WarSclerotic

Assad vows Syria will defeat ‘foreign conspiracy’ at any price.

Sunday, 26 August 2012

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad met with Iranian MP Alaeddin Boroujerdi in Damascus. (Reuters)

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An Israeli attack on Iran would help, not harm, Obama’s reelectionIsrael News – Haaretz Israeli News source..

Hard to believe that a seasoned Americanologist such as PM Netanyahu would think otherwise.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks from the Briefing Room of the White House in Washington August 20, 2012. 

In many of the conspiracy theories that have been presented in recent weeks in the Israeli press concerning the possibility of an imminent Israeli attack on Iran, one theme has been constant: it would put President Barack Obama in a bind and possibly hurt his chances in the November elections as well.

Both developments, according to press reports, were part and parcel of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu considerations in pressing for an early attack. Republicans, it was said, not only subscribed to this assessment but also were egging Netanyahu on to in order to help Mitt Romney’s chances in November. The Israeli commentators, it sometimes seemed, accepted this conventional wisdom as if it was cast in stone.

It was left to political strategist Karl Rove, grandmaster of Republican tactics and chief advisor to the pro-Republican super-PAC “American Crossroads”, to blow this cockamamie theory out of the water. Appearing on Fox News last week, Rove made clear that any flare up with Iran would only serve Obama’s interests. Americans, he said, would instinctively rally around their Commander in Chief and Obama’s standing in the polls would immediately improve.

Rove went a step further and more or less warned Israel not to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities too early. In a comment that did not receive the media attention it deserved, Rove said that a military strike on Iran needs to wait until what Rove described as “a moment of vulnerability” – and that won’t happen until the Iranians bring all their fissile material “to a central site in order to be machined into a weapon or weapons.”

“They’ve got to wait until it’s brought together”, Rove said, and one can assume that such a moment won’t arrive, according to Rove’s strategic calculated, before November 6.

All four panelists on NBC’s Chris Matthews show this Sunday concurred with the political part of Rove’s analyses. A war with Iran, former ABC broadcaster Sam Donaldson said, would change the dynamics of the election campaign, draw attention away from the troubled economy and allow Obama to showcase his experience while accentuating Mitt Romney’s lack thereof. Foreign affairs and national security, after all, is the one area in which Obama enjoys a clear advantage over Romney in all the public opinion polls, they noted.

Another misplaced piece of the misguided conventional wisdom in Jerusalem is that an Israeli attack that would take place before the elections would force Obama to suppress his supposedly natural inclination to abandon Israel in its time of need. He would have to succumb to overwhelming public pressure and support Israel, both diplomatically and militarily, because of pure electoral considerations, according to this theory.

But this assessment may also be light years away from reality, a by product of the irrationally critical view of Obama’s shared by strident Republican Jewish critics who are close to Netanyahu and to some of his officials and who genuinely believe that Obama is a socialist/pacifist who would like nothing better than to see Israeli cities burn. Only his sense of self-preservation before the elections, they believe, might cause Obama to act against his usual anti-Jewish instincts.

Back on earth, however, it is far from clear that there would be any real pressure by the American public to get the US involved in another Middle East war. Opinion polls on the American public’s attitude towards US military involvement in Iran are all over the place, depending on the wording of the questions, but they consistently show wide support for Obama’s policy of exploring all other options first. They may very well accept the President’s judgment even if he opts against committing the US to a military confrontation.

Secondly, most people who know Obama maintain that if his hand is forced, either by Iran or by Israel, the President would not hesitate to send the American bombers on their way, elections or no elections, not only if Iran attacks American targets directly but also to help Israel, if it turns out that it cannot fend for itself. At the height of an election campaign, such a crisis would doubtlessly entail the fringe benefit of forcing Republican candidates Romney and Paul Ryan to support the President and to put aside their criticism while guns are blazing and American lives are in danger. And any reckoning with Jerusalem over its refusal to accede to the Administration’s demand to give peace another chance my indeed come – but only after the situation has stabilized and the elections are long over.

In fact, the very foundations of a theory that a war before elections would hurt Obama’s chances in the elections are so far fetched that it is actually unreasonable to believe that a seasoned Americanologist such as Netanyahu would subscribe to it. But now that Republicans appear to be actually warning him off – does this mean that war has been postponed? On the other hand, would Netanyahu’s Republican benefactors ever forgive him if it turned out that it was his decision to pull the trigger that actually ensured Obama’s second term?

