WarSclerotic

Iran can’t build nuke without tripping alarm bells, US says | The Times of Israel.

( Really?  Gee, so what’s everyone worrying about? – JW )

Intelligence director James Clapper says Tehran still has not decided whether to pursue militarization of nuclear program

March 12, 2013, 5:27 pm

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, right, accompanied by FBI Director Robert Mueller, testifying on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday. (photo credit: AP/Susan Walsh)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Iran cannot enrich uranium to the point of being able to make a bomb without the international community finding out, a top US intelligence official said Tuesday while delivering an otherwise sobering report on worldwide threats.

National Intelligence director James Clapper told a Senate panel that Tehran is developing nuclear capabilities to enhance its security and influence and “give it the ability to develop a nuclear weapon.”

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But the report stopped short of saying a decision has been made.

“We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” the report said.

Clapper explained that in the last year, Iran has made progress in working toward producing weapons-grade uranium. However, the report said Iran “could not divert safeguarded material and produce a weapon-worth of weapons-grade uranium before this activity is discovered.”

The assessment on Iran comes shortly before President Barack Obama’s trip to Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that the world has until this summer — at the latest — to keep Tehran from building a bomb. The Israeli leader repeatedly has indicated Israel is willing to strike militarily to stop Iran, a step that would likely drag in the United States.

Clapper, testifying with newly installed CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director Robert Mueller to the Senate Intelligence Committee, also spoke about threats emanating from Syria and North Korea.

He said that both Iran and Syria had acquired ballistic missiles from Pyongyang

In Syria, President Bashar Assad’s inability to quash the uprising in his country increases the possibility that he will use chemical weapons against his people, Clapper said.

“We assess that an increasingly beleaguered regime, having found its escalation of violence through conventional means inadequate, might be prepared to use chemical weapons against the Syrian people,” he said. “In addition, groups or individuals in Syria could gain access to chemical weapons-related material.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence committee, described Syria as a “massive and still growing humanitarian disaster under way with no end in sight.”

The United Nations estimates more than 70,000 people have been killed in the civil war, which started two years ago against Assad’s rule.

The report said terrorist threats are in transition with an increasingly decentralized global jihadist movement. The Arab Spring, however, has created a spike in threats to US interests in the region “that likely will endure until political upheaval stabilizes and security forces regain their capabilities.”

An unpredictable North Korea, with its nuclear weapons and missile programs, was touted as the most serious threat to the United States and East Asia nations.

The outlook on North Korea comes as the communist regime announced that it was “completely scrapping” the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War and has maintained peace on the peninsula for more than half a century. The Obama administration on Monday slapped new sanctions against North Korea’s primary exchange bank and several senior government officials as it expressed concern about the North’s “bellicose rhetoric.”

“The Intelligence community has long assessed that, in Pyongyang’s view, its nuclear capabilities are intended for deterrence, international prestige and coercive diplomacy. We do not know Pyongyang’s nuclear doctrine or employment concepts,” Clapper told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Although we assess with low confidence that the North would only attempt to use nuclear weapons against U.S. forces or allies to preserve the Kim regime, we do not know what would constitute, from the North’s perspective, crossing that threshold.”

North Korea, led by its young leader Kim Jong Un, has defied the international community in the last three months, testing an intercontinental ballistic missile and a third nuclear bomb.

“These programs demonstrate North Korea’s commitment to develop long-range missile technology that could pose a direct threat to the United States, and its efforts to produce and market ballistic missiles raise broader regional and global security concerns,” the report said.

Report: Iran will promise UN not to seek bomb – Israel News, Ynetnews

( Cross your heart and hope to die? – JW )

Islamic Republic will make public declaration in UN stating that Tehran will never seek nuclear weapons, new report claims. Meanwhile US intelligence official says he’s unsure of Iran’s nuclear intentions

Associated Press

A news agency says Iran plans to submit a written promise to the United Nations that it will not seek nuclear weapons.

The Tuesday report by the semi-official Mehr news agency quotes Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi as saying, “Iran plans to declare in the UN that it will never go after nuclear bombs.”

