WarSclerotic

Protest could be turning point in Syrian unrest.

Sudan’s Mohammed al-Dabi, the head of the Arab League monitoring mission to Syria. Photo: AFP

THERE have been many remarkable moments in the year of the Arab Spring, but the grainy videos of Syrian protesters pleading for help from the former security boss of another pariah regime must be among them.

The tens of thousands of people who came out of the shadows and the rubble of their embattled city of Homs to make their voices heard knew that for once it was safe to do so. In scenes that defied low expectations of the visit to Syria by a league monitoring mission, protesters were filmed shouting at the delegates, even as gunfire could be heard in the background. ”We are unarmed and dying,” one screamed. ”We are being slaughtered,” said another.

In their desperation, they called on the outside world to intervene and save them from the Syrian army. But it was Lieutenant-General Mohammed al-Dabi, head of the Arab League monitoring mission and a former intelligence adviser to President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, who was their real target.

Advertisement: Story continues below

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Photo: AFP

He uttered the bland words common to all such men on all such missions. His visit to Homs had been a ”good one”. He would return for more meetings, more visits, more information. But now perhaps none of that matters, for the facts must already have been clear long in advance. The only question is what the various sides of this complex and violent argument will do next.

Will the protesters stay on the streets? If not, President Bashar al-Assad will have won a significant victory, but if they do, they will confirm his worst fears that the Arab League delegation was a Trojan Horse that would only encourage the opposition to his authority.

He would then be forced to confront his own dilemma – whether to redouble the force he has already employed to drive them back into their alleyways, or to allow their movement to grow and be copied around the country, until the true strength of feeling against him is made clear.

Either spells disaster: the use of violence now would destroy whatever credibility he retains in the Arab League. More importantly, now it would put pressure on Russia, on whose support he relies in the United Nations but which is already showing signs of weakening, to allow some form of international action against him.

The conflict in Syria has spread slowly. It would be hard to find in it a turning point equivalent to the fall of Benghazi to the rebels in Libya, or the withdrawal of support from Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak by the Obama administration.

Tuesday’s encounter in Homs when tens of thousands of Syrian protesters marched on the centre of the city to demand that the Arab League act against the Assad regime could prove to be the moment for which the world has been waiting.

Richard Spencer is Middle East correspondent for The Daily Telegraph.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/protest-could-be-turning-point-in-syrian-unrest-20111228-1pcue.html#ixzz1hqMRcJwU

Blog: War tocsin sounding in Iran.

Rick Moran

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/12/war_tocsin_sounding_in_iran.html#ixzz1hqKzSNBh

Activists: Syrians refuse to meet monitors… JPost – Middle East.

    BEIRUT – Syrians in a flash-point area of the city of Homs refused to meet Arab League monitors in the presence of a Syrian army officer, prompting the observers to withdraw from the area, activists said on Wednesday.

“The monitors left the Baba Amr neighborhood because they refused to enter the neighborhood without being escorted by Lieutenant Colonel Mudeen Neda from the Fourth Division,” said Ahmed, a local activist and resident of Baba Amr.

“The families of the martyrs and the wounded refused to meet them in his presence, and the monitors left,” he said.

Earlier, live footage carried on al Jazeera television showed gunfire and black smoke rising above Syria’s central city of Hama on Wednesday as dozens of men marched through the streets chanting “Where are the Arab monitors”.

Arab League monitors checking if Syria is ending a military crackdown on popular unrest are due to visit the city on Thursday. In its footage, al Jazeera showed one man bleeding from his neck as protesters shouted in the background.

State television Syria TV said Wednesday that Syria has released 755 people detained during the nine-month revolt against President Bashar Assad, .

“Syrian authorities released 755 detained in recent events whose hands were not stained with Syrian blood,” the station said in a news flash.

Also on Wednesday, Syrian television channel Addounia reported that the head of the Arab League monitoring team told its reporter in Homs that the observers saw gunmen in the flashpoint city.