Operation Sphix – The israeli attack to Iraqui nuclear reactor (Operation Opera) – YouTube.

A MUST WATCH !

The parallels to the current situation with Iran are too numerous to list, though I have to say, Shimon Perez stands out .  I’m a dedicated student of the attack on the reactor.  This film recounts not only the military aspect but the political as well.

If you are like me, you are very nervous right now.  This film will make you feel a little better.

–  JW

Operation Sphinx — Between 1978 and 1981, obtained highly sensitive information about Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor by recruiting an Iraqi nuclear scientist in France.

Operation Opera (Hebrew: אופרה‎), also known as Operation Babylon was a surprise Israeli air strike carried out on June 7, 1981, that destroyed a nuclear reactor under construction 17 kilometers (10.5 miles) southeast of Baghdad, Iraq.
In 1976, Iraq purchased an “Osiris”-class nuclear reactor from France. While Iraq and France maintained that the reactor, named Osirak by the French, was intended for peaceful scientific research, the Israelis viewed the reactor with suspicion, and said that it was designed to make nuclear weapons. On June 7, 1981, a flight of Israeli Air Force F-16A fighter aircraft, with an escort of F-15As, bombed and heavily damaged the Osirak reactor. Israel claimed it acted in self-defense, and that the reactor had “less than a month to go” before “it might have become critical.” Ten Iraqi soldiers and one French civilian were killed. The attack took place about three weeks before the elections for the Knesset.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osirak

IAEA Evidence Shows Israel, Not Obama, Talking Sense About Iran « Commentary Magazine.

Countdowns in Teheran and Jerusalem – Features – News – Israel National News.

Flags of Israel and Iran

Israel news photo collage

If Israel jets show up in Iranian airspace, it will most likely happen while Obama is too busy accusing Mitt Romney of secretly storing all his money in a giant cave in the Rocky Mountains to do more than dispatch a flunky to chew out Netanyahu over the phone. The election is the perfect window for a strike on Iran’s nuclear program, because Team Obama will be too tied down on the Romney Front to do much damage to Israel.

Despite the signs being brandished at your local Anarchists for Peace rally, accusing the United States of being a puppet of the Zionist regime, the United States and Israel have different interests. Israel is interested in not getting bombed and the United States is interested in regional stability. And regional stability means keeping the Sunni Arab oil countries happy.

The United States is interested in somehow making Iran’s nuclear capabilities go away in the interests of regional stability. Particularly the regional stability of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. But the last thing that this form of regional stability needs is Israeli planes flying over Saudi Arabia to take out that nuclear capability.

Just like during the Gulf War, regional stability demands that the United States protect Saudi Arabia and the Gulfies, while keeping Israel out of it. Since Iran’s Revolutionary Guard isn’t camped out in Kuwait City, protecting them is a matter of posture. That posture is there as a deterrent, a warning that Iran had better not interfere with our oil suppliers or there will be hellfire missiles to pay.

The posturing is hollow because everyone knows that Obama is not about to bomb Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia and its colony in Bahrain. He is as likely to do it for Israel as he is to move to South Carolina and join the NRA. But he isn’t alone in that regard. Despite the fevered fantasies of everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ron Paul, no American president would ever bomb Iran for Israel. If a third Gulf War is fought, it will be fought for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, one more time.

The last time the United States fought Iran, in 1988, it was to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers. If Iran interferes with oil tankers from our friendly Gulfie terrorist states, then a future administration is likely to bomb Iran. If oil prices go high enough to potentially cost Obama the election, then he might pry away his foreign policy people from drawing up maps of Syrian targets and actually hit some Iranian naval installations.

None of this has anything to do with Iran’s nuclear program… and that’s the point. George W. Bush did appear to think that Iranian nuclear weapons might be bad news for the United States, not just for the balance of power in the region. He was nearly unique in that regard. The diplomatic and military establishment is full of experts who view Iranian nuclear weapons purely as factors in the balance of power and utterly refuse to look at them from any other angle. To them, Israel isn’t really concerned about a nuclear attack, it’s only playing a regional power game along with everyone else.

For Israel, violence is not a posture or a theory. It has few trading connections and no alliances in the region. Its foreign policy has always been about dissipating physical threats to its people, whether through diplomatic or military means. It does not follow this line because it is a saintly state, but because it is a state always on the edge. It has too little territory and too many enemies around it to follow any other path.

