WarSclerotic

Home Front Officer: Missile attack would force massive evacuation of Tel Aviv.

DEBKAfile Special Report June 12, 2012, 6:18 PM (GMT+02:00)

Tel Aviv

Col. Adam Zusman, Home Front Commander of Israel’s Dan region (Tel Aviv and its environs), told AFP Tuesday, June 12, “In case of a missile attack on the centre of Israel, especially unconventional attacks and if buildings are destroyed, the population from Tel Aviv and other cities will be evacuated and relocated in other areas of the country.”
The officer did not say to where the roughly two million inhabitants of the Dan region’s core towns of Tel Aviv, Bat Yam, Holon, Petakh Tikva, Ramat Hasharon, Ramat Gan, Givatayim, Bein Brak, Herzliya, Or Yehuda, Givat Shmuel and Kiryat Ono, would be evacuated. debkafile’s military sources estimate they will be relocated in the southern mostly desert Negev region. The outer Gush Dan ring includes some 3 million people.

Col. Zusman said Israel continued to face serious threats from Iran and its allies, the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah and Gaza’s Hamas rulers. He did not refer to Syria.
“In the next war, nobody will be able to drink a coffee in Dizengoff,” he said, referring to a popular street in downtown Tel Aviv. “Israeli civilians will have to face the threat. Today, every civilian is threatened in Israel.”

Thirty percent of the Israeli population under his command are short of gas masks.

Zusman added Israel has some of the “most sophisticated” anti-aircraft system in the world, but that the Jewish state could not count on any system for total protection. “We are getting ready for the worst-case scenario.”
Until now, Israeli officials and high-ranking officers have never talked openly about the potential outcome of a concentrated missile attack on central Israel, although two days ago, the deputy chief of staff, Maj. General Yair Naveh disclosed that Syria had the biggest arsenal in the world of chemical weapons and also rockets able to strike every part of Israel.
debkafile’s military sources report that plans were drawn up to evacuate Tel Aviv and some of its outlying towns two years ago when it turned out that in a potential war, that centralregion might be attacked with missiles carrying “dirty” (radioactive) warheads which spreads contamination across an area of several square kilometers, or containing poison chemicals, nerve gas or biological substances.
While Iran is the only possible source of nuclear bombs, although none are yet operational, the other types of unconventional weapons are possessed by Iran, Syria and Hizballah.
Israel’s Defense Forces area also prepared for a nuclear or dirty bomb attack coming from the Mediterranean Sea to the West.

Col. Zusman did not go into the logistics of a massive population transfer from Tel Aviv or the measures to sustain them as refugees. However, because of the awareness of Tel Aviv’s potential danger, building was halted there on a new underground facility for the IDF General Command, which unlike the present war room was planned to withstand intense missile attack. Our military sources report that an alternative site has been reserved to house the high command in the event of war.

Iran begins designing nuclear subs | The Times of Israel.

Navy official claims military ships fall into civilian use category

Illustrative photo of a nuclear attack submarine, the USS Columbus. (photo credit: US Navy via Wikimedia Commons)

TEHRAN , Iran (AP) — A semiofficial Iranian news agency is reporting that the country has begun to design its first nuclear submarine.

The Tuesday report by Fars quotes the deputy navy chief in charge of technical affairs, Rear Admiral Abbas Zamini, as saying Iran has begun “initial stages” of designing the nuclear-powered craft.

Rear Adm. Zamini says Iran has developed “peaceful nuclear technology” and that the right to civilian uses of nuclear power includes military nuclear submarines.

Iran and the West are odds over Tehran’s nuclear program. The US suspects it is aimed at developing weapons technology, a charge Iran denies.

Iran has domestically built several small submarines over the past years. It has recently overhauled one of the three non-nuclear Russian Kilo-class submarines it bought in the 1990s.

Israel ‘to evacuate Tel Aviv’ in event of missile attack | The Australian Eye.

June 12, 2012
By : Gary Dunn

Israel will evacuate the entire population of Tel Aviv if it is hit by missiles, particularly if they have unconventional warheads, the commander in charge of Israel’s central region told AFP.

Colonel Adam Zusman, chief of the Home Front Command in Israel’s Gush Dan region, which encompasses the city of Tel Aviv and its environs, said an attack on the centre of the country would force massive evacuations.

“In case of a missile attack on the centre of Israel, especially unconventional, the population from Tel Aviv and other cities will be evacuated and relocated in other areas of the country,” Zusman told AFP in an interview at the weekend.

“Massive evacuations will take place in case of unconventional attacks and if buildings are destroyed by a missile.”

Zusman said Israel continued to face serious threats from Iran and its allies, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

“We estimate that in case of war, hundreds of missiles will hit Tel Aviv and its nearby cities. As a result of these attacks, there will be hundreds of Israeli casualties.

“In the next war, nobody will be able to drink a coffee in Dizengoff,” he said, referring to a popular street in downtown Tel Aviv.