“Yes…we saw gunmen in the city of Homs,” the news flash quoted him as saying.

The head of an Arab League mission investigating if Syria is following a peace plan has said earlier that day that he saw “nothing frightening” in the flashpoint city of Homs but many residents said they were already losing trust in the monitors.

Sudanese General Mustafa Dabi said his team needed more time to inspect Homs before giving a final verdict, but residents in the hard-hit Baba Amr district where the team took an initial tour said they felt monitors were not responding to their grievances.

“There were some places where the situation was not good,” Dabi told Reuters by telephone on Wednesday. “But there wasn’t anything frightening, at least while we were there. Things were calm and there were no clashes.”

Homs is the heart of the nine-month uprising against President Bashar Assad’s rule and has become one of its bloodiest hotspots as armed rebels emerge to fight government tanks and machine guns.

The monitors are checking to see if Syria is withdrawing its troops from cities and halting the violence that has threatened to spiral into civil war.

Activists said they showed the team buildings riddled with bullets and mortar rounds and pointed out what they said were tanks but only had two hours to give them a tour.

“I felt they didn’t really acknowledge what they’d seen – maybe they had orders not to show sympathy. But they didn’t seem enthusiastic about hearing people tell their stories,” said Baba Amr resident and activist Omar. “We felt like we were shouting into a void.”

Dabi said his team did not see tanks but they did see some armored vehicles. He said his team planned to visit Baba Amr again.

“The situation seemed reassuring so far,” he said. “But remember this was only the first day and it will need investigation. We have 20 people who will be there for a long time.”

Mohammed Saleh, an activist in Homs told Reuters on Tuesday that the army had pulled tanks away from the perimeter of Baba Amr in what critics said was a move to hoodwink monitors.

Residents in Baba Amr were angry that they could not convince the monitors to go into the worst-hit neighborhoods of the district, he said.

Paris calls on Iran not to block Hormuz strait | World | RIA Novosti.

(I just realized that the US may actually WANT Iran to try to block the straits because of the new sanctions.  This would represent an act of war, a causus beli that the US could use to justify attacking Iran with no question of legality. – JW)

The French foreign ministry called on Iran to observe international laws and refrain from blocking the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important oil routes.

Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi on Monday threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz if sanctions are imposed on Iran’s oil exports. The strait accounts for one-third of the world’s tanker-borne oil and 17% of all oil traded worldwide.

“Just like in the issues of human rights and nuclear non-proliferation, we call on the Iranian authorities to observe international law, in particular the freedom of navigation in international waters and straits,” French foreign ministry chief spokesman Bernard Valero said.

The French diplomat said that the Strait of Hormuz is a part of international waters and “all vessels, no matter what flag they are flying, have the right to cross it under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Seas.” Iran, though a signatory to the convention, has yet to ratify it.

The Hormuz strait links oil-rich Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Its northern shore is controlled by Iran, and southern – by U.A.E. and Oman.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy voiced a proposal to impose an embargo on Iranian oil to put additional pressure on Iran over its controversial nuclear program. The issue may be discussed at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on January 30.

Michael Mann, a spokesman for EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, reiterated that the European Union still has a fresh round of sanctions on Iran on its agenda.

“European Union is considering another set of sanctions against Iran and we continue to do that,” he told AFP.

Iran is currently carrying out ten-day Navy exercises in international waters to the east of the strait. During the exercises, the Iranian Navy will among other things train blocking the strait.

Iran’s navy chief Habibollah Sayyari told Iran’s Press TV that closing the strait would be “really easy … or as Iranians say it will be easier than drinking a glass of water.”

‘World should bomb Syria’ – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Special: In first interview with Israeli media, two Syrian exiles urge world to wake up

Orly Azoulay

WASHINGTON –Rahim knows the Syrian horror story from the inside: A short while after the great uprising got underway, in late March, he was detained, imprisoned and tortured. A few weeks later he managed to somehow flee from prison, cross the border, hide in the mountains and escape to the United States, where he was granted asylum.