Surrounded by countries for whom destroying it is a matter of national pride and religious fervor, its only real deterrent is military. Winning several wars won it enough breathing room to try diplomatic solutions. And now the first and last of those diplomatic solutions has failed. It can still count on the military as a deterrent, but there is no deterrent against a nuclear attack carried out by terrorists under plausible deniability. The only remaining deterrent after a nuclear attack is killing as many of those responsible as possible before succumbing to radiation poisoning.

To the United States, Iranian nukes and an Israeli attack on them are equally unacceptable because they both disturb regional stability. The opponents of an attack insist on calling it a “War”, not that a war is even structurally possible unless Iran decides to march an army through Iraq and Syria to get to Israel. They spread hysterical bulletins warning that an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program could spark “another” recession.

Their message is that the cost of attacking Iran is more than the cost of allowing it to go nuclear. That may be true for the United States, which did not suffer too much from accepting that the Bolsheviks had taken over Russia, that Mao had taken over China and other once unacceptable phenomena that forced it the up its defense spending, but did not do any lasting damage. A nuclear weapon in the hands of people who believe that the world needs to be cleansed by fire for the arrival of the Mahdi and have dozens of terrorist front groups at their disposal may be a different story. Or it may not.

Washington D.C. did not get overrun by Communist forces. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Tibet and a few hundred million other people who did not have oceans to protect them from the reasonable commissars in Moscow and Beijing, did. And that is why Israel’s interests fundamentally diverge from those of the United States. Israel is not playing a grand game from across the ocean; it is trying to survive in a region that is as hostile to it, as Asia and Eastern Europe became to non-Communist countries.

That is why, no matter what speeches politicians deliver, the actual interests of the United States and Israel are only loosely aligned. The United States is trying to protect the tattered fabric of regional stability from Iran and Israel. Israel is trying to protect itself from Iran. The United States needs Israel to promote regional stability by going back to the table and negotiating with the terrorist front groups backed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulfies. Israel needs to protect itself while Obama is too busy telling senior citizens that Paul Ryan will cook them in a frying pan to pay attention to what it’s doing.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been cobbling together a national unity government, which in Israeli terms means that he is either running for sainthood or trying to get as much of the political system behind him as possible in a critical time. It could all be a monumental bluff, a way to panic Obama into taking action out of fear that Israel will act instead. But that would make Netanyahu a very stupid man, and while he is not all that Americans think he is, neither is he likely to be playing such a silly game.

Everyone in the region understands the nature of the countdown. Most of the Sunni Gulfies also privately welcome Israel doing something about Iran’s nuclear weapons, even as they redouble their efforts against the Jewish State to avoid allowing their Shiite enemies to benefit ideologically from a confrontation with the Zionist Entity. The rhetoric out of Iran now echoes the rhetoric out of Egypt in the 1960’s. That buildup eventually ended in a preemptive Israeli strike that destroyed Egypt’s air force.

But in Washington D.C., the countdown is not a real thing. The received wisdom among the press and the political and diplomatic establishments is that Netanyahu is an obstinate paranoid man who is playing games with them. They don’t believe that Israel will do anything about Iran, because they wouldn’t do anything about Iran and they assume that Netanyahu is just like them, only more deceptive because he pretends that he will do something about Iran.

The problem is that Israel really isn’t playing a game. Its political establishment is as bad as that of any Western country. Its politicians are no better than their American or French counterparts, but its survival actually is on the line. Iran isn’t playing a game. That’s why Israel can’t afford to play a game either.

It has become fashionable among Western elites to view aggression as either a posture or madness. They have forgotten that sometimes violence isn’t a move on an international chessboard or a prelude to a set of political steps. Sometimes it’s as simple as one side wanting to kill the other and the other side not wanting to be killed.

In the Middle East ideas that are considered aberrant insanity in the West are commonplace. Killing people is no great big thing. Most regimes do it from time to time to stay in power. Iran dispatched its Islamic militias to kill its own best and brightest in the streets of its capital. Virginity is believed to act  as an instant pass to heaven for a woman, so teenage girls sentenced to death must first be forcibly married to their jailers and raped, before being hanged.

The very idea that people think this way is incomprehensible in Washington D.C. But the simple question that Israel has to answer is, if this is what the Ayatollahs do to their own daughters, what would they do to those they consider the spawn of pigs and apes?

