WarSclerotic

‘Hagel backtracks on disparaging … JPost – Diplomacy & Politics.

Israel Hayom | Report: Hagel apologizes for ‘Jewish lobby’ comments.

Defense secretary nominee reportedly sends letter to Jewish Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, saying he fully supports unilateral sanctions on Iran and condemns Hezbollah as a terrorist threat • Calls his “Jewish lobby” comment “a very poor choice of words.”

Israel Hayom | ‘Netanyahu will work with Obama while safeguarding Israel’s interests’.

Likud campaign chief Gideon Sa’ar responds to harsh comments in report by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who quoted Obama as saying: “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are … Netanyahu is moving his country toward near-total isolation.”

Outcome the ultimate test – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Op-ed: In second term, Netanyahu failed to achieve most important goal of stopping Iran’s nuclear program

Shimon Shiffer

In the argument over the NIS 11 billion the Netanyahu government spent on the preparations for an attack in Iran without American assistance, one must focus solely on the facts.

Forget Ehud Olmert’s claim that Netanyahu wasted the money on “hallucinatory escapades that haven’t, and won’t, come to fruition.” Let’s also disregard the response of Netanyahu, who boasted on Israel Radio that his government mobilized the world’s nations to impose economic sanctions on Iran and built “independent capabilities” against the Islamic Republic. In any case, it can be said with a high degree of certainty that in the four years of his second term the prime minister failed to achieve the most important goal he set for himself: To halt Iran’s efforts to equip itself with nuclear weapons.

It is safe to assume that the answers provided by officials in the Prime Minister’s Office to the attacks by former security establishment heads Yuval Diskin and Meir Dagan will not satisfy the heads if the inquiry commission that will be established in the future to examine the decision-making process vis-à-vis the Iranian issue.

According to reports released by the International Atomic Energy Agency, in the beginning of Netanyahu’s second term one could get the impression that Iran was very far from enriching quality uranium in significant amounts. Now, however, it appears that the ayatollah regime is very close to building its first bomb. Actually, it is claimed that the decision on whether to build the bomb is dependent solely on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Moreover, it has been claimed that over the past four years Iran succeeded in constructing fortified and impenetrable installations which contain the equipment used to enrich the uranium needed to produce a nuclear bomb – a bomb that will change the regional and international reality.

Netanyahu mentioned this week his efforts to mobilize countries to impose sanctions against Iran. Really? The prime minister thought we had forgotten that he used to claim that sanctions were ineffective and that the only way to stop Iran was to launch an Israeli attack that would lift the existential threat on the Jewish state and prevent a disaster. So let’s stick to the facts: Netanyahu equated the Holocaust to a nuclear Iran and doubted our ability to survive in the event that Tehran produces nuclear weapons. The panic he created, it was argued, led to the withdrawal of billions of shekels that were deposited in Israel and to a surge in the number of Israelis applying for foreign passports.

In addition, Netanyahu and Barak spoke of an attack in October or November of last year, before Iran reaches the “zone of immunity” from an attack. The attack was not launched, and the Iranians can continue laughing until the next IAEA report, which will inform us that they have completed their nuclear project.

Meanwhile in America, Obama was elected to a second term and has recently selected as his next defense secretary Chuck Hagel, who is known for his staunch opposition to an attack on Iran and to resolving conflicts militarily. And so, following the elections Netanyahu is expected to find himself facing the cold shoulder of a hostile administration and the need to leave Iran alone and tackle the Palestinian issue.

Netanyahu conundrum faces Iranian riddle.

Monday, 14 January 2013

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at a conference in the coastal city of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, in this January 13, 2013 file photo. Netanyahu has a simple message as he seeks a third term in office – he is a strong man and a vote for him at parliamentary elections on January 22 means Israel will be a powerful nation. (Reuters)

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Obama: ‘Israel Doesn’t Know What Its Best Interests Are’ – Bloomberg.

Obama prepares public to accept first Iranian nuclear test.

( Hoping that debka is full of it, as it often is.  Still… – JW )

DEBKAfile Special Report January 15, 2013, 10:56 AM (GMT+02:00)

A demonstration in Tehran

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told an Israeli TV interviewer Monday night, Jan. 14 that his government had spent billions of shekels to outfit Israel’s Defense Forces with offensive and defensive options which were hitherto lacking. He stressed Israel is obliged to be extremely strong – whether to stand up to the Iranian nuclear threat and the extremist Islamist wave lashing the Arab world – or to make peace.
Earlier Monday, Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz ceremonially installed Maj. Gen. Gady Eisenkott as deputy C.-of-S, after the state attorney had approved his taking up the post irregularly in the middle of an election campaign in view of Israel’s security situation.
When the AG made that decision some days ago, a decision by Syrian President Bashar Assad to attack Israel with chemical weapons was taken into account as a possibility. Not that the danger is over,  only that it was pushed into a quiet corner by the statements made last Friday, Jan. 11 by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint US Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey.

