WarSclerotic

Jerusalem Post – Breaking News.

( The American people [not the government] are the deepest and greatest friends Israel has.  This is no accident.  Our mutual ideals of resistance to tyrannical evil are reminiscent of the US and Britain vs. Nazi Germany. – JW)

FWIW (or not) 11-28-2012 Radical Islam: The Scourge of the 21st Century – YouTube.

Even absent its nuclear program, as the number one financier of Radical Islam violence world-wide, Iran needs to be taken down.

Radical Islam is responsible for over 95% of all the violent exchanges around the world.  (Check Wikipedia)

Even if the West prefers to look up in the air and whistle, Israel cannot afford to follow suit.

Operation “Pillar of Defense,” while a sideshow, eliminated Iran’s southern threat to Israel during the coming “main operation”…

Coming soon….

JW

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‘Iran will press on with uranium… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

Egypt: Copts sentenced to death for anti-I… JPost – Middle East.

( Our Egyptian “friends” under the “moderate” Morsi… – JW )

Photo: YouTube Screenshot

War With Iran: Iran is Now Rearming Hamas, and That Could Lead the US Into Deeper Conflict.

The Gaza Operation: Less a War than an Anti-Iran Coup.

The eight-day Gaza duel between Israel and Hamas was the showcase.  Behind it, a coup went forward, masterminded by at least three intelligence wizards: Israel’s Mossad Direct Tamir Pardo, Turkish National Intelligence Organization – MIT chief, Hakan Fidan and the Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Jassim al Thani, who also heads the emirate’s intelligence service.  The CIA was in close touch.

Their aim was to abort the military ties Tehran was cultivating with Hamas before the Gaza Strip is grabbed as Iran’s springboard to Cairo. To this end, wave upon wave of multiple missile assaults on Israel were provoked.
The coup action was designed as Part One of US President Barack Obama’s overall plan, which is to harness the Arab Spring to key US objectives. His partners were – and are – Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Obama’s next stop is Syria where matters are coming to a head on several fronts.

The plan, if Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense worked, was to chart a new future for the radical Hamas terrorists by their transformation into the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people for which they still need some grooming and more than a touch of the airbrush.

Hamas has the advantage of being the most popular boy on the Palestinian block, which is why the Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas has avoided an election for six years.
In the short term, the Israeli miniwar was meant as a vivid lesson for Tehran about the fate awaiting its Arab allies. Hizballah is advised to watch what happened to Hamas before its leader Hassan Nasrallah looses tens of thousands of rockets with which Iran filled its armory against Israel.

For these objectives, Israeli ground action was not necessary at any stage of the Gaza operation.

Its opening shot was a bull’s eye, eliminating Hamas’s military commander, the pro-Tehran Ahmed Jabari and Iran’s kingpin in Gaza.
Iron Dome stole the show by knocking out most of the 1,000 missiles launched from Gaza before they hit town centers. Israel lost six dead. Many of the injured were shock victims.
So was the coup strategy played out in Gaza a success?
Time will tell; Israel has meanwhile begun easing its land and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip. Turkey and Qatar are committed to major investments in the Gaza economy to make it more prosperous than the rival West Bank.  And the US and Egypt have undertaken a joint effort to stem the flow of Iranian arms to Gaza through the smuggling routes of Sinai.

A million things could go wrong along the way. However, the same coalition has meanwhile shifted it sights from Gaza to Syria. NATO is about to post Patriots with American crews on the Turkish-Syrian border and the rebels are finally beginning to hem Assad’s military resources in.

Is Hamas Really a ‘Surrogate’ of Iran? – Robert Wright – The Atlantic.

(Robert Wright is one of radical Islam’s most distinguished apologists. – JW )

Is Hamas a puppet of the Iranian regime? An affirmative answer to this question is, from the point of view of Bibi Netanyahu, a dual-use rhetorical technology: (1) It helps justify the recent bombardment of Gaza (since one goal of the operation was to deplete an Iranian-supplied missile stock that Iran could in theory activate against Israel in the event of war). (2) It helps justify Netanyahu’s uncompromising stance toward Iran (since, the more pervasively threatening Iran seems to Israelis, the easier it is to convince them that the Iranian regime is beyond the reach of negotiation).

The Hamas-as-Iranian-puppet narrative gets help from American media. Consider, for example, this week’s New York Times piece by David Sanger and Thom Shanker asking what the recent Israel-Gaza conflict tells us about how a possible war with Iran might play out. Referring to Netanyahu and President Obama, Sanger and Shanker write:

And one key to their war-gaming has been cutting off Iran’s ability to slip next-generation missiles into the Gaza Strip or Lebanon, where they could be launched by Iran’s surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad, during any crisis over sanctions or an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The confident assertion that Hamas is an Iranian “surrogate”–a claim Sanger and Shanker never get around to substantiating–is oddly out of touch with recent developments in the region.

It’s certainly true that Hamas had, and still has, lots of Iranian-supplied missiles, the product of a close relationship that goes back years. But this past year has seen developments that changed the relationship.

First, Hamas ended its relationship with the Syrian regime and moved its leadership out of Syria–a move that not only strained relations with Syrian ally Iran but may have deeply altered them. In March, a Hamas official said Hamas would not serve as Iran’s retaliatory surrogate in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran and would not get involved in an Israel-Iran war.

Second, the sudden slack in Hamas’s relationship with Iran seems to have been taken up by Qatar, which is now bankrolling Hamas, and, in a different way, by Egypt, which is closer to Hamas under President Morsi than it was under Hosni Mubarek. This shift in Hamas’s source of support–from Iran and Syria toward Qatar and Egypt–could prove constructive in the long run, since both Qatar and Egypt are members of the global establishment and seem to want to stay that way.