Israel already knows the answer to that. When Muslim mobs got their hands on Israeli Jews, before or after independence, they tore them to pieces and then sold snapshots of the remains. The policy of targeting all Jews, men, women and children, is not just something that terrorists do because they have no choice, it is the ideological position of Islamist leaders like Yusuf Al-Qaradawi in Egypt or Rashid Al-Ghannushi in Tunisia, and the policy of the Arab countries fighting Israel.

The liberal West has its illusions about the enemy. Israel has little room for those illusions. It will act when Washington is too busy fighting itself to focus on restraining it. It will act because it is alone as few other countries on earth are. It will act because it cannot afford to be Poland, Czechoslovakia or Tibet– sacrificed in the great game of nations. It will act because it has no real choice but to act. It will act because for it this is not a set of talking points, a diplomatic program or a regional agenda, it is life or death. It will act, because for all its flaws, its survival is on the line.

That sense of a nation’s survival and the life of a people hinging on a single course of action has become an alien one in an insulated world. It is not a thing that Washington D.C or Brussels can take seriously. It is not even a thing that all Israelis take seriously anymore. But those who hear the clock ticking know what is coming. They know the hard choices that will come in the months ahead.

And they will make those choices as they made them before, because they will choose to survive.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century. He blogs at sultanknish.blogspot.com/.

What Obama talks about when he talks about Islam | Martin Peretz | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel.

Barack Obama’s initial six months in the presidency were rich in symbolics. No one could have misunderstood his intention when he anointed Al-Arabiya, Dubai-based and Saudi-owned, to be the first of the world’s television networks to interview him from the White House.

Not surprisingly, the reporter began by asking what Obama meant when he promised “aggressive peacemaking between the Palestinians and the Israelis.” The president responded lamely by alluding to George Mitchell, his already-designated special envoy to the problem, as “somebody of enormous stature. He is one of the few people who have international experience brokering peace deals.” As if the nasty Irish quarrel was at all comparable to the historical and meta-historical warfare between Zion and Araby. Then, two more fawning asides about Mitchell, thought of as the deus ex machina for the president’s predicament, and one allusion to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for having “great courage,” a prelude to Obama’s undignified curtsy in Riyadh.

When Obama speaks about Islam it is mostly blah, blah:

Did not Obama realize, did not his advisers tell him, that the very day he was addressing the Islamic orbit was the 30th anniversary of the shah’s abdication? The Ayatollah Khomeini wrote the acrid script for American-Islamic relations from 1979 onwards, exacerbating the ongoing conflict in Lebanon (where 17 American diplomats and then 241 US Marines were murdered in two separate incidents, and 56 French soldiers besides), sharpening the hostility of Syria toward the West, eroding the progressive reforms — yes, the shah’s progressive reforms — in Iran itself. And how about Obama’s careless reference to peace two decades back? The Gulf War, for one, which really was the beginning of the conflict against Saddam Hussein that has not yet ended, and, since it was always a sectarian conflict, will not likely end soon. The Afghani fratricide is an antique phenomenon, reinvigorated by Obama himself as the “yes, we can” war, but now being left to fester, ancient hatreds on ancient turf, and spread to the paradigmatic non-nation-state of Pakistan.

So is Islam a religion of peace, even if you set aside Syria and Yemen, Mali, Nigeria and all the others? Will some Muslim leaders, somewhere, anywhere, call their faithful to the streets to protest and condemn the ritual fratricide of their own?

Actually, no one expected Obama to call attention to the Turkish genocide against the Armenians on his visit to Turkey that April. Unlike the Germans, who are hewn to a philosophical tradition of guilt and remorse and have put themselves and their youth through an unforgiving struggle of conscience, Islam does not traffic in matters of collective guilt and remorse. These are not categories of the faith, and Obama did not nothing to disturb the self-satisfied temper of the faithful. Having anointed Recep Tayyip Erdogan his favorite Muslim, he brought comfort, if not exactly good cheer, to Ankara. The most brazen instance, given the fact that America is not a member of the European Union and that the Europeans do not trust him, was the president’s endorsement of Turkey’s admission to the common market. If anything, Obama’s advice left the continent very much peeved. Where does he come off telling us who is family?