Rahimi did not say when the promise would be delivered.

He charged that the Western sanctions aim to thwart Iran’s “scientific progress.” Several rounds of sanctions aimed at the nuclear program have impacted heavily on Iran’s economy.

Iran has repeatedly denied West suspicions that it is pursuing weapons construction under cover of its nuclear program.

In 2005, Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a religious edict “banning production, storage and use of nuclear weapons.”

Meanwhile, while testifying before a Senate panel on the US intelligence community’s overview of global threats US Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said that Tehran is developing nuclear capabilities to enhance its security and influence and “give it the ability to develop a nuclear weapon.”

But the report stopped short of saying a decision has been made.

“We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” the report said.

Clapper explained that in the last year, Iran has made progress in working toward producing weapons-grade uranium. However, the report said Iran “could not divert safeguarded material and produce a weapon-worth of weapons-grade uranium before this activity is discovered.”

The assessment on Iran comes shortly before US President Barack Obama’s trip to Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that the world has until this summer at the latest to keep Tehran from building a bomb.

The Israeli leader repeatedly has indicated Israel is willing to strike militarily to stop Iran, a step that would likely drag in the United States.

Syria, Bosnia, and the Old Mistakes | New Republic.

( My friend from Columbia College, Leon Wieselier, really hits this issue out of the park.  Leon… כל הקבוד – JW )

BY LEON WIESELTIER

“One could never have supposed that, after passing through so many trials, after being schooled by the skepticism of our times, we had so much left in our souls to be destroyed.”

Alexander Herzen wrote those words in 1848, after he witnessed the savage crackdown on the workers’ rebellion in Paris. Having been disabused by history of any illusions about the probabilities of justice, the great man was surprised to discover that he had not yet been completely disabused—that his belief in the betterment of human affairs, however mutilated by experience, was still intact; and what apprised him of his irreducible idealism was his broken heart. In 1995,

I cited Herzen’s pessimistic optimism, or optimistic pessimism, in an angry article about Bosnia and the Western failure there, and glossed the lacerating sentence this way: “They did not suppose that they had so much left in their souls to be destroyed! What basis for bitterness do those words leave us, who have witnessed atrocities of which the nineteenth century only dreamed, who have watched totalitarian slaughter give way to post-totalitarian slaughter, and the racial and tribal wars of empire give way to the racial and tribal wars of empire’s aftermath?

But bitterness is regularly refreshed . . . ” Forgive my quotation of myself, but I have been reading in the old Bosnian materials, in the writings of the reporters and the intellectuals who campaigned for American action to stop a genocide. I have been doing so because my Bosnian bitterness has been refreshed by Syria.

I am finding crushing parallels: a president who is satisfied to be a bystander, and ornaments his prevarications with high moral pronouncements; an extenuation of American passivity by appeals to insurmountable complexities and obscurities on the ground, and to ethnic and religious divisions too deep and too old to be modified by statecraft, and to ominous warnings of unanticipated consequences, as if consequences are ever all anticipated; an arms embargo against the people who require arms most, who are the victims of state power; the use of rape and torture and murder against civilians as open instruments of war; the universal knowledge of crimes against humanity and the failure of that knowledge to affect the policy-making will; the dailiness of the atrocity, its unimpeded progress, the long duration of our shame in doing nothing about it.

The parallels are not perfect, of course. Only 70,000 people have been killed in Syria, so what’s the rush? Strategically speaking, moreover, the imperative to intervene in Syria is far more considerable than the imperative to intervene in Bosnia was. Assad is the client of Iran and the patron of Hezbollah: his destruction is an American dream. But his replacement by an Al Qaeda regime is an American nightmare, and our incomprehensible refusal to arm the Syrian rebels who oppose Al Qaeda even as they oppose Assad will have the effect of bringing the nightmare to pass. Secretary of State Kerry seems to desire a new Syrian policy, but he is busily giving our side in the conflict—if we are to have a side by the time this is over—everything but what it really needs.

