WarSclerotic

Obama refocusing terror threat to pre-9/11 level | The Times of Israel.

President who says US ‘cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root’ is unlikely to commit troops in large numbers to any conflict, including Syria

US President Barack Obama talks about national security, at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, May 23 (photo credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some call it wishful thinking, but President Barack Obama has all but declared an end to the global war on terror.

Obama is not claiming final victory over extremists who still seek to kill Americans and others. Instead, he is refocusing the long struggle against terrorism that lies ahead, steering the United States away from what he calls an equally frightening threat — a country in a state of perpetual war. In doing so, Obama is recasting the image of the terrorists themselves, from enemy warriors to cowardly thugs and resetting the relationship between the U.S. and Islam.

His speech Thursday was designed to move America’s mindset awy from a war footing and refine and recalibrate his own counterterrorism strategy, Obama asserted that al-Qaida is “on the path to defeat,” reducing the scale of terrorism to pre-Sept. 11, 2001, levels. That means that with the Afghanistan war winding down, Obama is unlikely to commit troops in large numbers to any conflict — in Syria or other countries struggling with instability in the uncertain aftermath of the Arab Spring — unless, as his critics fear, he tragically has underestimated al-Qaida’s staying power.

“Wishing the defeat of terrorists does not make it so,” said Rep. Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

In Thornberry’s view, Obama is pushing the idea that “we can simply declare al-Qaida beaten and go back to the pre-9/11 era.”

From the beginning of his presidency, the centerpiece of Obama’s national security strategy has been a desire to move beyond the wars he inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the shadowy spaces occupied by al-Qaida and its offshoots now creeping up in North Africa and elsewhere.

Those endeavors consumed enormous amounts of his administration’s time and attention during his first term, not to mention the incalculable costs paid by military members and their families.

“This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

As Obama edges toward a new approach to national security, his political opponents are quick to raise doubts.

“Too often, this president has sought to end combat operations through rhetoric rather than reality,” Republican Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon of California, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Friday.

“He has declared the war in Iraq over, but the insurgency there continues. He has declared an end to combat operations in Afghanistan, but the Taliban fight on. He has now declared the war on terrorism over, despite a terrorist attack in Britain this week, a terrorist attack in Boston last month and a terrorist attack in Libya that left a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans dead last year.”

Yet the president cautioned against a return to what he called a complacency in counterterrorism before Islamic extremists hijacked U.S. jetliners and slammed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Make no mistake,” he said, “our nation is still threatened by terrorists,” noting that the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, last September and in Boston last month were tragic reminders.

But he also left little doubt that he thinks it is time to turn the page on the post-9/11 approach. He was referring not only to the controversial use of armed drones to target terrorists in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other countries, but also the commitment of tens of thousands of U.S. ground troops in conventional fighting.

“For all the focus on the use of force, force alone cannot make us safe,” he said. “We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root,” adding that “a perpetual war — through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments — will prove self-defeating and alter our country in troubling ways.”

Some counterterrorism experts long have argued that the global war on terror should be brought to a close, and that some of the policies and programs put in place after 9/11 should be reconsidered and possibly changed.

James Lewis, a national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues for a more traditional approach to battling terrorism, largely through law enforcement and the intelligence community.

Lewis said that ending the fight against terrorism will help reinforce the administration’s message that America is not at war with Islam.

“It helps, because it delegitimizes the terrorists,” said Lewis. “They want to think of themselves as warriors. We want the world to think of them as crooks. We want everyone in every country not to think of them as terrorists defending Islam, but as people who are psychos. They are criminals, and that’s what we want to paint them as.”

That is closely in line with Obama’s description of what remains of the terrorist threat.

He said core al-Qaida, the organization formerly led by Osama bin Laden, is “a shell of its former self.” The president said that while one of its most troublesome affiliates, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, is a force to be reckoned with, “in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al-Qaida will pose a credible threat to the United States.”

He also cautioned against the threat of homegrown extremists and said terrorism may never go away entirely.

“But as we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11,” he said.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut hit by rockets | The Times of Israel.

( Too bad, so sad… – JW )

At least 4 wounded in unprecedented attack that comes after Lebanese terror group’s leader admitted his men were fighting Syrian rebels

A Lebanese army officer investigates part of a rocket which struck a car exhibit on a street at the Mar Mikhael district, south of Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday May 26, 2013 (photo credit: AP/Hussein Malla)

BEIRUT (AP) — Rockets slammed Sunday into two southern Beirut neighborhoods that are strongholds of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, wounding at least four people, security officials said.