He also had an assignment for Turkey in resolving the historic struggle between Israel and the neighborhood within which it lives. “Like the United States,” Obama declared in a sloppy, all-too-facile analogy, “Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security.” Now, the fact is that the editor of this very page was perhaps the first American journalist to chronicle the Erdoganian view of the world and his weird affinities for weirder allies. Already in 2006, he had noticed the prime minister’s weakness for the body parts blood libel implicating both Israel and our country. Apparently, neither the president nor his scriptwriters were aware of the cranky Ottomanist elements in Erdogan’s Middle East strategy. Anyway, Ankara has never let go of the Mavi Marmara pretension that you can break a legal international blockade against a rogue not-at-all statelet without cost or intervention. What was Netanyahu to do? Let the Turkish “humanitarians” run the blockade and invite anyone and everyone to follow suit?

The fact is that Obama is afflicted with a certain Turkomania, and it persuaded him that the US could trust Erdogan’s lead in Syria, way past the time he had shown that he was not inclined to do so. Erdogan suffers from Kurdophobia, which stays his hand in Syria, however much his early but sudden antagonism to the Assad regime in the civil war may have suggested otherwise. Indeed, as soon as Turkey let pass the shooting down of its bomber by Damascus, it no longer had credibility as a big player in the conflict. But Obama had trusted Erdogan to lead, and, predictably, he did not.

US President Barack Obama celebrates the Islamic holy month of Ramadan by hosting an iftar dinner in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, August 10, 2012 (photo credit: AP/Susan Walsh)

The White House and Foggy Bottom had many flimsy excuses for not moving forcefully against Assad. What they amounted to was that, if America really intervened, it would intensify the carnage on both sides. And shift the leadership to the extremists. But that is exactly what has occurred with the rebels because there was trivial assistance, and the rough guys take over when desperation sets in. Yet Assad’s fascist rule has not fundamentally changed. Indeed, his leadership was indulged for some time by the president and his underlings. Of course, the Syrian people would have continued to suffer. The key to the goodies was that Israel would pay the price by forfeiting the Golan Heights. Not since the ’30s had the American elite been so blasé about its dealings with ideological trash that had much blood on its hands. And it wasn’t only Anna Wintour who would make the dictator voguish. Harvard, the school where I taught for more than four decades, held a meeting of its Arab Alumni Association in Damascus last year, with Professor Jorge Dominguez, vice provost for international affairs, as a speaker. Blood was already flowing in the streets of Syrian cities and towns. And who was the other star to address the crowd? The wife of the tyrant. I suppose that this can be seen as a defense of free speech.

The third of the president’s Middle East extravaganzas at the beginning of his tenure was the speech in Cairo. One doubts that Obama would be embarrassed by his text. After all, he does not make mistakes! But maybe, if we had a secretary of state like Dean Acheson or George Shultz instead of Hillary Clinton, he could be made to be mortified by its strange medley of geeky innocence and high moral cynicism. (Have you noticed on the State Department website feature, “Travels With The Secretary?” 102 countries, 352 travel days, 843,450 miles. This is not a formula for analytic depth.) Our chief executive clearly has no patience for depth, which may be why he and the mistress of our diplomatic corps get along so well. Even a cursory rereading of his June 2009 text would expose how deeply he does not understand the region and its doctrines, its peoples and their excuses. Virtually nothing — no fact, no insight — has survived from the president’s self-confident Al Aqsa prayer meeting only 38 months ago.

Of course, what Obama considered the most serious unsolved foreign challenge to the United States was the question of Palestine, or, to be more precise, the question of the Arabs of Palestine, now referred to as the Palestinians. The world has given them — through the United Nations with its various redundant organs (what do they all do?), the support of the sloppy moralists (like Norway, Sweden, unworthy South Africa) and the up-for-purchase so-called non-aligned — the phony backing that they see as near unanimous support. The fact is, the Palestinians are further away from having their Palestine than at anytime since 1967. Or maybe 1947. The General Assembly may in its next session sanction an Arab government called Palestine, as it did 65 years ago, when the British ran away from their Mandate while the Jews picked up half of it and turned an established society into a nation-state. What kept Arab Palestine from becoming Palestine at that time were Egypt and Jordan, and the fact that Palestinian society was a primitive and fractured collection of clans and tribes as far from nationhood as other countries which the British abandoned in the post-war period.