“I cannot yet reveal the exact story of the escape route,” he says. “I left family behind, and any mistake I make could cost them their lives.”

Western diplomats who learned to appreciate Rahim’s activity on behalf of human rights in Syria and his efforts in the struggle to topple Bashar Assad’s oppressive regime helped him behind the scenes as much as they could. Since then, for some three months now, he has been hiding somewhere, receiving inside information from comrades left behind in the homeland, and using social networks to provide updates on the daily horrors taking places there, far away from the public eye.

Rahim is a human database who has recorded and filed everything that has happened in Syria since the start of the uprising. He is apparently the last of the activists in the campaign to replace the regime who managed to leave the country and secure an asylum. The information he possesses is fresh and up-to-date.

Rahim is not his real name. He must not be exposed, especially not in an Israeli media outlet. He is unwilling to be photographed, even from behind or as a silhouette. The moment he entered the home where our meeting was held, he violated Syrian law, which bans any contact with Israelis. By law, such meeting constitutes treason.

Yet this is the smallest risk he has assumed. The great risk is that someone will hurt his relatives in Damascus: His parents and siblings. “If authorities find out that I spoke to you, they will butcher my family. This is a brutal, radical regime. What people know in the West is merely the tip of the iceberg. They don’t know about the torture, the raping of women and the massacres of civilians by snipers during funerals.”

“In recent months, people started to bury their dead in their backyards, in improvised graves, until the dust settles. People are scared to gather in public. If more than five people come together, it constitutes an illegal gathering, and then the army arrives and fires indiscriminately.”

‘We don’t hate Israel’

Rahim received his permit to stay in the US courtesy of one of the organizations affiliated with the State Department. He joined his friend Amar here (another pseudonym.) Amar too was an anti-regime activist. Some three years ago, when he was sitting at an Internet café at the heart of Damascus, security agents raided the site, cuffed him, and threw him in jail. He was released after a few weeks and somehow made it to America. Today he heads the Syrian exile organization and provides authorities and the media with information about what goes on in his homeland: Abuse, murder, rape and other acts of grave violence perpetrated by Assad supporters against protestors.

Both of them are in their early 30s and seek to topple the regime. They reside in a suburb of a large city and cannot keep in touch with family members left behind, because the Syrian regime listens in. For lack of other choice, they convey their well-wishes via mediators, learned to avoid being followed, evade people who can endanger them, and like every exile dream of the day when they can board a plane to Damascus and land in the free Syria.

I brought Israeli-made Turkish coffee for my meeting with them. The Mideastern coffee made the atmosphere more relaxed. The cigarettes were lit one after another and a short while later the tension and suspicion evaporated.

Why are you telling your story to the Israeli media? Do you wish to convey a message to the government in Jerusalem?

“We do it so that you bomb Assad’s palace,” Amar quips. “But seriously now: I’m not a captive of the myth that Jews run the world and America, but Israeldoes have power and influence. We are engaged in a public relations campaign worldwide to put Bashar Assad on trial for crimes against humanity and for war crimes. If Israel supports the move, it would be greatly helpful.

“The Syrian opposition and Israel share a joint interest. We have no ideological hatred for Israel or for Jews. I know that’s what you think, but it’s not the case. It’s true that for years they taught us to hate Israel and fight is, but many Syrians already realized that they are being taught to hate Israel to divert attention away from the oppression in the country. We realized that Assad senior and junior educated people to hate Israel in order to stay in power; to blind us with hate for Israel so that we don’t channel our energies to the fact that we live with no freedom or future.

“This is over. People got it. Assad still has his supporters, the Alawites who depend on him, because if he falls they will fall too. Yet among other groups, and there are very diverse ethnic groups in Syria, he lost support. In the army too there are thousands of defectors by now, and they left with their weapons. They are hiding away, getting organized, and at the right moment they will act.”

