WarSclerotic

DEBKA.

Nouri al-Maliki

The final American military exit from Iraq on Dec. 18, conferred on a belligerent Tehran a strategic gift beyond its wildest dreams: wide open overland corridors to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan, as well as a direct military road link from Tehran to Damascus.
Seizing the moment, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei established a new command for all the special and intelligence units operating outside its borders at about the same time as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki wound up his talks with President Barack Obama on Dec. 14 in Washington.
The unified command is headed by Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the al Qods Brigades which is responsible for Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) overseas covert and terrorist operations.
He now has the added task of running the special units charged with buttressing Shiite domination of the Baghdad government and securing direct military routes through Iraq to Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Israel answered Tehran the next day, Dec. 15 when Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz launched a new Israel Defense Forces-IDF command for “depth” missions in distant locations.
The new corps, said the IDF spokesman, would give Israel military operations “strategic depth.” It is headed by Maj. Gen. Shai Avital, a former special operations commander who retired from the armed forces in 2002.
The new corps “could assist in mobilizing special forces in the Iranian nuclear context,” said the statement.
Equally important, it will chart and execute operations related to the covert war on al Qaeda and Iran in such places as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan and the countries of the Horn of Africa and East Africa.
Saudis tighten Gulf military and financial ranks against Iran
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates reacted with strong words and the closing of ranks.
Monday, Dec. 19, Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz opened the annual Gulf Cooperation Council-GCC meeting in Riyadh warning that its members’ security was under threat: “No doubt you all know that our safety and security is targeted and so the Gulf Arab states must close ranks as “a single entity,” he said. “We learn from history and experience not to stand still when faced with reality,” said the King. “Whoever does that will end up at the back of the caravan trail and be lost. That is why I ask of you today to move beyond the stage of cooperation and into the stage of unity in a single entity,” said Abdullah.
With these words, the Saudi king decisively spurned Tehran’s bid for an anti-US partnership which Iranian intelligence minister Heidar Moslehi put before Saudi Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz in Riyadh on Dec. 12.
The statement ending the GCC summit Dec. 21 called on Iran to “stop these policies and practices… and stop meddling in the internal affairs of the Gulf nations.”
By “single entity,” King Abdullah had two steps in mind: Gulf cooperation in developing nuclear weapons and the creation of a unified GCC military command, approved Tuesday, Dec. 20, to orchestrate the preparations for war with Iran.
In fact, only two members have real military muscle to contribute – Saudi Arabia alone has military forces for operations outside the Gulf, while the United Arab Emirates has the only air force with warplanes for the “single entity” command. Therefore, the summit’s final resolution boiled down to all members putting their hands in their pockets to stump up the funds for arming the bloc with a nuclear weapon. The inference drawn by our sources is that this effort is well advanced.
Gulf Arabs signify disapproval of the way US exited Iraq
In the wake of the Iranian and Israeli generals, the Saudi king appointed his incoming Defense Minister Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz head of the just-created GCC joint command. Each of the six members will appoint a professional military man as deputy.
With an eye on these developments, the Obama administration dispatched Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint US Chiefs of Staff, to Riyadh. But the Gulf rulers, including the Saudi defense minister, declined to meet with him. They joined forces to signify their disapproval of the way the US departed Iraq which left Baghdad under Tehran’s thumb and show Washington it had no role to play in GCC nuclear and military policies.
Gen. Dempsey had to be content with meeting officials of the Saudi Ministry of Defense officials and National Guard and military officers of Gulf armies.
In his comment on the snub, the US general told reporters traveling with him: “I’ve been very clear with all of our partners – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and others – [that] if you’re concerned about the future of Iraq, then we should all work together to help ensure that we achieve a brighter future for Iraq…[If Iraq] is left unattended or left to its own devices,” he said, “then countries that could have helped the newly sovereign nation shouldn’t come back and complain about the outcome.”
Al Maliki begins purge of Sunni politicians
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources report that Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners are especially peeved by the discovery – largely from Saudi intelligence agencies – that the Obama administration chose to disregard the Iranian takeover of Baghdad out of US strategic concerns relating to Iran, Syria and Turkey.
They learned that US President refused to take issue with the presence of Hadi al-Ameri, Iraq’s Trade Minister in the Al Maliki entourage he received at the White House last week, although he knew about al-Ameri’s notoriously close friendship with Iran’s Supreme Leader and the al Qods chief Gen. Soleimani.
Gulf officials complain that US officials were deaf to their contention that the ex-terrorist mastermind’s reception in the White House may not mean much to the Americans but was received in the region as a resounding statement capable of releasing Iraq’s endemic sectarian demons.
And indeed, Tehran and al-Maliki, exploiting what they saw as American weakness, were already moving forward on their three-pronged scheme for grabbing power in post-war Iraq.
On Dec. 19, just 24 hours day after the last US military convoy rolled out of the country, the Shiite prime minister obtained a warrant for the arrest of Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi. Signed by five judges, it charged al-Hashemi with offences under Article 4 of the anti-terrorism law and barred him from leaving the country.
The Sunni leader’s thereupon fled to the self-governing Kurdish province in northern Iraq.
Maliki demanded his handover or else, he threatened, the Iraqi army would launch an offensive against the Kurdish Peshmerga army.
DEBK-Net-Weekly’s sources report that Maliki also saw his chance of a showdown to challenge Kurdish control of the oil city of Kirkuk which the US military presence had kept at bay.
Tehran wields al-Maliki for domination of government, clergy and street
As Tehran and its Iraqi puppets behaved as though they no longer had anything to fear, fifteen deadly bomb explosions ripped through Baghdad Thursday, Dec. 22, killing 67 people and injuring more than 200 – an ominous sign of the sectarian strife – or even partition – awaiting the country if its current regime goes through with its master plan to install Iran as Iraq’s hegemon and Shiite Islam as the ruling faith.
One part if this plan is to push Sunni Muslim politicians like Tareq al-Hashemi out of the ruling machinery in Baghdad and segregate them in the western enclave of Al Anbar province far from the corridors of national power.
To implement the second part, DEBKA-Net-Weekly reports, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, a high-ranking radical Iranian cleric close to Khamenei, was imported from the Iranian holy city of Qom to the Iraqi shrine town of Najef. By this move, the Iranian clerical hierarchy of Qom assumed control of Iraq’s Shiite religious centers and asserted its supremacy over the Shiite world’s most important centers of pilgrimage.
The third segment devolved on the pro-Iranian radical Iraqi Shiite cleric and long US antagonist Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia controls Iraq’s Shiite masses, just as Hizballah rules the streets of Lebanon.
Our sources report that al Sadr only pretended to seek cooperation with the United States, a deception he dropped after the last American soldier left the country.
Tehran counts on him – like Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon – to keep the lid on people power in the streets of Iraq and avert popular Arab uprisings that could spill over into Iran.
Tehran has therefore moved fast to slot its Shiite pawn Nouri al Maliki unopposed into the top rung of Iraq’s ruling political and military systems in Baghdad; put Ayatollah Sharoudi in charge of its religious establishment and deployed Moqtada al Sadr ready to brandish a whip to keep heads down on Iraqi streets.

