WarSclerotic

International – Jeffrey Goldberg – Ex-Mossad Chief: Israeli Attack Would Help Iran Go Nuclear – The Atlantic.

Jun 13 2012, 11:10 AM ET 35

Gen. Benny Gantz, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, spoke out last week against ex-military and intelligence officials who are expressing doubts about the efficacy of a preemptive Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear project.

Gantz, testifying in the Knesset, said, “There is a lot of chatter and conversation regarding Iran. Very few people know what is real and what is not, or what can be and what cannot be.” Gantz named no names, but his targets were quite obviously three men: his predecessor as chief of staff, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi; the former head of the Shabak, Israel’s internal security service, Yuval Diskin; and Meir Dagan, the recently retired chief of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

It is Dagan who has taken the lead in criticizing his former boss, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the defense minister, Ehud Barak, for contemplating a preemptive aerial strike. Dagan came out of the gate early and strong, stating, in early 2011, shortly after his retirement (a retirement that was forced by Netanyahu), that attacking Iran is a “stupid idea.” He has not let up since.

For those of us who have asked, on occasion, whether Netanyahu and Barak are actually preparing to strike Iran or are simply trying to bluff the international community, Dagan’s harsh, and repeated, statements about the plans of the current government need to be taken seriously: Dagan believes firmly that Bibi and Barak are not bluffing. Which is why he is so agitated.

Earlier this month, I accompanied David Bradley, the chairman and owner of the Atlantic Media Company, on a visit to Dagan’s Tel Aviv apartment in order to discuss the Iran issue. (David and I spent much of our time in Israel interviewing senior officials on this issue, though in Jerusalem as well as in Amman and Ramallah, we also talked about the stalled peace process – but more on that later).

When David and I walked into the lobby of Dagan’s very modern apartment building, we noticed a couple of suspicious looking young men loitering near the elevator. One of them approached us and said, simply, “He’s waiting,” and then put us on the elevator. Dagan answered his own door, greeting us in a kind of gruff, matter-of-fact manner – he is, at 67, rotund, but there is a hardness to him that is easily discernible. Before joining the Mossad, he was one of Ariel Sharon’s favorite generals, and he made his career in the Israel Defense Forces as a renowned hunter of terrorists. He is said to have devised some of the most effective anti-terror raids Israel has ever conducted.

We sat in his living room, which is decorated with his own paintings; like Peter Zvi Malkin, the legendary Mossad agent who seized Eichmann in Argentina, Dagan is a painter, but a painter of simple, almost pastoral scenes. One painting over his shoulder caught my eye – an old man sitting in an obviously eastern market. I asked him what inspired the painting. “It’s an old man I once saw in Tabriz,” he said. Tabriz, of course, is in Iran.

His paintings may be naïve, but Dagan himself is not. When he says he doesn’t believe Netanyahu and Barak are bluffing, I tend to believe him. It seems unlikely that a man like  Dagan is easily tricked. At one point, we asked him if he believed there was even a small chance that he was the target of a deception campaign run by the prime minister and defense minister. After all, Dagan’s criticisms of what he sees as Netanyahu’s recklessness have quite efficiently buttressed fears in Iran, and across the world, that Israel may launch a precipitous strike. Dagan’s public criticisms of Netanyahu and Barak have been quite useful to the Israeli government, which needs its threats to be understood as credible, both in Tehran and in Washington. Dagan, however, dismissed this notion out of hand. “They are very serious,” he said, referring to Netanyahu and Barak. “I’m taking the threat of an Israeli attack very seriously.” He added, with a measure of disgust, and incredulity, in his voice, “If the prime minister and defense minister are creating a deception campaign against the intelligence apparatus then they don’t deserve their jobs.”

It is highly unlikely that Dagan would fall victim to such a deception campaign (which would, of course, be difficult for Netanyahu and Barak to execute over time, especially inside the Israeli intelligence system). What is only slightly more likely is that Dagan himself is part of the deception campaign, playing the role of the rogue ex-intelligence chief in order to advance his government’s goal of concentrating the world’s attention on the Iranian problem. My understanding is that some Iranian officials believe this to be the case, but it is a) impossible to prove, and b) fairly implausible, even for the Middle East.