‘Most Syrians despise Iran’

We head to the computer. Amar opens his encrypted files, which contain photographs and videos smuggled by the rebels. On the screen we see protestors in the city of Homs burning Hezbollah flags with fury and also burning Hassan Nasrallah’s photos. This is a new phenomenon in Syria, which for years allowed the group to arm itself.

“In all protests thus far, an Israeli flag wasn’t burned even once,” Amar says. “This uprising demonstrates that the Syrian people’s hatred is reserved for Assad’s tyrannical regime and for those who support it and safeguard it. They realize that Hezbollah caused Syria grave damage.”

“They also burned Iranian flags in the protests. I can promise you that the alliance between Syria and Iran that threatens the Middle East will come to an end after Assad is gone. Most Syrians despise Iran, because it dragged Syria into becoming an ostracized state. The protestors are also burning Russian flags, because Russia supports Assad in the United Nations,” he says. “It’s not as though there are no disagreements with Israel. There are. A dispute over borders. The Golan is ours and we shall demand it back under any regime. Yet there is no hatred for Israel and for the Jews. We, the young people’ proved it.”

Iran has played a key role in assisting Assad. Both Rahim and Amar tell of Iranian-speaking snipers who do not speak Arabic being deployed across Damascus and helping in repressing the protests. Rahim adds that other Arab world protests, in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya inspired Syrian’s citizens.

“Social networks played a key role for us too,” he says. “We were able to call or protests and convey messages. Yet then the terrible oppression started. In a protest held on March 15, authorities detained a group of 13 or 14 year-old boys who chanted against the regime and another boy who wrote on a wall ‘Assad go home.’ They were thrown into prison and when their fathers came to release them, members of the secret police told them: ‘If you want your children, bring your women in their place.

“Some of the children were eventually released and others were not. Among those who remained in prison was the boy who drew the graffiti. Two months later, they sent his mutilated body to his parents. He underwent severe abuse; his fingernails were pulled out before he was beaten to death. They told the parents: ‘That’s what happens to those who write a slogan against the leader.’ The parents photographed the body and sent us the images.”

Women raped, children killed

The testimonials include reports by husbands whose wives were raped in front of them by security agents and by brothers who say their sisters were raped as a form of revenge. There are many testimonials by parents about their children being sexually abused and dozens of horrific photos of mutilated and dismembered bodies.

An expert team of the UN’s Human Rights Commission in Geneva recently published a report asserting that since the protests started and through November, Syrian security forces detained some 100,000 people and killed more than 5,000, including at least 256 children. Some of them were tortured beforehand, both physically and sexually. The report contains difficult photos and videos. For example, a soldier shooting a two-year-old girl to death and telling the parents: “She should die now instead of growing up to be a protestor.”

However, Amar says the figures he possesses are much higher. “I estimate that nearly 15,000 protestors were killed so far. The report does not take into account people who were buried in backyards or those who disappeared.”

Zainab Hosseini was 18 when her parents last saw her in April. She disappeared from her home and only a few weeks later her brother was summoned to pick up her body. The sight he encountered was horrifying: Zainab’s head was severed and her face was completely mutilated. The grave violence used against her made it impossible to identify her. The brother assumed that the regime decided to punish him by hurting his sister because he acted against the government. He invited CNN to his home and published the photographs. Yet a few days later the regime presented Zainab alive and claimed that the protestors are making false accusations against security forces.

However, Rahim says the regime was unable to answer one question: “Whose mutilated body was it that was handed over to the family? Perhaps it wasn’t Zainab, but there was a body of a girl there who underwent terrible torture. Who tortured and murdered her? Who’s this girl?”

Israeli opportunity

A few weeks ago, Amar met with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He presented to her, among other things, information about soldiers who defected and plan to launch a guerilla fight against the army. “To my surprise, she asked that the defectors lay down their arms,” he says. “That’s an odd request. Why didn’t they ask the rebels in Libya to lay down their arms? How can they do it if at any moment they can be fired at and murdered? It’s impractical.”

