a deviant offspring of the Shiite Muslim faith, which rules the country although numbering just over one-tenth of Syria’s total population.
By reestablishing his headquarters in a mountain fortress, Bashar Assad hopes to achieve two goals:
1. To shelter his Alawite following in the event of a full-scale civil war. Rebel groups, especially Sunnis, are expected to seek revenge against this minority sect for controlling government through Assad father and son for 37 years.
2. Clustering them in protected canons will ensure these Alawites’ loyalty to Bashar Assad and his clan.
There are four Alawite tribal confederations: Kalbiyah, Khaiyatin, Haddadin and Matawirah. Not all their leaders are prepared to throw in their lot with the president and his family or withdraw to the sites under his protection.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Middle East sources report the Alawite community is divided for and against the ruler, generating its first desertions in the nine-month uprising against the regime.
A dozen Alawite village chiefs in the restive Homs and Hama regions have struck deals with local rebel militia chiefs, including the Free Syrian Army, gaining guarantees of immunity from attack in return for their young men refusing to enlist in Assad’s private, state-backed paramilitary Shabiha.
Assad was unable to stop three enclaves rising outside his authority
Assad and his henchmen were unable to stop this accord going through, an indication of the president’s declining authority these days in the strife-torn country. That control is slipping out of his hands was shown also by the fact that apart from the fortified Alawite district, at least three more enclaves are under construction by communities who no longer defer to his authority or the Syrian army’s jurisdiction. Indeed Assad’s soldiers are barred entry to these areas which now occupy about 35 percent of Syrian territory.
Should the beleaguered president decide it is in his strategic interests to assemble a military corps for invading those enclaves, he still has the clout for doing so. But as time goes by, local governing bodies and militias are forming and stabilizing and the chances of central government in Damascus turning the clock back are ebbing.
The three principal segregated districts established thus far are:
The Druze enclave – Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze chief, who is accepted by the Syrian Druze community, came to an agreement with Syrian rebel leaders on behalf of its half-million members, who are concentrated mostly in the Jabal al-Druze mountain of southern Syria.
Syrian Druzes undertook to withdraw their support from the Assad regime and stop sending their young men to the Syrian army. The rebels, for their part, pledged not to fight the Druzes or operate from their villages.
Jumblatt this week voiced concern lest a civil war in Syria reach Jabal al-Druze and spill over into Lebanon. The Lebanese and Syrian communities would then be forced to fight their common enemies, Assad’s forces and his Lebanese ally, Hizballah.
West and South out of Assad’s control
The Western Euphrates Valley Enclave – Located in eastern Syria near the Iraq border, this district includes the towns of Deir al-Zour, Abu Kamal and Mayadin, as well as Syria’s oil fields. It has a population of around three million. Syrian government institutions, the courts, army and security bodies were all driven out of this enclave in the clashes between the army and protesters, making way for the rule of local militias, mostly fighters of the Shammar tribes, which have branches in Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources report that Assad ran out of military strength for holding onto this strategic region although it contains his oil fields and the intersection of the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian borders.
His armed forces were stretched beyond the limit when they had to be deployed on the Turkish and Lebanese borders to guard against a potential NATO-Arab invasion, crack down on revolts in the north and at the same time secure the regime in Damascus. Their strategists were forced to decide on priorities and so Assad gave up on the Western Euphrates region.
The Horan enclave – The uprising against Assad first erupted nine months ago in this part of southern Syria which borders on Jordan and Israel. It is home to 400,000 Syrians, mainly in the cities of Daraa, Bosra, Quneitra and As Suwayda.
By May-June of this year, Syrian security forces had brutally extinguished the flames of revolt here, but in late September the rebels regained control.
Assad has refrained from ordering the regular military units deployed on the Golan border with Israel to crack down on the resurgent revolt for fear that the soldiers, most of them Sunnis, will defy his orders.

DEBKA.

The timetable for any US or Israel attack planned for Iran must have been profoundly upset by Tehran’s out-of-the-blue capture Sunday, Dec. 4 of the top-secret American stealth RQ-170 unarmed aerial vehicle.
The surveillance drone was supposed to gather intelligence on Iran’s nuclear sites in advance of an attack. Those plans have been thrown out of kilter for two reasons:
One: The US and/or Israeli drones, armed and unarmed, to have taken part in operations against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, Revolutionary Guards bases and other strategic targets, dare not venture into Iranian air space until it is fully understood how the secret drone was downed and the risks to those fleets can be safely assessed.