What is most likely is that Dagan’s criticisms are entirely sincere. They certainly seem heartfelt. In our hour-long conversation, Dagan outlined his many objections to the idea of an Israeli strike, but he began by disavowing the notion that he is anything like a dove. He does not believe that Israel could easily survive in a Middle East dominated by a nuclear Iran, and he believes that the Iranian regime might not be entirely rational, that elements of the Islamic Republic’s leadership might be motivated by extreme eschatalogical beliefs to contemplate committing unthinkable acts.

In other words, Dagan is someone who takes seriously the genocidal threats of Iranian leaders, and their nuclear intentions – “Iran has come to the conclusion that it needs a bomb” — and it is for this reason that he made himself the principal architect of Israel’s program of anti-Iranian sabotage, subterfuge and cyberwarfare (the last one being run jointly with the United States, as David Sanger has recently shown.) One of the criticisms I hear of Dagan, particularly in Israeli Air Force circles, is that he believes a bit too much in the capacity of Israel’s intelligence services to subvert the Iranian nuclear program by themselves. (Dagan would not talk about this, naturally: When I noted that he directed the Mossad’s anti-Iran operations of the past several years, he looked at me stonily – never averting his eyes – and said, “I’m not aware of that.”)

All this is to say that Meir Dagan is not a pacifist. He told David and me explicitly that the threat of military action should be held out as an absolute last resort, but he is angry that Israeli leaders have turned what should be understood as a problem for the entire world into a specifically Israeli issue. “We made a huge mistake by making this our problem,” he said.

But what angers him most is what he sees as a total lack of understanding on the part of the men who lead the Israeli government about what may come the day after an Israeli strike. Some senior Israeli officials have argued to me that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities might actually trigger the eventual downfall of the regime. Dagan predicts the opposite: “Judging by the war Iran fought against Iraq, even people who supported the Shah, even the Communists, joined hands with (Ayatollah) Khomeini to fight Saddam,” he said, adding, “In case of an attack, political pressure on the regime will disappear. If Israel will attack, there is no doubt in my mind that this will also provide them with the justification to go ahead and move quickly to nuclear weapons.” He also predicted that the sanctions program engineered principally by President Obama may collapse as a result of an Israeli strike, which would make it easier for Iran to obtain the material necessary for it to cross the nuclear threshold.

Dagan believes that sanctions may still yet work, especially the sort of sanctions, combined with sabotage programs, that threaten the stability of the regime. If the Iranian economy is squeezed in a way that causes average citizens to rise up against their government’s policies, Dagan believes that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, might be forced to shelve his nuclear ambitions. And Dagan believes the tempo of sabotage should, if anything, be increased. “Covert operations have a better impact on proliferation than an attack.,” he said.

Dagan is quite convincing on these points, but what is even more convincing to me is his C.V. He has devoted his entire life to the defense of the Jewish state.  And like Netanyahu, he fears a Second Holocaust. The first one took an atrocious toll on his family. In his Mossad office, Dagan displayed two photographs taken by German soldiers as they were about to carry out the murder of the Jews in the Polish town of Lukov. The photographs show other Germans standing over a kneeling Jewish man draped in a tallis, a prayer shawl. The man, who was apparently executed moments later, was Ber Erlich Sloshny, Meir Dagan’s grandfather. Dagan told visitors to his office who saw the photographs this: “When I look at these photographs I promise that I will do whatever I can to make sure that something like this never happens again.”

DEBKAfile June 13, 2012, 6:26 PM (GMT+02:00)

British Foreign Secretary William Hague is to meet urgently with Russian FM Sergey Lavrov Thursday for a last bid to gain Moscow’s cooperation in stopping the violence in Syria, or else the three allies will unilaterally impose a no-fly zone over the embattled country. (DEBKAfile exclusively reported this option Monday, June 11.) In Paris, French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius said his government favors using all measures including military action and a no-fly zone – failing any other recourse.

via US, UK, France initiate Security Council motion for military intervention in Syria.