The incident raises fears that Syria’s civil war is increasingly moving to Lebanon, whose sectarian divide mirrors that of Syria. One leader of Syria’s overwhelmingly Sunni rebels had threatened to strike Hezbollah strongholds to retaliate against the Iranian-backed Shiite group for sending fighters to assist Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Street fighting between rival Lebanese groups has been relatively common since the end of the country’s 1975-1990 civil war, but rocket or artillery attacks on Beirut neighborhoods are rare.

One rocket fired Saturday landed in the Mar Mikhael district on the southern edge of the capital, striking a car exhibit on the street and causing all four casualties. Another struck the second floor of an apartment in a building in Chiyah district south of Beirut, about two kilometers (one mile) away from Mar Mikhael. The apartment’s balcony appeared peppered with shrapnel, but no one was wounded.

The officials said it was not clear from where the rockets were fired. They spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

The state-run National News Agency said among the wounded in the Mar Mikhael blast were three Syrians. Interior Minister Marwan Charbel blamed “saboteurs” and said: “We hope what is happening in Syria does not move to Lebanon.”

An ongoing battle in Syrian town of Qusair on the Lebanese border, which government troops backed by Hezbollah pounded with artillery on Saturday, has laid bare the Shiite group’s growing role in the Syrian conflict. Hezbollah initially tried to play down its involvement, but could no longer do so after dozens of its fighters were killed in the town and buried in large funerals in Lebanon.

Col. Abdul-Jabbar al-Aqidi, commander of the Syrian rebels’ Military Council in Aleppo, appeared in a video this week while apparently en route to Qusair, in which he threatened to strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs in retaliation for Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria.

“We used to say before, ‘We are coming Bashar.’ Now we say, ‘We are coming Bashar and we are coming Hassan Nasrallah,’” he said, in reference to Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

“We will strike at your strongholds in Dahiyeh, God willing,” he said, using the Lebanese name for Hezbollah’s power center in southern Beirut. The video was still online on Youtube on Sunday.

On Saturday, Nasrallah vowed to help propel Assad to victory in Syria’s bloody civil war, warning that the fall of the Damascus regime would give rise to extremists and plunge the Middle East into a “dark period.”

A Lebanese investigator takes pictures at a balcony where a rocket struck an apartment in a building at Chiyah district, south of Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday May 26, 2013 (photo credit: AP/Hussein Malla)

In a televised address, he also said Hezbollah members are fighting in Syria against Islamic radicals who pose a danger to Lebanon, and pledged that his group will not allow Syrian militants to control areas along the Lebanese border. He pledged that Hezbollah will turn the tide of the conflict in Assad’s favor, and stay as long as necessary to do so.

“We will continue this road until the end, we will take the responsibility and we will make all the sacrifices,” he said. “We will be victorious.”

The Hezbollah leader’s comments offered the clearest public confirmation yet that the Iranian-backed group is directly involved in Syria’s war. They also were Nasrallah’s first remarks since Hezbollah fighters have pushed to the front lines of the battle for the strategic Syrian town of Qusair near the Lebanese frontier.

The Syrian conflict poses a threat to the stability of Lebanon, and the fighting next door has repeatedly spilled over the border. For the past week, Assad’s opponents and supporters have been clashing in the Lebanese port city of Tripoli, using mortars, grenades and machine guns to attack densely populated areas.

Syria’s main opposition group, the Syrian National Council, slammed Nasrallah’s speech as an “an attempt to pit the Lebanese people against their Syrian brothers and sisters who have revolted against the brutal dictator.” In a statement issued Sunday, it said his speech “has the potential for serious ramifications in the region.”

“It explicitly declares Iranian interests as superior to the basic, inherent rights of people across the region,” the statement said.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

Nasrallah pledges tens of thousands of volunteers to fight for Assad.

Funerals in Beirut of Hizballah Syrian war dead

Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed Saturday night, May 25, to expand his movement’s military role in the Syrian civil war. “With just two words, I can muster tens of thousands of volunteers to fight for Bashar Assad,” he said, claiming that he receives daily letters from parents begging him to send their only sons to fight in Syria. Al Qaeda fighters were streaming into Syria and Israel planned more attacks, he warned, in a speech marking the 13th anniversary of Israel’s military withdrawal from South Lebanon.

The Hizballah leader said if Sunni Islamists took over in Syria, they would pose a threat to the entire Lebanese population. If Assad falls, so too will the “resistance front” against Israel – as well as the Palestinian people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. “Hizballah will not let that happen!” Nasrallah declared.
debkafile’s military sources: Nasrallah’s speech denotes his movement’s plunging ever deeper into the Syrian conflict. From limited involvement, he has undertaken to fight for Assad to the end, for better or for worse.