“I can’t understand why the Americans are silent,” Amar says. “We expected them to intervene. Militarily. To bomb the Syrian army from the air. They intervened in Libya and managed to prompt Gaddafi’s removal, and that is what we expect them to do to Assad now. Thus far, more people were killed in Syria than in Libya at the point where Obama decided to launch a military offensive in order to avert a greater massacre. NATO also bombed in Kosovo when it was necessary. Why this hypocrisy?”

“Obama urged Assad to leave, but he won’t leave out of his own accord. He’s a coward, he’s naïve, and he is convinced that he has support. He boasts that his children support him. His wife benefited him greatly over the years by providing, with her very presence, a moderate image in the eyes of the world, yet people who met her said she is very shallow and we don’t count on her to influence him to leave.”

Meanwhile, Rahim stresses that Syria is a secular state and that the West should not fear a radical Islamic takeover. “We have many groups, but we live with respect for each other. What’s clear is that the oppressive regime must pass from this world. Our slogan is freedom and dignity. This is what Syria deserves, and we hope that the world will help us, including Israel.”

These voices reached Israel too. Knesset Member Isaac Herzog, who is a member of the Knesset’s Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, met with Syrian exiles in Washington in recent weeks and he suggests that we listen to them.

“We in Israel often complain that they don’t know us and don’t understand us. We should know that we too do not possess sufficient understanding of our neighbors, and when it comes to Syria we see total ignorance. Following these and other meetings, I can say that what’s happening there does not resemble any other change taking place in our region. The Syrians are a secular nation comprising a fascinating coalition of ethnicities.”

“In my view, following the Assad era there is a chance for positive processes vis-à-vis Israel as well, and they will require us to meet the challenge,” Herzog says. “The US and its partners, along with human rights groups, must grant the protestors more massive support, so that these processes mature as quickly as possible. Otherwise Syria will be plunged into chaos.”

For the exiles, the clock is ticking. Every passing day means more fatalities, more wounded and more prisoners. This is on top of the personal fears for the safety of family members left behind. “The world must wake up,” both Rahim and Amar say. “This is a call for help and for intervention. Assad will not leave on his own accord. He isn’t Mubarak. In order to prevent more bloodshed the world must do something. Now.”

Israpundit » Blog Archive » Israeli military prepares for a new type of war.

U.S., Israel Discuss Triggers for Bombing Iran’s Nuclear Infrastructure – The Daily Beast.

Dec 28, 2011 4:45 AM EST

The Obama administration tries to assure Israel privately that it would strike Iran militarily if Tehran’s nuclear program crosses certain “red lines”—while attempting to dissuade the Israelis from acting unilaterally. Eli Lake reports exclusively.

When Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opined earlier this month that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities could “consume the Middle East in a confrontation and a conflict that we would regret,” the Israelis went ballistic behind the scenes. Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, lodged a formal diplomatic protest known as a demarche. And the White House was thrust into action, reassuring the Israelis that the administration had its own “red lines” that would trigger military action against Iran, and that there is no need for Jerusalem to act unilaterally.

Panetta’s seemingly innocent remarks on Dec. 2 triggered the latest drama in the tinder-box relationship that the Obama administration is trying to navigate with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. With Republicans lining up to court Jewish donors and voters in America in 2012, Obama faces a tricky election-year task of ensuring Iran doesn’t acquire a nuclear bomb on his watch while keeping the Israelis from launching a preemptive strike that could inflame an already teetering Middle East.

The stakes are immensely high, and the distrust that Israelis feel toward the president remains a complicating factor. Those sentiments were laid bare in a speech Netanyahu’s minister of strategic affairs, Moshe Ya’alon, gave on Christmas Eve in Jerusalem, in which he used Panetta’s remarks to cast doubt on the U.S.’s willingness to launch its own military strike.

Ya’alon told the Anglo-Likud, an organization within Netanyahu’s Likud party that caters to native English speakers, that the Western strategy to stop Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons must include four elements, with the last resort being a military strike.