None of this means Hamas’s relationship with Iran is over. Indeed, with Hamas now basking in the glow of what it’s calling a victory over Israel, gratitude for the missiles Iran sent to Gaza is on conspicuous display. Still, Hamas’s behavior during the conflict with Israel may say more about its relationship with Iran than any niceties emanating from Gaza afterwards. On this point it’s worth reading Meir Javedanfar, an Israeli academic of Iranian descent who teaches a course on Iranian politics. His take:

Apart from supplying weapons, Iran did not have any other influence. If it did, and Hamas was acting as its proxy, the latter would not have agreed to a cease-fire and instead done everything to force Israel to launch a land invasion in Gaza. Such an outcome would have many benefits for Iran and, in fact, this is what Iran’s military and political leaders wanted. They wanted to see Israel stuck in a quagmire in Gaza, with its economy and diplomatic standing suffering heavily while its relations with Egypt reached breaking point. Unfortunately for the Iranian regime, it did not get its wish precisely because Hamas is not its proxy, nor does it have any political influence over Hamas. Otherwise, the story would have been different.

The Hamas-as-Iran’s-surrogate motif has dramatic appeal, and journalists, like the rest of us, like drama. But dramatization often means simplification. And when the prospect of war is real–as it was with Iraq in 2002, as it is with Iran now–journalists have a particular responsibility to resist incendiary oversimplification.

Israel snuffs out Hamas’ missiles – Washington Times.

JERUSALEM — Israeli officials are hailing their military operation against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip as a strategic success in neutralizing one of three potential threats should Israel need to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in coming months.

“Operation Pillar of Defense” destroyed nearly all of Gaza’s rocket arsenal and proved the efficacy of the Iron Dome defense system against short-range missiles, Israeli officials told reporters in a military briefing Thursday.

Israel’s weeklong military operation and Hamas‘ rocket attacks ended Nov. 21 under a cease-fire brokered in part by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.

One of the principal aims of the operation was to destroy the arsenal of short- and medium-range rockets capable of striking the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, about 40 miles from Gaza, Israeli officials said.

On Nov. 14, the first day of the attack, the Israeli military destroyed almost all of the rockets in the possession of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the other main Islamic terrorist group in Gaza.

Gaza’s rocket arsenal was one leg of a three-pronged threat that could deter Israel from attacking on Iran’s nuclear sites. The other two are Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group in Lebanon that has a larger rocket arsenal than Hamas‘, and Iran itself, which has ballistic missiles.

Hezbollah did not join Hamas and Islamic Jihad in firing on Israel this month, but has said that it would join in any future attacks on Israel.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has said it has given Hamas the technology to build longer range missiles.

According to the Israeli Defense Force, more than 1,000 rockets were fired from Gaza during the seven-day military operation, most of which fell in unpopulated areas. Iron Dome intercepted at least 359 (about 85 percent of) incoming missiles determined to be a threat against a populated area.

Israeli officials praised the missile defense system, which uses cameras and radar to detect a rocket or mortar launch, and track the shell’s flight path from a distance as far as 45 miles away.

Iron Dome then transmits data about the shell’s trajectory to a fire-control system that determines whether the rocket poses a threat to a populated area, and ignores missiles that are projected to hit unpopulated areas.

If an incoming rocket does pose a threat, Iron Dome launches an interceptor missile that uses its built-in radar to help it close in on the target and destroy it over a safe area.

Israeli officials also said their new medium-range missile defense system, called “David’s Sling,” has passed operational tests. The system is designed to intercept missiles as far as 180 miles away.

For months, Israeli officials openly have mulled attacking Iran’s nuclear program, which the Jewish state and Western nations have said is geared toward building an atomic weapon.

Iran has denied the accusations about its atomic program, saying its nuclear research aims only at peaceful ends. However, it has refused to allow international inspectors to examine its nuclear facilities.

By eliminating the Gaza threat, Israel cleared one of its flanks. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, although belligerent toward Israel in tone, has been careful not to provoke Israel into an attack.

Hamas, dedicated to the destruction of Israel, had remained relatively quiet since Israel’s incursion into Gaza in January 2009.

However in the past six months, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have entered into increasingly frequent cycles of violence with Israel — firing rockets and being struck by Israeli air attacks.

After attacks increased in southern Israel, the Israeli military retaliated. It launched more than 1,500 airstrikes in the eight-day conflict with Hamas, which killed more than 160 Palestinians.

Israeli officials said most of those killed were terrorists, although civilians also died in the air raids.

Six Israelis were killed in Hamas rocket attacks during the conflict.

In drawing up target lists, the Israeli planners avoided civilian areas in order not to provoke Egypt into an overreaction, including possible renunciation of its peace treaty with Israel.

“We did not aim to eliminate their capacity to fire rockets entirely,” a senior military figure told an Israeli journalist. “We intended to cause them not to resume firing.”

Israeli officials said that the militants did not yet realize the extent of the damage caused to their infrastructure.

“As the days pass and the dust settles, the other side will realize the price it paid for its actions,” Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, Israel’s chief of the military staff.

Israel preceded its attack by assassinating the Hamas military commander, Ahmed Jaabari.

The destruction of his car in the center of Gaza City by a rocket fired from an aircraft, was followed almost immediately by the first wave of the Israeli air attack.

Public opinion polls show the Israeli public was disappointed that the attack did not bring Hamas to its knees. The army command said that was never the intention.

The Israeli political leadership appears to be abandoning earlier threats of destroying Hamas because there is no alternative leadership in the Gaza Strip