We must mark an anniversary. It has been two years since fifteen teenagers in the town of Dara’a scrawled “the people want the regime to fall” on the wall of a school, and were arrested and then tortured for their temerity. The protest that erupted in Dara’a, in the area in front of a mosque that was dubbed “Dignity Square,” was a democratic rebellion, and it swiftly spread. In Dara’a it was met by a crackdown whose brutalities were documented in an unforgettably chilling report by Human Rights Watch a few months later.

Dissolve now to Aleppo in ruins, where the dictator is hurling ballistic missiles at his own population. Two years.

The Obama administration may as well not have existed.

Though two years into the Bosnian genocide Bill Clinton was still more than a year away from bestirring himself morally and militarily, so what’s the rush? Clinton acted after the massacre at Srebrenica. But Syria has already had its Srebrenicas, and Obama is still elaborate and unmoved. He also worries about a Russian response to American action, when Putin’s obstructionism in fact perfectly suits Obama’s preference for American inaction.

People around the White House tell me that Syria is agonizing for him. So what? It is hard to admire the agony of the bystander, especially if the bystander has the capability to act against the horror. Obama likes to drape himself in Lincoln’s language, so he should ponder these words, from the Annual Message to Congress in 1862: “We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility.” Obama wants the power but not the responsibility. Unfortunately for him, the one brings the other.

Not even the advent of Barack Obama can abrogate what was learned in Bosnia in the antiquity of the twentieth century: that in the case of moral emergencies, those with the ability to act have the duty to act; that even justified action is attended by uncertainty; that military force can do good as well as evil, and that war is not the only, or the worst, evil; that the withdrawal of the United States from global leadership is an invitation to tyranny and inhumanity; that American foreign policy must be animated by principle as well by prudence, though there is nothing historically imprudent about setting oneself resolutely on the side of decency and democracy.

“How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” Obama recently told this magazine, as an example of how he “wrestle[s]” with the problem. Do not be fooled. It is not wrestling. It is casuistry. He has no intention of coming to the assistance of Congo, either. Obama is a strong cosmopolitan but a weak internationalist. And he is, with his inclination to disinvolvement, and his almost clinical confidence in his own sagacity, implicating us in a disgrace, even we here.

The Golan and the coming troubles – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Analysis: UN may leave Golan Heights amid sharp increase in violence along Israel-Syria border

Riccardo Dugulin

The situation on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights is quickly spiraling toward a hardly containable power vacuum which is likely to lead to an increased degree of instability region wide and to an augmentation of the attacks against Israel. The most recent sign of this ongoing destabilization has been shown when 21 UN Filipino unarmed peacekeepers were taken hostage by Syrian rebels. This unprecedented act of violence against non-armed personnel is instrumental in underlying a number of factors which will influence the future security environment in Israel’s northern regions.

The Syrian civil and proxy war has become a war of attrition between government forces and a nebulous network of foreign sponsored and at times competing rebel groups. This reality led the regime to optimize the use of its armed forces, thus leaving regions such as the border with Israel weakly garrisoned. The rise of pro-regime militias backed by Hezbollah is a likely response to these developments.

Such a strategic shift creates an imbalance of force in areas which are strategic for Israel’s defense. The multiplication of anti-regime armed groups, some of which are substantially close to al-Qaeda in tactics and ideology, is making it impossible to have a single entity in control of the Syrian territory, especially over key regions such as the Israeli border.

The steep increase of violence in this area along with allegations of malpractice being raised against UN peacekeepers is bringing the UN disengagement from the Golan Heights closer to reality. This would mean that the Israeli Defense Forces would be the only regular army in control of a part of a border region that the Jewish state and various terrorist and insurgent groups are struggling to control. The pledged help by the US and Arab States to the Syrian rebels effectively means that the Syrian armed forces will not regain power over those contended regions. This may lead to two different scenarios, none of which have a positive outcome for Israel or the international community.