Syrian Conflict Takes New Turn for the Worse – NYTimes.com.

Associated Press

Rebel fighters with the Free Syrian Army, a loose federation of militias across the country, at a house in Aleppo on Tuesday.

By MARK LANDLER and NEIL MacFARQUHAR

WASHINGTON — With evidence that powerful new weapons are flowing to both the Syrian government and opposition fighters, the bloody uprising in Syria has thrust the Obama administration into an increasingly difficult position as the conflict shows signs of mutating into a full-fledged civil war.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Tuesday that the United States believed that Russia was shipping attack helicopters to Syria that President Bashar al-Assad could use to escalate his government’s deadly crackdown on civilians and the militias battling his rule. Her comments reflected rising frustration with Russia, which has continued to supply weapons to its major Middle Eastern ally despite an international outcry over the government’s brutal crackdown.

“We have confronted the Russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to Syria,” Mrs. Clinton said at an appearance with President Shimon Peres of Israel. “They have, from time to time, said that we shouldn’t worry; everything they’re shipping is unrelated to their actions internally. That’s patently untrue.”

Russia insists that it provides Damascus only with weapons that can be used in self-defense.

As fighting intensified across Syria, there were reports that government forces were using helicopters to fire on a rebel-held enclave in the northwestern part of the country. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, reported that more than 60 people had been killed in the fighting, one-third of them government soldiers, while the United Nations released a report saying that Syrians as young as 8 had been deployed by government soldiers and pro-government militia members as human shields.

The fierce government assaults from the air are partly a response to improved tactics and weaponry among the opposition forces, which have recently received more powerful antitank missiles from Turkey, with the financial support of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, according to members of the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile, and other activists.

The United States, these activists said, was consulted about these weapons transfers. Officials in Washington said the United States did not take part in arms shipments to the rebels, though they recognized that Syria’s neighbors would do so, and that it was important to ensure that weapons did not end up in the hands of Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups.

The increased ferocity of the attacks and the more lethal weapons on both sides threatened to overwhelm diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis. Kofi Annan, the special envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League, continued to pressure Damascus to halt the violence and to respect a cease-fire. But Mrs. Clinton said that if Mr. Assad did not stop the violence by mid-July, the United Nations would have little choice but to end its observer mission in the country.

Mrs. Clinton, State Department officials said, continues to push for a “managed transition,” under which Mr. Assad would step aside. Russia’s role is viewed as critical, however, and Mrs. Clinton’s claims about helicopter shipments are certain to increase tensions with Moscow less than a week before President Obama is scheduled to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin at a summit meeting in Mexico.

Administration officials declined to give details about the helicopters, saying the information was classified. But Pentagon sources suggested that Mrs. Clinton, in her remarks at a Brookings Institution event, was referring to a Russian-made attack helicopter that Syria already owns but has not yet deployed to crack down on opposition forces. While these helicopters, known as Mi-24s, are flown by Syrian pilots, Russia supplies spare parts and provides maintenance for them.

A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. John Kirby, said the precise status of the helicopters was not as important as the violence being directed against opponents of the Syrian government. “The focus really needs to be more on what the Assad regime is doing to its own people than the cabinets and the closets to which they turn to pull stuff out.” Captain Kirby said. “It’s really about what they’re doing with what they’ve got in their hand.”

The use of helicopters is contributing to a growing sense that, as Hervé Ladsous, the head of United Nations peacekeeping operations, put it, the fighting could be characterized as a civil war.

“The government of Syria lost some large chunks of territories and several cities to the opposition and wants to retake control of these areas,” Mr. Ladsous said at the United Nations. “So now we have confirmed reports not only of the use of tanks and artillery, but also attack helicopters.”

Opposition leaders are wary of the term civil war because it suggests that the conflict is somehow an even match.