They explained at a joint news conference in Washington that if Assad chose to use his chemical stockpiles, it would be virtually impossible for US intelligence to detect it in advance or to stop him. “You would have to actually see it before it happened,” said Dempsey.

However, not so longer ago, last August, the same Secretary Panetta and Defense Minister Ehud Barak said they were certain that if Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the order to build a nuclear bomb, “…we will know it, we and you and some other intelligence services will know about it…”
However, the latest comment on the Syrian chemical threat also lets the cat out of the bag on another WMD menace lurking in wait for the region. Because, if US intelligence finds itself unable to detect an Assad order for a chemical attack, how can they be sure to know when Iran starts building a nuclear bomb? The answer is they can’t.
Anticipating this question, the Obama administration had its answer ready.

Monday, the Institute for Science and International Security’s president, David Albright, a proliferation expert who often represents thinking in US security and intelligence agencies, presented a 154-page report in Washington titled “Strategy for US Nonproliferation in the Changing Middle East” He was one of the co-chairs of this project which once again shifted all the way to mid-2014 the key timeline for Iran to be able “to produce enough weapon-grade uranium for one or bombs without detection by the West.”

President Barack Obama is obviously preparing for his second term in office a policy that lines up his Middle East unconventional weapons ducks – Syrian chemical and Iranian nuclear – under the same revised estimate. Contrary to previous official US statements, Albright now establishes that US intelligence is incapable of pinning down the moment when Iran starts assembling a nuclear bomb, any more than it can detect the Syrian order to embark on chemical warfare.

Therefore, a preemptive operation is out and people must get ready to wake up one morning to find Iran has carried out its first nuclear test, in the same way as they must expect to be surprised by Bashar Assad’s launch of a chemical attack. Only then, may Washington and Jerusalem begin wondering what to do.
But to stave off that moment, Obama still hopes the secret negotiations he initiated with Iran last month plus stiff sanctions (so for ineffective for slowing down Iran’s nuclear progress) will do the trick of holding Tehran back from building a bomb. Failing this result, the Albright report provides him – and Iran – with another eighteen months’ grace.

debkafile’s military and intelligence sources affirm that this new estimate may be convenient for some but it is false: Iran already has enough enriched uranium – produced or procured – for building at least five nukes. This is no secret. Wednesday, Jan. 9, the Financial Times reported that a stock of 5 tonnes of un-enriched uranium, enough to produce weapons-grade fuel for five atomic devices, had gone missing in Syria and may have passed to Iran. The stock had been prepared for the nuclear reactor Bashar Assad was building at Al-Kibar in eastern Syria before it was destroyed by Israel in 2007. The information was based on British intelligence sources.
The nuances in Netanyahu’s current reference to the Iranian nuclear threat suggest that he too is aware of the new winds blowing in Washington. In his latest statement, he departed from his standard assertion that his government would not permit Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon and said instead: “The government which I head has invested billions to prepare the country for the Iranian threat.”

Egypt’s Leader, Morsi, Made Anti-Jewish Slurs – NYTimes.com.

Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s president, attacked Zionists in a 2010 interview, when he was a Muslim Brotherhood leader.

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: January 14, 2013

CAIRO — Nearly three years ago, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood delivered a speech urging Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. In a television interview around that time, the same leader described Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”

That leader, Mohamed Morsi, is now president of Egypt — and his comments may be coming back to haunt him.

Since beginning his campaign for president, Mr. Morsi has promised to uphold Egypt’s treaty with Israel and to seek peace in the region. In recent months, he has begun to forge a personal bond with President Obama around their successful efforts to broker a truce between Israel and Palestinian militants of the Gaza Strip.

But the exposure this month of his virulent comments from early 2010, both documented on video, have revealed sharp anti-Semitic and anti-Western sentiments, raising questions about Mr. Morsi’s efforts to present himself as a force for moderation and stability. Instead, the disclosures have strengthened the position of those who say Israel’s Arab neighbors are unwilling to commit to peace with the Jewish state.