Two: Even before this is determined, the US and Israeli air forces will have to replace existing drone technology with new hardware on the assumption that the RQ-170 drone’s secrets are secret no longer. New technologies take time to develop and quick results are not assured – even when the necessary funding is immediately available.
The Americans and Israelis are likely to suspend their plans for Iran until they evaluate the extent of this grave intelligence and technological setback – unlike the Iranians.
Hacking – possible but difficult
On June 2010, the computer control systems of Iran’s nuclear program were hit by the Stuxnet worm; in October 2010, about one-third of its Shahab ballistic missiles were destroyed in a mysterious explosion. While investigating these blows and waiting for results, the Iranians did not halt the momentum of work at their nuclear installations, uranium enrichment plants or missiles bases. They carried on as though nothing untoward had taken place.
But before exercising their military option against Iran, the Americans and Israelis will want to be absolutely sure they don’t run into an Iranian trap and will therefore seek answers on four key points:
1. The Iranians say the spy drone was “downed with help from the Iranian military’s electronic warfare unit” – i.e. hacking. This would have been extremely difficult. The experts describe the RQ-170’s primary communications antennas as fixed atop the aircraft and therefore less susceptible to hacking. To intercept or modify the signal, the hackers would have had to be near the signal’s “footprint.”
Technically that seems unlikely, given that the Sentinel has a special “skin” or coating to mask it from enemy radar detection. But what if the Iranians or their collaborators did manage to develop technology for penetrating this antenna?
If they turn out to have done so, the Americans and Israelis will be faced with the problem of replacing all their drones’ communications antennae in the shortest possible time.
All this was hypothetical surmise until Thursday night, Dec. 8. It was confirmed when Iran put on display the captured drone and it was seen to be in almost perfect condition. Therefore, Iran had indeed brought the UAV down by a cyber attack.
Has Iran mastered the high-skill signal jamming technique?
2. Might the Iranians have found ways to defeat the drone’s stealth technology and use its sensors and communications systems against other hostile stealth hardware?
3. The Sentinel was designed for reconnaissance missions deep inside enemy territory. It would almost certainly have been fitted with a self-destruct mechanism to save its secrets from falling into hostile hands. If Tehran was telling the truth about the slight damage to the captured aircraft, why weren’t these mechanisms activated?
4. What could Iranian intelligence learn from the cameras and the data found in the drone’s electronic monitoring systems about the sites on which the US aircraft was gathering intelligence for strikes?
By deciphering this data, Tehran would acquire priceless information about the depth of knowledge the Americans, and through them the Israelis, possess on Iran’s most secret nuclear facilities and which sites they intended to attack and which to miss.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources, one way to find out what the Iranians have learned from the captured RQ-170 is to watch and see if sensitive installations identified in the drone’s data banks are in fact evacuated to new locations.
To monitor these movements, in order to revamp the Iranian nuclear targeting map – the US would have to send more spy drones into Iranian air space. But this entire project has been suspended.
5. The greatest cause for concern in Washington is Iran’s claim that signal jamming tricked the UAV’s systems and caused it to crash. If the Iranians have, in fact, mastered this very sophisticated form of attack, they’d be foolish to tip their hand, say US experts. So in this instance they may be lying.
But the specter of an Iranian breakthrough in this arcane field casts a heavy cloud over the future of aerial warfare and intelligence-gathering – not only in relation to Iran, but also to China, Russia and North Korea.
Duqu the son of Stuxnet is born – and vanishes
There is still a joker in the pack: Suddenly, ever since mid-November, the Stuxnet-like computer virus Duqu has gone dark, vanished off screens worldwide and no one knows why.
Duqu is itself an unknown quantity which first came to light in October when international security researchers alerted Symantec to a virus that appeared to be a variant of Stuxnet with a different function.
The computer security software giant Symantec decided that Duqu is “a precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack” and may have been created by the same authors: “Its purpose is to gather intelligence data and assets from such entities as industrial control system manufacturers. The attackers are looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility.”
On Nov. 14, Iranian officials said that the Stuxnet-like Duqu virus had hit their computers country but had been fixed. After that, a mysterious hand erased all evidence of Duqu from cyber space without leaving a trace.
So what exactly is this mysterious worm up to?
Officials in Tehran have claimed to have fixed Stuxnet too, but it keeps on coming back to haunt their nuclear computer systems. Duqu may not be just a precursor to the next cyber attack on Iran but Stuxnet’s successor. If that is so, the new worm will certainly have a role to play in the plans to attack Iran and its nuclear program.