“The fourth element of this combined strategy is the credible military strike,” Ya’alon said, according to a recording of the speech provided to The Daily Beast. “There is no credible military action when we hear leaders from the West, saying, ‘this is not a real option,’ saying, ‘the price of military action is too high.’”

The lack of trust between the Israeli and American leaders on Iran has been a sub-rosa tension in the relationship since 2009.  Three U.S. military officials confirm to The Daily Beast that analysts attached to the Office of the Secretary of Defense are often revising estimates trying to predict what events in Iran would trigger Prime Minister Netanyahu to authorize a military attack on the country’s nuclear infrastructure. Despite repeated requests going back to 2009, Netanyahu’s government has not agreed to ask the United States for permission or give significant advanced warning of any pending strike.

The sensitive work of trying to get both allies on the same page intensified this month. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak visited Washington last week to go over Iran issues; and the undersecretary of state for political affairs, Wendy Sherman, and a special arms control adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Robert Einhorn, were in Israel last week to discuss Iran as well. Panetta for his own part has revised his tone on the question of Iran’s nuclear program, telling CBS News last week that the United States was prepared to use force against Iran to stop the country from building a nuclear weapon.

The new diplomacy has prompted new conversations between the United States and Israel over what the triggers—called “red lines” in diplomatic parlance—would be to justify a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Matthew Kroenig, who served as special adviser on Iran to the Office of the Secretary of Defense between July 2010 and July 2011, offered some of the possible “red lines” for a military strike in a recent Foreign Affairs article he wrote. He argued that the U.S should attack Iran’s facilities if Iran expels international nuclear weapons inspectors, begins enriching its stockpiles of uranium to weapons-grade levels of 90 percent, or installs advanced centrifuges at its main uranium-enrichment facility in Qom.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Kroenig also noted that Iran announced in 2009 that it was set to construct 10 new uranium enrichment sites. “I doubt they are building ten new sites, but I would be surprised if Iran was not racing to build some secret enrichment facilities,” Kroenig said. “Progress on new facilities would be a major factor in our assessment of Iran’s nuclear program and shape all aspects of our policy towards this including the decision to use force.”

Until recently, current and former Obama administration officials would barely broach the topic in public, only hinting vaguely that all options are on the table to stop Iran’s program. Part of the reason for this was that Obama came into office committed to pursuing negotiations with Iran. When the diplomatic approach petered out, the White House began building international and economic pressure on Iran, often in close coordination with Israel.

All the while, secret sabotage initiatives like a computer worm known as Stuxnet that infected the Siemens-made logic boards at the Natanz centrifuge facility in Iran, continued apace. New U.S. estimates say that Stuxnet delayed Iran’s nuclear enrichment work by at most a year, despite earlier estimates that suggested the damage was more extensive.

Last week in a CBS interview, Panetta said Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon is a “red line.” White House advisers have more recently broached the subject more specifically in private conversations with outside experts on the subject.

Patrick Clawson, the director of research for  the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said, “If Iran were found to be sneaking out or breaking out then the president’s advisers are firmly persuaded he would authorize the use of military force to stop it.” But Clawson added, “The response they frequently get from the foreign policy experts is considerable skepticism that this is correct, not that these people are lying to us, but rather when the occasion comes we just don’t know how the president will react.”

Henry Sokolski, the executive director the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said “You don’t propose and go about doing an oil embargo unless you are serious about taking the next step, and the next step for the administration is clearly some form of military action, and people who have left the administration like Dennis Ross have made it clear that this is precisely what’s on this administration’s mind.”

Ross did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment.

Ironically, Panetta often is the official the Obama administration uses to engage Israel. “Panetta has been straightforward with the Israelis and they seem to appreciate that,” one senior administration official said. “The Israelis view Panetta as an honest broker.” In some ways that is why his remarks stung Netanyahu’s government so much.

Complicating matters, the Dec. 2 remarks also came at the same time a high-level delegation of Israeli diplomats, military officers and intelligence officials were in Washington for an annual meeting called the strategic dialogue. At the meeting, the Israeli side offered a new presentation on Iran’s nuclear program suggesting that Iran’s efforts to build secret reactors for producing nuclear fuel were further along than the United States has publicly said.  Some of the intelligence was based on soil samples collected near the suspected sites.