The first one consists of a gradual takeover of the Syrian side of the Golan Heights by Hezbollah. The Shi’a terrorist organization has acquired in the last years an advanced offensive and defensive arsenal and tactical expertise. It has been engaged in the Syrian conflict in combat and logistical operations for almost a year and a half and has direct access to Iranian support and intelligence.

The regime would benefit from such a move as it would clamp down a sizeable number of rebel forces while leaving Assad’s forces for other places in the country. This would have catastrophic effects on Israel’s security calculus as it would mean that Hezbollah acquires a new border with Israel from which it could position its medium range ballistic missiles to target Israeli civilians. In addition to that Hezbollah’s control of the region would limit the transit Assad and Iranian weapons would need to undergo to arrive into the Lebanese terrorist organization.

Rebels who captured UN troops near border (Photo: AFP, YouTube)

The second possibility is that with the demise of Syrian regular forces in the area, a number of different rebel groups will share influence over the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. The possibility that groups closer to al-Qaeda and other Sunni terrorist organizations will gain control of strategic communication nodes is high. Due to their sponsor and their tactical expertise these terrorist networks are already having the upper hand against regime forces and rival groups in almost the majority of the engagements they participate in.

The takeover of the Syrian border with Israel by fundamentalist Sunni terrorist organizations would lead to a growth of terrorist attacks – or at least attempts – against Israeli targets. In fact, with an increased Hezbollah presence, the balance of power may be altered, but a full blown conflict may be diverted, when on the other hand to gain and maintain legitimacy and popular support jihadi groups would need to step up their terrorist campaign against the Jewish state. Their relatively lower offensive capabilities would result in Hamas-like terrorist attacks mainly centered on the use of inaccurate artillery and rocket barrages as well as suicide bombings. Regardless of the fact that, thanks to well tested defensive capabilities, Israel could minimize civilian causalities, this scenario would not be a sustainable one and in the medium term it makes Israeli cross border actions necessary. These actions may be highly compromised by the volatile situation in Syria.

The likelihood that, while retreating or losing ground, Syrian regime forces try to gain popular support by engaging Israeli targets remains low. The fact that the regime did not respond to Israel’s alleged strike inside its territory may be taken as an indicator that Assad does not want to risk the certain loss of men and material in any kind of adventurous attempt to expand the conflict toward Israel.

Because of this scenario, international commentators, analysts and policy makers should look at the evolving situation in the Golan with increased attention as the Syrian implosion raises the probability of regional conflict.

Riccardo Dugulin holds a Master degree from the Paris School of International Affairs (Sciences Po) and is specialized in International Security. He is currently working in Paris for a Medical and Security Assistance company. He has worked for a number of leading think tanks in Washington DC, Dubai and Beirut. Personal website: www.riccardodugulin.com

2nd Generation Sky Rider.

Moriya Ben-Yosef

11/3/2013

A new and improved version of the Sky Rider UAV is expected to enter operational use in the IDF. The UAV, which is intended to be used by soldiers in the field, is equipped with payloads that make it possible to receive real-time battlefield pictures.

The new Sky Rider model, which was developed by the Ground Technological Division and the Ground Forces Weapons Department and is supplied by Elbit Systems, underwent final test stages last month and is meant to enter operational activity this month.

“This is an improvement of the existing system,” says a source connected to the project. “The aircraft itself has slightly increased, and it is a little heavier – it previously weighed approximately 6.5 kilograms and now it weighs 7 kilograms. Ailerons were added to the  UAV, which have improved its airworthiness and its handling of winds and weather conditions, and many things pertaining to flight reliability have been improved.

“In addition, it now includes a night payload with continuous zoo, when there was a need to transition between the narrow and broad fields in the past. The ground system has also been changed, and there is now a tremendous improvement in the user interface. The communication allows for greater operational flexibility, both with regards to ranges as well as with regards to controlling several UAVs at once.”

The Sky Rider unit in the IDF Artillery Corps has been operating in recent years close to the various forces deployed in different sectors, providing a real-time intelligence picture. The integration of the new model in the field is expected to provide technological operational advantages, and the Ground Forces hope that in the future, every battalion will have a Sky Rider team to assist with field activities.