DEBKA.

Barack Obama and Ehud Barak

During the half hour they talked at the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor, Maryland, last Friday, Dec. 16, US President Barack Obama received from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak the latest intelligence on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Barak disclosed that Iran has started work on the assembly of a nuclear weapon and advanced surreptitiously on a program for developing a plutonium nuclear weapon.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Washington sources report that President Obama did not fall off his chair because it confirmed the data reaching him in the last week of November. For further evidence, the RQ-170 reconnaissance drone was assigned its first flight over Iran – only to be downed on Dec. 4 by means yet to be fully clarified.
Since then, the US and Israel have resorted to alternative resources to determine whether Iran has indeed started building components for a nuclear bomb or warhead.
Then, on Tuesday, Dec. 20, Dennis Ross, until a month ago President Obama’s senior adviser on the Middle East including Iran, noted that Israel had reason to be concerned about enrichment at Qom (a reference to the Fordo underground site near that religious city). He cited Iran’s accumulation of low-enriched uranium, its decision to enrich to nearly 20 percent “when there is no justification for it,” its hardening of nuclear sites, and other “activities related to possible weaponization” – all factors that “affect the Israeli calculus and ours,” said Ross.
“Qom is important, but it is worth remembering that IAEA inspectors go there, and I would not isolate Qom and say this alone is the Israeli red-line to spur a military response.
Iran embarks on nuclear weaponization
Ross’s reference to “weaponization” activities and other sites beside Qom as an Israel red line spurring a military response are firm indications that the White House knows for sure that Iran has embarked on the assembly of a nuclear weapon and that Fordo is not its only clandestine weapon development site.
Using this information, Israel calculated that Iran had drastically reduced its timeline for building a nuclear weapon from two years to six months. If Iran’s rulers so decided, Iran could have an operational weapon ready to go by early June or July 2012.
Barak did not ask the US President how he intended acting on the new intelligence because the way Obama uses the Iranian nuclear issue for his re-election campaign is outside Israel’s ken; the US president, for his part, did not inquire whether an Israeli strike against Iran was any nearer. He left the two questions open, commenting only that the situation was extremely serious.
So Israel’s leaders don’t know for sure if Obama is planning to strike Iran – either to keep a nuclear weapon out of the Islamic Republic’s hands or to save his campaign for a second term as president from being trapped in a morass of manipulative Iranian tricks.
As Israel reads the situation in Tehran, Iran’s leaders have gained enormous confidence from their capture of the US reconnaissance drone. They appear to believe that laying hands on American stealth technology arms them for repelling a US attack, or at least reducing to a minimum the amount of damage it would cause.
After talking to the Israeli defense minister, Obama said: “The cooperation between our militaries has never been stronger.”
Barak commented, “Both countries agree that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable.”
US and Israel in sync on military action
The US president’s reply to Barak came three days after they met, Monday, Dec. 19, when US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta informed CBS interviewer Scott Pelley that Iran had reached a point where they can assemble a bomb in a year – or potentially less.
Pelley: So are you saying that Iran can have a nuclear weapon in 2012?
Panetta: “It would probably be about a year before they can do it. Perhaps a little less. But one proviso, Scott, is if they have a hidden facility somewhere in Iran that may be enriching fuel…
Pelley: So that they can develop a weapon even more quickly.
Panetta: On a faster track…
Pelley: Than we believe.
Panetta: That’s correct.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly reveals that this “hidden facility somewhere in Iran” was a reference by Panetta to the new intelligence data Barak had put before President Obama.
It is reasonable to assume therefore that, under the impact of this interchange, the US president authorized his defense secretary to enunciate the reversal the administration has effected in its position on a possible US attack on Iran’s nuclear program – although it may not be the last such change.
Panetta accordingly dropped his former warnings of the grave consequences of an attack for US interests and the global economy and said suddenly: ‘Well, we share the same common concern. The United States does not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. That’s a red line for us and that’s a red line, obviously, for the Israelis. If we have to do it we will deal with it.”