Part of the issue now between the United States and Israel are disagreements over such intelligence. The Israelis and the U.S. both believe that Iran suspended its work on weaponization, or the research and testing on how to fit an atomic explosion inside a warhead, in 2003 shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The Israelis, however, say the Iranians started that work again in 2005, according to Israeli officials and Ya’alon, who said this in his speech on Christmas Eve. The 2007 and 2011 U.S. national intelligence estimates for Iran say this weaponization work remains suspended.

The Israelis also say a recent document uncovered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that shows detailed plans for constructing a “neutron initiator,” or a pellet that sits at the middle of the nuclear core and is crushed by high explosives in a nuclear explosion, is evidence that Iran is continuing its weaponization work. The latest IAEA report released in November said members states had shared intelligence alleging that Iran had conducted explosive tests associated with nuclear weapons research.

A senior administration official told The Daily Beast, “Both Americans and Israelis agree that some research and design work is probably continuing in the event the Iranians decide to move ahead with weaponization.”

The intelligence disagreement is significant in part because one of the factors in drawing up red lines on Iran’s program is how much progress Iran has made in constructing secret enrichment facilities outside of Natanz, where IAEA inspectors still monitor the centrifuge cascades. In 2009, the Obama administration exposed such a facility carved into a mountain outside of the Shiite holy city of Qom. The IAEA has chastised the Iranians for not fully disclosing their work on the Qom site until the United States forced the regime’s hand.

IDF assessing plans to counter possible Cairo … JPost – Defense.

    A debate is raging within the IDF regarding the so-called inflection point when it will need to begin establishing new formations and procuring new platforms to counter a future threat from Egypt.

The current assessment within the IDF is that Egypt will, for the coming years, retain the peace treaty with Israel due to its need for continued financial and military assistance from the United States.
Nevertheless, there is concern within the military over two different scenarios involving the deployment of Egyptian military forces into the Sinai Peninsula, which is supposed to be demilitarized under the 1979 peace treaty.

The first scenario involves an Egyptian decision to deploy troops there for training. The second scenario sees the movement of an Egyptian division into the peninsula, on the sidelines of a future Israeli war with Hezbollah or Syria, as a demonstration of unity with the Arab countries.

“In both cases, Israel will be in a quandary regarding what to do,” a senior defense official explained recently. “On the one hand, no Israeli prime minister will go to war with Egypt over such violations but on the other hand, if we don’t respond then we are turning a blind eye to the violation.”

As a result, the IDF Planning Directorate has recommended that a Muslim Brotherhood victory in the ongoing Egyptian elections serve as the cutoff line for when the military should begin establishing long-lead items – such as new divisions and combat squadrons.

“These are formations that take a number of years to create, and that is why we will need to begin working on them sooner rather than later,” a senior IDF officer explained.

Shortly after taking up his post in February, Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz decided to take a cautious approach visa- vis Egypt and not recommend the implementation of an immediate procurement plan aimed at establishing new units.

This was done with the understanding that even if the Muslim Brotherhood takes over in upcoming elections, it will still take some time before Egypt threatens Israel again as it did in the days leading up to the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

For that reason, the past year has been devoted mostly to learning about Egypt, dusting off old maps and preparing conceptually for the future.

Now, however, with a Muslim Brotherhood victory appearing to be quite clear, one possibility under growing consideration is to reestablish units that the IDF dismantled seven years ago.

The main obstacle to all of these plans is the shortage of funds.

While Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has apparently decided not to cut the defense budget for the coming year, the decision to establish new formations would require a major financial investment, which the country does not appear to be prepared to make.

The IDF’s NIS 42 billion budget – under which the IDF formulated its new multi-year plan called Halamish – does not include preparations for a confrontation with Egypt, which would require the country to invest billions of additional shekels.