The issue is no longer, as Israeli officials insist, whether he can get hold of the advanced Iranian weapons supplied him through Syria, only whether Hizballah can fulfill its two twofold goal. One is to tip the scales of the war in favor of the Syrian army and the other is to contribute enough troops to the various war sectors to free Syrian forces for battling Israel in the war of attrition, which Assad and Nasrallah have both declared.
Hizballah’s Deputy Secretary Sheikh Naim Qassem said Friday that President Assad is absolutely serious about opening a front against Israel from the Golan. It only remains to be done, he said. “Syria is fully capable of implementing this decision on its own. If necessary, we’ll help, but it’s up to Syria.”

As a bonus, Nasrallah’s expanded intervention in the Syria war assures him that the advanced weapons – whose transfer into the Lebanese terrorist group’s hands Israel has vowed to prevent – will in fact be handed over on Syrian soil.

Friday, May 24, debkafile disclosed that two competing terrorist movements, Shiite Hizballah and Sunni al Qaeda, were pouring troops into Syria, while US Secretary of State John Kerry remained focused an the elusive Israel-Palestinian peace process.

After spending 48 hours in Jerusalem and Ramallah, trying to talk Israeli and Palestinian leaders into reviving the long-stalled Middle East peace process, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s exit line Friday, May 24, was: “We’re getting toward a time now when hard decisions need to be made.”

That was all he had to say about Israel’s comments on US proposals on the subject as unworkable and the Palestinian view that American ideas were still unformed and conditions for reviving talks non-existent.
In any case, the Syrian crisis hurtling forward heedless of its disastrous potential for its neighbors is fully exercising their leaders’ attention at this time and confronting them with much more urgent “hard decisions.”
The Secretary himself had just come from a Friends of Syria meeting Thursday in Amman, which was attended by a sparse 11 members compared with the original 80. The meeting ended with a demand that the international conference on Syria, which Kerry is trying to convene in Geneva in the first week of June in partnership with Russia, will not accept Assad regime representatives with blood on their hands.
Moscow took exception to this demand Friday by means of a Russian Foreign Ministry statement that Syria has agreed in principle to participate in the conference, but obstacles to a date were still raised by the Syrian opposition.
It can’t therefore be said that Washington and Moscow see eye to eye on the key issues of Syrian representation at the conference they are jointly sponsoring.

The US still insists that Bashar Assad must go before a political solution can be broached, while Russia continues to champion and arm him.

The most conspicuous feature of Kerry’s current Middle East tour is the strong dichotomy between his public statements and mission and the events taking place in the real world around him.
debkafile analysts assign this gap between the Secretary’s perceptions and reality to US President Barack Obama’s own evasiveness on the “hard decisions” he needs to take for determining the level of US involvement in the acute crises shaking this highly volatile region.

This was evident in the speech he delivered  Thursday, March 23, in which he stressed the effort to pull the United States away from its inclusive “post 9/11 war on terror” and “return to normalcy.”

He said “lethal force [such as drones] will only be used against targets who pose a continuing imminent threat to Americans.”
Obama’s message was totally unrelated to the rising militancy of the two most virulent Islamic terrorist movements of the present day.

As he spoke, Al Qaeda, on the one hand, and the Lebanese Shiite Hizballah, on the other, continued to pour fighting strength into Syria and feed the flames of a calamitous civil war which has claimed more than 80,000 lives in a little more than two years.
Our military sources report that Hizballah brigades are forming up with the Syrian army for their next decisive battle, after their al-Qusayr victory, for the capture of the northern city of Homs; Al Qaeda jihadis are streaming across the border from Iraq to cement rebel control of the Deir a-Zor region of eastern Syria.

The aggressive actions of both Hizballah and al Qaeda in Syria are outside the bounds of the US president’s revised objectives for the US war on terror – hence, the rationale for US non-involvement in any part of the Syrian conflict.
At the same time, both these movements are at war, declared or undeclared, on Israel, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Their destabilizing impact extends to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah too.
In terms of timing and immediacy, therefore, the ”hard decisions” John Kerry called for are right outside the current Middle East context. Israel’s leaders must decide urgently how to address Syria’s headlong descent into more bloodshed at a time that Iran, Russia, Al Qaeda and Hizballah are in charge of events.

The initiative led by the US Secretary of State and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for an international conference to hammer out a political solution for the Syrian crisis in no way slowed its momentum.
Israel’s leaders might perhaps best be advised to prioritize attention to determining how best to handle the perils looming from Syria ahead of Kerry’s bid for a return to talks with the Palestinians.