In any case, who really cares what the General Assembly does or, for that matter, what the Security Council does or does not do? Kofi Annan is the prototype for the UN: cocksure but irrelevant, really altogether beside the point. Nothing the UN does will affect the lives of the Palestinians. What keeps Palestine from becoming Palestine now is that most — indeed almost all — of the Palestinians do not recognize the Jewish state and its history. Which is really why they won’t negotiate. Which is also why they return again and again to the empty geographical formula of the armistice lines of 1949.

Those lines are a fiction, even if they are called “1967 lines,” which is the Arab attempt to show they are up-to-date. History may wait for a while. But it does not stop. The State of Israel, which (mostly) desires to be freed from the burden of Palestine and the Palestinians, will not accept a “peace” that leaves it open — because of its size and its turf, because of its vulnerability as a free society to terror, because of their obsessions with false and falsified history, because of their indifference to such civilized rules of war as are still possible — to the unappeasable resentments of time.

It is a pity that Obama took his foreign policy imperative from Rashid Khalidi in fixing on the issue of Palestine as uniquely his own. The issue that is most important is Iran and nuclear weapons, and this has also fundamentally affected the Palestine question. If Iran secures the bomb, so will Saudi Arabia, Turkey, even Egypt. For three and a half years Obama deceived himself into thinking that somehow he had, he could, he would, with suasion and goodwill, talk the Persians into giving up the ultimate weapon. Then he did “sanctions,” ever so slowly and piecemeal. Did the president not grasp the urgency of time? The further Iran went in securing the atom for itself, the more difficult it would be for it to give it up. That is where we are now: Iran on the cusp of possession, the Arabs in agitated nowhere, the Palestinians fooling themselves that statehood is only a step or two away. And Israel? A free and pleasant place to visit and to live, with many grounds, both old and new, to worry.

Israel Hayom | Playing into Iran’s hands.

Israel’s Security Insiders Split on Iran – Forward.com.

Never-Before-Seen Rifts Over Wisdom of Unilateral Strike

getty images

Facing Split: Benjamin Netanyahu faces an Israeli security apparatus that is split like never before over the possibility of a unilateral strike on Iran

Jerusalem — With the looming prospect of an Israeli unilateral strike against Iran, the national debate has seen an urgent onrush of warnings from past and present members of Israel’s usually taciturn national security establishment.

That reflects a profound change in the country’s political culture, analysts say. And it presages further public questioning of future security decisions.

“It is unprecedented to see people who were serving in such senior positions in the very recent past expressing themselves like this,” said Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv. “Usually in the past there was a level of reliance on the decisions made by the government.”

It’s not that objecting to military operations or questioning their management, per se, is something new for Israel. Such dissent was evident in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in two wars in Lebanon (1982 and 2006), and in the controversy over the quelling of the two intifadas (beginning in 1987 and 2000, respectively). But in all of those cases, the debate arose during or after the fighting, never before it was launched, as is happening with the current controversy over whether to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Among the factors behind this change are a more open, aggressive media, the years-long period during which the decision has been hanging in the balance, and a sense that this decision will have fateful consequences for the country’s place in the region and world.

“We live in a different world,” Diskin said, “the world of WikiLeaks. The whole atmosphere has changed because there is a change in technology and culture, and Israel is definitely a part of this. But I don’t think we will be seeing criticism of this scope, because this issue is existential in nature.”

Not everyone is pleased with the change. Ephraim Kam, a senior analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies, in Tel Aviv, deplores it. He warned: “If we want to create pressure on the Iranians and on the Western governments to continue the pressure on the Iranians, this discussion is harmful. If everyone becomes convinced that because of the discussion, Israel will not attack, then the pressure on Iran and the West diminishes.”

Still, Kam predicts that the phenomenon of a broad public debate by former security establishment personnel will be repeated in the future on other issues.

“There is still military censorship, but in the past it was stricter and it is today more permissive,” he said. “Forty years ago, if people started talking about what we were about to do, the censor would stop it. Today there are a lot of news outlets; the competition between them is very aggressive, and everything is open.’’

Yaron Ezrachi, professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University, believes that the security establishment pillars speaking out augurs well for Israel’s still-developing sense of civil society. “It is one of the most brilliant moments of Israeli democracy,” he said, “and it reflects Israeli developments since last summer’s [socioeconomic] protests, and the idea that criticism of the government can make a difference.”

But with the ultimate decision on whether to strike held tightly in the grip of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, can any of this cacophony make a difference?

“I do not rule out the possibility that this attitude on the part of a large part of the public, especially the defense establishment, can affect the decision makers,’’ Ezrachi said.