“Israeli civilians will have to face the threat. Today, every civilian is threatened in Israel.”

Zusman said Israel has some of the “most sophisticated” anti-aircraft system in the world, but that the Jewish state could not count on any system for total protection.

“We are getting ready for the worst-case scenario.”

He acknowledged that gaps in preparedness remain, with around 30 percent of the residents in the area under his command lacking gas masks.

But in other areas, he said, precautions had been taken, including the running of regular drills and the preparation of hospitals to deal with the potential of treating casualties while under attack.

US, EU fake Iran’s consent to discussing enrichment to fend off Israeli action.

DEBKAfile Special Report June 12, 2012, 10:05 AM (GMT+02:00)

Catherine Ashton and Saeed Jalili in Istanbul

A spokesman for EU foreign executive Catherine Ashton, who heads the six-power group in nuclear negotiations with Iran, reported Monday night, June 11, that Tehran is now willing to discuss high-grade uranium enrichment in the next round of nuclear talks in Moscow on June 18-19.

The claim is false. Tehran consistently refuses to discuss its “right to enrichment” and threatened not to turn up for the Moscow session after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded last week that Iran come to the table with  “concrete plans” for curbing uranium enrichment up to 20 percent purity.
Iran has not backtracked:  Ashton got nothing new from an hour of tense conversation with senior negotiator Saeed Jalili and had to be satisfied with issuing the noncommittal statement, “The Iranians agreed on the need for Iran to engage on the (six powers’) proposals, which address its concerns on the exclusively peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program.”
Enrichment remained unmentioned – least of all, any reference to the international inspectors’ discovery that Iran was enriching uranium up to 27 percent – and the “exclusively peaceful nature” of Iran’s nuclear program was endorsed.
From the outset, the talks between the six powers (US, China, Russia, Germany, France and Britain) in Istanbul (April 14) and Baghdad (23.5) and Tehran were falsely presented by the US and the European Union as different from previous diplomacy in that Tehran was now prepared to discuss the controversial aspects of its nuclear program.
This sham presentation of Iran puts diplomacy on artificial life support. Admission of is demise would leave the powers face to face with the only remaining path, i.e., military action – to which President Barack Obama is committed if all other options failed – either by the United States or Israel with US support.
The International Atomic Energy Agency Director Yukiya Amano toed the line Monday, June 11, by denying that IAEA negotiations with Iran had broken down Friday, June 8, of IAEA on inspections of its suspect nuclear sites, particularly the Parchin military complex where nuclear-related explosives tests are believed to have been conducted.
It wasn’t the first time that Amano put a good face on a failure to get anywhere with Iran.  On May 2, after coming away from a visit to Tehran empty-handed, he claimed a deal on inspections was clinched and close to signing. It never was. But the next day, the P5+1 were enabled to launch talks with Iran in Istanbul.
Still, Iran made sure that those talks got exactly nowhere. The next session in Baghdad was seriously stalled from the word go by a long-winded harangue by chief negotiator Jalili on the historical connotations of the 30-year old Khorrmanshahr battle, in which revolutionary Islamic Iran trounced Iraq although the world powers and Gulf states solidly backed Saddam Hussein.

Jalili did not mention Iran’s nuclear program but, tacitly pointing at the delegations present, he commented: “The weapons that they provided to Saddam’s Ba’athist regime included German Leopard tanks, British Chieftain tanks, French Exocet missiles and Super Etendard aircraft, Russian MIG fighter-planes and Scud-B missiles, German and British chemical weapons, American Sidewinder missiles and AWACS aircraft, Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Emirati dollars.
He concluded with a declaration that the Islamic republic would “never be bullied into surrendering” to “illegal and unjust demands.”
The tight lid kept on proceedings at the nuclear negotiations keeps embarrassing disclosures out of the public domain and supports the pretense of progress, when in fact Tehran has adamantly refused to open its nuclear program to real discussion.
Iran’s real attitude toward the current round of diplomacy is summed up by debkafile’s Iranian and intelligence sources in five points:

1. The US has run out of unilateral options for dismantling Iran’s nuclear weapons program and depends now on the cooperation of Moscow and Beijing to achieve any progress. Tehran infers this from Washington’s turn to the Russians for help in resolving the Syrian crisis.
2. The world powers facing Iran at the nuclear negotiations in Istanbul and Baghdad are not united as depicted by the Obama administration but split three ways between Russia, China and the West. It is therefore in Tehran’s interest to keep the talks dragging on for as long as possible and so widen the divisions and isolate America.
3.  Tehran is aware of US plans to impose harsher sanctions very soon, including an air and marine blockade, and is not dismayed. In fact, Iranian strategists are busy figuring out ways to get around them. They also calculate that the tougher the sanctions, the higher the price they will exact for every nuclear concession. From this perspective, tougher sanctions will buy Iran more time and a faster route to a nuclear bomb.
4. Tehran regards the staging of the “P7 Talks” as part of a wider picture. A high-ranking Iranian source said: ‘If the negotiations were just about nuclear issues, why bring in the major powers? The talks could have been handled by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
Iran’s leaders are nonetheless capitalizing on those talks as a short cut to broad global recognition of the Islamic Republic’s status as a major world power.
“We are already more than half way to achieving this,” they say in Tehran.
5. In view of the first four points, Tehran believes it is on a winning roll and can afford to stand fast against giving ground on a single one of its nuclear and technological advances.
The question asked by debkafile is why is Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu keeping silent on this charade and even going along with it.