“Civil war will not come suddenly in one day or two or five, but you have to look how things are gradually changing on the ground,” said Samir Nachar, a member of the executive committee of the Syrian National Council. “Can you say to people, ‘Don’t defend yourselves?’ It is impossible.”

Council members on Tuesday were also wary of reading too much into Mrs. Clinton’s claim, suggesting that it was an open secret for months that the Russians were supplying weapons to Syria. There have been repeated reports of Russian armament ships docking in Syria, although Moscow has always denied that they were carrying the arms used to suppress the protests.

Speaking in Istanbul, council members also described efforts to supply the opposition with arms, specifically antitank weaponry delivered by Turkish Army vehicles to the Syrian border, where it was then transferred to smugglers who took it into Syria.

Turkey has repeatedly denied that it is giving anything other than humanitarian aid to the opposition, mostly at refugee camps near the border. It has recently made those camps harder to visit: permission was not granted to two reporters in the vicinity for five days last week. Turkey did not act alone, but with financial support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia and after consultation with the United States, said these officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s diplomatic delicacy.

The more powerful weapons have been delivered as far south as the suburbs of Damascus, but not into Damascus itself, they said. The presence of the antitank missiles seems to have made government forces hesitant to move their tanks around urban centers, according to sources in the Syrian National Council.

But they have done nothing to stem the violence. On Tuesday, a team of United Nations cease-fire monitors retreated before reaching Al Heffa in the northwest, when hostile crowds struck their vehicles with stones and metal rods, said a spokeswoman, Sausan Ghosheh.

“The shelling has been continuous,” said Houran al-Hafawi, a member of the local coordination committee of Al Heffa. “The Syrian Army is throwing missiles and rockets from helicopter and rocket launchers from the eastern and western entrances.”

For the Pentagon, the debate over Russia’s rearming of Syria took an odd twist on Tuesday when Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, complained that the United States military was buying attack helicopters for Afghan security forces from the same Russian weapons company supplying the Assad government.

George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, defended the purchases of the Mi-17 helicopters from the Russian company, Rosoboronexport, as important to helping Afghanistan create a credible self-defense force, and said the issue was separate from the concern over arms shipments to Syria that were used by the government to kill civilians.

“It’s about equipping the Afghan air force with what they need to ensure that they have the capabilities from an air standpoint to defend themselves,” Mr. Little said.

Is an attack on Iran inevitable? | GlobalPost.

Countdown to a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations appears to be inching closer to the zero hour. Some experts in Israel predict an attack soon after the US election.

[5]

The countdown to a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations, by either Israel or the US, appears to be inching closer to the zero hour. In this photo, Iran tests a medium-range missile in 2009. (Vahi Reza Alaee/AFP/Getty Images)

JERUSALEM — The countdown to a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations appears to be inching closer to the zero hour. Some experts in Israel are predicting an attack soon after the US election in November.

“The United States has been very clear about their red line being the acquisition of weapons,” said an Israeli expert on Iran, speaking on background. “If Iran takes steps toward the acquisition of weapons in the next few months, I don’t doubt that the American president would take military action.”

Analysts here say that the possibility of a strike, either by the US or by Israel, seems more and more likely as diplomatic negotiations sputter, European companies lose patience with economic sanctions, and Iranian leaders and Western powers engage in a new round of verbal sparring.

Non-European based subsidiaries of European companies, for example, have already begun to claim exemptions [6] from participating in the sanctions on Iran, which would undermine the US effort to pressure the country into giving up what the US believes is a militarized nuclear program.

Iran’s chief negotiator, meanwhile, has threatened to withdraw [8] from the third round of talks, now scheduled for June 18 in Moscow. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton countered [9] that Iran must be prepared to “take concrete steps” if it wishes to continue talks.

The United States is particularly concerned about the International Atomic Energy Agency’s announcement on May 25 that it believed Iran was enriching uranium to 20 percent [10], for which there is no known civilian use. Iran, meanwhile, deflected questions about the announcement, and continues to maintain that its nuclear enrichment program exists solely for non-military use.