Syrian Air Force intelligence head reportedly assassinated as Syrian rebels report massacre | The Times of Israel.

Jamil Hassan targeted due to air force bombardment of rebel positions; rebels say 200 killed ‘execution style’ in one town

A man walks by a destroyed building in Azaz near Aleppo last week. (photo credit: AP/Muhammed Muheisen)

The head of Syrian Air Force intelligence was reportedly assassinated in Damascus Saturday, rebels said, as the war-town country devolved into one of its bloodiest periods yet, with 400 people were reported killed, including 200 in one town.

A spokesperson for the Free Syrian Army told al-Arabiya on Sunday that Lt. Jamil Hassan was killed in his office by an aide, who was an operative for Ahfad al-Rasul (Grandchildren of the Prophet Brigade), a group that operates under the aegis of the Free Syrian Army and has claimed credit for bombings in the past.

Hassan was reportedly targeted due to the recent escalating Syrian Air Force bombardment of rebel groups and neighborhoods.

He was considered a close adviser of Syrian President Bashar Assad. There was no immediate word from Damascus on the report.

Opposition forces have reported assassinations in the past that were later disputed, including of Assad’s brother Maher and a top Russian general.

Also Saturday, rebel activists reported upwards of 400 people were killed in Syria over the day, including a massacre in a Sunni town south of the capital.

A local activist in the town of Daraya told Reuters that 200 bodies had been found there, most of them shot execution-style.

“In the last hour, 122 bodies were discovered and it appears that two dozen died from sniper fire and the rest were summarily executed by gunshots from close range,” the activist told Reuters by telephone.

He called what happened “a massacre.”

The Local Coordination Committees reported that 310 people had been killed in and around Damascus and another 130 in fighting in other places around the country, including Aleppo, Daraa and Deir Al Zour in the north of the country.

State-run media reported government forces “cleared the area of terrorists,” their term for the rebels, “and eliminated a large number of them.”

Video from the town posted on YouTube showed scores of bodies with gunshot wounds lying in a dark room. Warning: graphic footage

Another video from the town purported to show forces loyal to Assad beating bound rebels.

Damascus itself also saw heavy fighting on Saturday, as tanks shelled rebel-held neighborhoods in the south of the city, Reuters reported.

On Friday, Damascus residents reported hearing loud explosions as shells fired from the Qasioun mountains overlooking the capital slammed into Daraya and the nearby suburb of Moadimiyeh.

Human rights groups say more than 20,000 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising against Assad erupted in March 2011 and evolved into a civil war. The bloodshed already has spilled over into neighboring countries.

On Friday, the United Nation’s refugee body reported that the number of people fleeing the country had surpassed 200,000, as thousands headed for safe havens in Turkey and Jordan.

Assad’s forces accused of massacre near Syrian capital – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Reuters

The Local Coordination Committees, an activists’ organization, said Assad’s forces killed 440 people across Syria on Saturday, including dozens of women and children, in one of the highest death tolls since the uprising against his rule broke out in March last year.

The organization, which monitors Assad’s military crackdown, said 310 people were killed in Damascus and its environs, including Daraya, 40 in the northern province of Aleppo and 28 in Syria’s Sunni tribal heartland region of Deir al-Zor.

The rest were reportedly killed in the Idlib, Deraa, Hama and Homs, outlying provinces where poverty and discontent with Assad’s minority Alawite rule have been building up since bloody repression by Assad’s father, the late President Hafez al-Assad, killed tens of thousands of people in the 1980s.

Due to restrictions on non-state media in Syria, it was impossible to independently verify the accounts.

“Assad’s army has committed a massacre in Daraya,” said Abu Kinan, an activist in the town, using an alias to protect himself from reprisals.

“In the last hour, 122 bodies were discovered and it appears that two dozen died from sniper fire and the rest were summarily executed by gunshots from close range,” Abu Kinan told Reuters by telephone.

The official state news agency said: “Our heroic armed forces cleansed Daraya from remnants of armed terrorist groups who committed crimes against the sons of the town and scared them and sabotaged and destroyed public and private property.”

The United Nations Human Rights Council said that more than 200,000 Syrians have fled into neighboring countries and are in dire need of aid.

The United Nations estimates that more than 18,000 people have been killed in the conflict that pits a mainly Sunni opposition against a ruling system dominated by the Assad family for the last five decades.