Panetta’s bombshell dismays Washington opponents of military strike
In other words, the “red line” for America, defined in his Brookings Institute speech of Dec. 2, has moved from free trade through Persian Gulf waters to the same groove as Israel’s, namely, the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran per se.
Panetta’s new stance landed on Washington with bombshell force. Our Washington sources report dismay in senior US intelligence circles including CIA director David Petraeus, and in the military and defense lobby which actively opposes a US or Israel attack on Iran’s nuclear program.
Pentagon officials asserted that the Defense Secretary’s prediction of an Iranian nuclear bomb within a year was based on “a highly aggressive timeline” and actions which Iran has not yet taken. There was no cause to revise the timeline, they insisted: It still stood at two or three years from now.
George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, stressed the Defense Secretary had stated clearly that there was no sign Iran had made the decision to go ahead on a nuke.
Mr. Little said, “He was asked to comment on prospective and aggressive timelines on Iran’s possible production of nuclear weapons – and he said if, and only if, they made such a decision. He didn’t say that Iran would, in fact, have a nuclear weapon in 2012.”
The Pentagon official went on to argue that the International Atomic Energy Agency-IAEA was still in Iran and its inspectors had “good access to Iran’s continuing production of low-enriched uranium.”
Should Iran choose to “break out” – divert low-enriched uranium to produce weapons-grade highly enriched uranium – the inspectors could detect it. “We would retain sufficient time under any such scenario to take appropriate action,” he said.
Losing the RQ-170 did not end US intelligence efforts in Iran
According to usual rules governing such dust-ups in Washington, after the Panetta interview sounded the alarm siren, the ensuing play-down of his comments ought to have sounded the all-clear and settled the dust.
But this is not what happened.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources report that someone in the US capital decided not to let the opponents of an attack on Iran win the battle over the revised White House position. So the Pentagon press secretary was not allowed to push Panetta’s words back into the old plenty-of-time-yet frame; nor did he get the last word.
From Afghanistan, Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint US Chiefs, came forward Wednesday, Dec. 21 to reinforce the Defense Secretary’s comments and add a new dimension:
Speaking on CNN, the general issued a warning to Iran.
“My biggest worry is they will miscalculate our resolve,” Dempsey said. “Any miscalculation could mean that we are drawn into conflict, and that would be a tragedy for the region and the world.”
The top US soldier made the first authoritative reference to the loss of the reconnaissance drone downed by Iran earlier this month, after senior Iranian intelligence and military officers claimed that with reverse engineering they had gained the stealth and fighter jet technology for repelling a US attack on their nuclear sites.
Dempsey said the loss of the RQ-170 was not the end of US efforts to figure out what Iran is doing.
“Of course we are gathering intelligence against Iran by a variety of means. It would be rather imprudent of us not to try to understand what a nation who has declared itself to be an adversary of the United States is doing.”
Two senior US visitors arrive to step up cooperation with Israel
This week, Obama took two more steps for tightening military cooperation with Israel. Lt. Gen. Frank Gorenc, commander of the US’s Third Air Force, arrived to finalize plans for the biggest joint missile defense exercise the US and Israel have ever held this spring. Several thousand American soldiers will be deployed in Israel for the exercise.
It will include the establishment of U.S. command posts in Israel and IDF command posts at EUCOM headquarters in Germany – with the ultimate goal of establishing joint task forces in the event of a large-scale conflict in the Middle East.
Tuesday, Dec. 20, also saw the arrival of Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s right-hand, together with Robert Einhorn, the State Department special adviser on nonproliferation. The two came to tie up the diplomatic ends of the decisions reached by President Obama and Defense Minister Barak at their meeting in Washington.
Einhorn, the administration’s top expert on Iran’s nuclear activities, said just before the visit that the situation over Iran’s nuclear program was becoming increasingly worrying and an urgent diplomatic solution needed to be found. “Iran is violating international obligations and norms,” he said. “It is becoming a pariah state.” He added: “The timeline for its nuclear program is beginning to get shorter, so it is important we take these strong steps on an urgent basis.” Einhorn did not elaborate on those steps.