“As things are, I think the chance is 100 percent,” an Israeli intelligence officer told GlobalPost, referring to a possible strike. “But we don’t know who will attack, or when.”

“Quite honestly, things are not at a healthy place,” said Ilan Berman, the vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council and an expert on Iran. “We are talking about the reactivation of a negotiations track that so far has not led to tangible benefits for the US and its allies but has, on the other hand, led to many tangible benefits for Iran.”

Berman, like the Israeli government, thinks that in the absence of verifiable evidence that Iran’s not seeking to militarize its nuclear program, the continuing international discussions serve as no more than a fig leaf for Iran.

More from GlobalPost: Are Palestinians giving up? [11]

Severe sanctions against the country’s central bank and against importing Iranian oil are set to begin over the next few weeks. But Berman points out that European companies are already chafing at the limitations being imposed on them, and are requesting exemptions in the face of the added cost of non-Iranian oil.

“Diplomacy inherently works to Iran’s advantage,” Berman said. “It allows the regime greater time to work on its nuclear effort. It is hard to envision that in the midst of these negotiations, there’s going to be a dramatic tightening of sanctions. It will make a deal more difficult to achieve.”

Speaking to the German newspaper Bild on July 6, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed this sentiment.

“The demands that accompany the sanctions are inadequate,” he told the paper. “You apply this whole set of pressures — for what? For practically nothing! Iran could stop the 20 percent enrichment at any moment now and not in any way retard their advancement in their [civilian] nuclear program.”

Netanyahu listed three demands Iran should meet to avoid an attack: The halt of all uranium enrichment, the removal from Iran of all enriched uranium and the dismantling of the underground nuclear bunker in Qum, which is a point of noteworthy concern in Jerusalem.

Many observers are troubled by the possibility that Iran’s recent acquiescence to full international inspections is, in fact, not much more than a ruse.

This concern was heightened last week with the publication of images that appear to show major installations being destroyed at the Parchin nuclear refinement facility. The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), which released the images, said Iran might be attempting to hide the tracks of its nuclear enrichment before the arrival of international inspectors.

“Buildings are being torn down, and it looks like they could be cleansing the site, not wanting someone to inspect it,” said David Albright, ISIS’s president.

If so, it is a tactic Iran has used before. In 2004, six industrial-sized buildings at a nuclear research center were razed. The IAEA was then allowed to sample the rubble. The site is now a soccer complex.

Both the United States and Israel have always refused to rule out a military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Nevertheless, amid radio silence and conflicting signals, it is unclear whether the United States and Israel fundamentally agree or disagree on the basic facts of an Iranian threat.

Albright said the differences between the two nations can be measured in terms of each one’s ability to respond to a potential Iranian move to weaponize its nuclear stores.

“Their military capabilities lead them to look at things differently. The United States has no trouble destroying the Fordow enrichment plant,” Albright said, referring to the underground facility outside the city of Qum. “The US can make sure it is not operational. Israel may not be able to do that. That means the US can be a little more relaxed about Iranian nuclear capabilities developing. If Iran moves to make nuclear weapons, they can be struck militarily.”

The situation remains ever more volatile and murky, with many Israelis convinced their government is planning an attack. Public fighting among senior intelligence officers has not lessened these concerns. Speaking at the Security and Foreign Affairs Committee of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Israeli Chief of Staff General Benny Gantz derided former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who has argued against the usefulness of an attack on Iran in recent months.

“People boast about things they don’t know,” Gantz said. “If they once knew something about Iran, it doesn’t mean they know anything now.”

Others see a calmer outlook — for now. Meir Javedanfar, a professor at the InterDisciplinary Center in Herzliya, views talk of an attack with skepticism, at least until US elections.

“The fact that the chances of an attack have receded will place more focus on other powerful methods of isolating the Iranian government. I think the Iranian government should really worry about the possibility of a military attack after the US election, especially if all is quiet in Israel.”