“When the leader of a country has a history of statements demonizing Jews, and he does not do anything to correct it, it makes sense that many people in Israel would conclude that he cannot be trusted as a partner for peace,” said Kenneth Jacobson, deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

Representatives of Mr. Morsi have declined repeated requests over more than three days for comment on his remarks. One reason may be that the re-emergence of his previous statements has now trapped him in a political bind. While his past comments may be a liability abroad, he faces a political culture at home in which such defamation of Jews is almost standard stump discourse. Any attempt to retract, or even clarify, his slurs would expose him to political attacks by opponents who already accuse him of softness toward the United States and Israel.

Signs asserting Mr. Morsi works for Mr. Obama are already common at street protests. Perhaps “the Muslim Brotherhood is so desperate for U.S. support that it is willing to bend over backwards to humor the Israelis,” Emad Gad, a leader of the Social Democratic Party, suggested in a recent column.

Outlining Mr. Morsi’s dilemma, the Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef used the president’s anti-Semitic remarks to set up a contrast with his more recent collaborations with Washington and Israel, including the brokering of a cease-fire with Palestinian militants in Gaza. Mr. Youssef, whose television program broadcast the video clip about hatred Friday night, juxtaposed Mr. Morsi’s 2010 statements denouncing “Zionists” and their Western supporters, including Mr. Obama, with the Egyptian president’s more recent declaration that he hoped Egypt and the United States could be “real friends.”

“Of course being in an international role has its rules and restrictions,” Mr. Youssef said on the program, advising Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies to retract their inflammatory talk: “Admit everything you said in the past was a joke, or stop bluffing.”

As the chief of the Brotherhood’s political arm before becoming president, Mr. Morsi was one of the group’s most outspoken critics of Zionists and Israel. He sometimes referred to Zionists as “Draculas” or “vampires,” using demonizing language historically associated with anti-Semitism. Although he explicitly denigrates Jews in the recently exposed videos, Mr. Morsi and other political and Brotherhood leaders typically restrict their inflammatory comments to the more ambiguous category of “Zionists.”

The anti-Semitic statements that have come to light this month both date back to 2010, when anti-Israeli sentiment was running high after a three-week conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza the previous year.

In the video footage first broadcast Friday on Mr. Youssef’s television program, Mr. Morsi addressed a rally in his hometown in the Nile Delta to denounce the Israeli blockade of Gaza. “We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews,” Mr. Morsi declared. Egyptian children “must feed on hatred; hatred must continue,” he said. “The hatred must go on for God and as a form of worshiping him.”

“The land of Palestine will not be freed except through resistance,” he said, praising the militant group Hamas as an extension of the Brotherhood.

“Who is our enemy? The Zionists. Who occupies our land? The Zionists. Who hates us? The Zionists. Who destroys our lands? The Zionists,” Mr. Morsi added, lashing out at “America, France and Europe” as “Zionist” supporters.

“And the last of them is that Obama,” Mr. Morsi said. He called the American president a liar who promised the Arab world “empty meaningless words.”

The other video clip was a television interview from the same period unearthed last week by the Middle East Media Research Institute, based in Washington, which tracks anti-Semitic statements in the Arab world.

“These bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs,” Mr. Morsi declared, using a slur for Jews that is familiar across the Muslim world. Although he referred repeatedly to “Zionists” and never explicitly to Jews, Mr. Morsi echoed historic anti-Semitic themes: “They have been fanning the flames of civil strife wherever they were throughout their history. They are hostile by nature.”

Some analysts said the gap between Mr. Morsi’s caustic statements as a Brotherhood leader and his more pragmatic actions as president illustrated the many factors besides ideology that shape political decisions. “What you believe in your heart is not the same as what you do in power,” said Shadi Hamid, research director of the Brookings Doha Center. Whatever Mr. Morsi’s opinions about Jews, he has left Egypt’s foreign policy toward Israel largely unchanged, Mr. Hamid said.

Mr. Morsi’s past statements may still raise questions about how he would act in the future if Egypt were not constrained by its financial dependence, relative military weakness and a network of Western alliances. But in contemporary Egyptian politics the gap between his past vitriol and his present comity may serve mainly as a tempting target for his opponents, Mr. Hamid said.

“You are already starting to hear his opponents saying, ‘Morsi is too close to the U.S. and doing its bidding in the Middle East,’ ” he said. “It would be smart to attack him there because he may be vulnerable.”