Fundamentally Freund: When Christians repent | JPost | Israel News.

Al Qaeda forms volatile 1,000-km chain from Baghdad to Damascus.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis March 12, 2013, 8:30 AM (GMT+02:00)

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz on Golan

Israel’s Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz rated war as a “low risk” for the foreseeable future, but credited the risk of escalation as “very high,” in a lecture he delivered Monday, March 11 at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Institute for policy and strategy. “Almost every week, some incident occurs that could drag the region into a conflagration,” he warned.

debkafile’s military sources: Gen. Gantz’s distinction between “war” and “conflagration” stems from the differentiation Israel’s senior policy-making and military circles have begun making of late to support a misconception that a full-blown war is no longer on the cards at present. They support this rationale by arguing that full-scale war can only be fought by large regular armies, while a “conflagration” or “escalation” entails smaller units and less terrain.
The Egyptian army, which would be the key to a major conflict, is held up in this regard as being in no state to go to war, given their country’s disastrous political and economic plight. The generals, according to this theory, wouldl take into account the low state of their units and lack of logistical preparedness and simply decline to issue any order to embark on war against Israel.
So when Gantz talked about a conflagration, he was thinking in terms of the Islamist militias in Syria, Hizballah in Lebanon and the Salafists allied with al Qaeda cells in Sinai – none of which are capable of launching war on the classical dimensions of the past.

What this kind of thinking omits to take into account is that, while the regular Arab national armies which attacked Israel in the past are indeed crumbling, the militias in their countries are mushrooming dangerously. They are bursting out of their national boundaries, nourished with arms, manpower and funding from distant sources in and beyond the Middle East.
debkafile’s military sources point to the example of the Syrian army’s 17th Reserve Division, whose recent defeat in the battle for the Euphrates River in eastern Syria established a regional landmark. It removed the last gap in the 1,000-kilometer long chain of command formed by Islamist forces identified or associated with al Qaeda, which now runs contiguously from the northern outskirts of Baghdad to the eastern fringes of Damascus.  The Syrian Golan, since it fell to the Islamist militias fighting with Syrian rebels, forms part of that chain. The Battle for the Euphrates was a landmark event in that it opened the way for al Qaeda to conduct itself as a transnational force in combat. And indeed, in a recent encounter, al Qaeda in Iraq claimed victory over Syrian military units which, having crossed the border into that country, lost the battle at the cost of 48 soldiers and 9 agents dead.

Therefore, any “conflagration” in Syria, for instance, could quickly spread to Lebanon, Iraq or the Golan; and a violent incident in Egypt may emanate from or spill over into Libya, Israel or Algeria.
This eventuality was intimated in another part of the Gantz lecture: “The only permanent factor we are seeing in the last two years is that nothing is permanent. Egypt, too, which underwent a revolutionary process, has not achieved permanence; old and familiar arenas are changing and are being replaced by newer, weightier, ones,” said the chief of staff. “The threats have not gone, only assumed new shapes and when we encounter them in the future, will demand of us enhanced strength.”
Gantz went on to say: “True, we aren’t preparing to fight a regular army, but when next challenged, we shall still have to crawl through the burrows of Gaza and reach every building in Judea and Samaria.”
The general omitted reference to Iran. This may have been because a nuclear Iran represents the prospect of all-out war with a national army and is therefore the exception to the theory embodied in his lecture.
Regarding Syria, he said: “The situation in Syria has become exceptionally dangerous and unstable. Although the probability of a conventional war against the Syrian army is low, the terrorist organizations fighting Assad may next set their sights on us. The Syrian army’s tremendous strategic resources may well fall into terrorist hands.”

‘Secrets’ of Obama’s upcoming visit to the Middle East revealed – Alarabiya.net English | Front Page.

( Obama asks Arab Americans to “give him a pass” on his speech in Israel…  i.e. Whatever he says, he doesn’t really mean.  I hope all of Israel reads this Al Arabiya article and completely ignores the lies he’s planning on foisting on the Israeli public with this speech.  – JW )