Inaction in Syria means a nuclear Ira… JPost – Opinion – Op-Eds.

By DAVID MEYERS06/11/2012 23:16

For more than a year, internationalcommunity has dithered, delayed action to stop the bloodshed in Syria, there is no end in sight.

Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl / Reuters

For more than a year, the international community has dithered and delayed action to stop the bloodshed in Syria, and there is no end in sight.

But the biggest beneficiary of the world’s inaction lies next door in Iran.

The Iranian regime has seen a world community unwilling and unable to stop a ruthless dictator from killing his own people. And Iran’s leaders have surely calculated that the world will never act to stop them from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

The reasons for the world’s inaction in Syria are myriad.

Major powers such as Russia and China would rather see Assad murder his own people than see Syria become a precedent for possible action against their autocratic regimes. The Arab League has grown weary of Western and military intervention after watching Libya descend into chaos.

Syria is a major player in the region, and there is fear of who (or what) would fill the void left by Assad. The West is also concerned about arming and aiding al- Qaida and other terrorist groups in Syria. Finally, the thought of Assad using chemical weapons (or those weapons falling into the wrong hands) has also delayed action.

But there are equally strong arguments for taking bolder action in Syria.

Among them, the need to protect the Syrian people in their struggle for freedom and democracy. The fact that the world’s past tolerance for Middle Eastern autocrats is directly responsible for the rise of terrorism and extremism in the region. And if Assad falls without our help, we may not have influence with the new Syrian government as it democratizes.

The situation in Syria is complex. But in the end, it should be easy for the world community to take decisive action to stop a despot from killing his own people.

It has not been. The Annan peace plan is going nowhere, and its best-case scenario is probably one where Assad remains in power. Russia and China continue to block any meaningful action at the UN. And the Arab states appear unwilling to take meaningful action to stop the slaughter.

This inaction is disastrous for the people of Syria. But it’s also disastrous for the world, because it will embolden Iran in its pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

The inaction in Syria means the international community will never embrace meaningful sanctions on Iran. It practically guarantees that Iran will never negotiate in good faith with the world community. It means that regime change in Iran, our best hope for stopping a nuclear weapons program, is probably an unrealistic option at this point. And it means that Iran (rightly) believes there will never be international consensus for a military operation if all diplomatic efforts fail.

If the US can’t get international support to stop the bloodshed in Syria, it’s a guarantee we won’t be able to get international support for meaningful sanctions on Iran. Russia and China have publicly opposed stringent sanctions, and their position appears inflexible.

Furthermore, even our allies such as India and South Korea continue to purchase oil from Iran. Granted, sanctions were never likely to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Iran knows that truly multilateral sanctions will never materialize.

Critics of my argument will say that the US-European sanctions have forced Iran to the negotiating table. They would be wrong. While Iran may be at the negotiating table, it has no interest in doing any real negotiating. As it has done in the past, Iran will offer false or meaningless concessions in a bid to delay international action as it continues to develop its nuclear program. After seeing what’s happened in Syria, Iran knows there will be no consequences if negotiations fail. Iran will simply use negotiations and the promises of concessions as an excuse for Russia, China and some European powers to oppose further action against Iran.

The world’s inaction in Syria is also benefiting Tehran because it has demoralized democracy activists inside Iran. Regime change in Tehran is probably our best chance of avoiding a nuclear Iran. That’s why the world’s appalling response to the 2009 Green Revolution was one of the biggest foreign policy errors in recent memory. Had the Green Revolution succeeded, there’s a good chance the Iranian weapons program would now be defunct.

Instead, the mullahs continue to press ahead with the program.

And thanks to the world’s dithering on Syria, we’re unlikely to see any new democratic movement arise in the country. The Iranian regime has spent the past three years jailing and murdering prominent dissidents.

And now, after seeing the world fail to react to the 10,000 dead in Syria, the Iranian people know that the international community will not come to their aid if they rise up again.

All of this means that Iran will continue pressing ahead with its nuclear program. And it means that a military attack, which the international community fears so much, might unfortunately become the only realistic option for stopping the program. The international community continues to oppose any action on Iran without UN support. But because of its failure to achieve consensus on issues such as Syria, action outside of the UN appears more likely.

The writer is a former White House staffer who is pursuing a PhD in political science.