WarSclerotic

Moderate Rohani on track for outright Iran election win | JPost | Israel News.

Reformist-backed Iranian cleric far ahead of conservative rivals in presidential election, easing beyond 50% mark in latest count; Supreme leader hails elections as a “vote of confidence” in Islamic Republic.

Hizballah units near Golan. Some receive “limited-use” chemical arms.

Chemical canister landing in Saraqeb, Idlib

American sources claimed Saturday,  June 15, that the “military support” the Obama administration promised the Syrian opposition Friday consisted of automatic weapons, mortars and recoilless rocket grenades (RPGs) for delivery within three weeks through Turkey.

Those items, say debkafile’s military sources, are no more than a mockery of the rebels’ needs. Any Middle East arms trafficker can quickly lay hands on advanced anti-air and anti-tank missiles for a price running into tens of thousands of dollars – whether in Lebanon, Egyptian Sinai, the Palestinian Authority – or even in trading among the Syrian rebel militias themselves. The going prices, according to our sources, are for instance, up to $50,000 for a shoulder-borne Grail SA-7 anti-air missile and $40,000 for a T-55 tank in poor technical condition plus 40 shells.
After the US weapons arrive, the huge imbalance between the rebels’ and Syrian army’s arsenals will be as stark as ever. It widens constantly with the landing almost every few hours of Russian and Iranian air transports delivering military equipment to cover the ongoing war requirements of the Syrian army and Hizballah.
Friday, as Iranians elected a new president, their supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech: “To the Americans, I say, OK, to hell with you. Any one who listens to you is a loser. The Iranian people have never attached any value to their enemies.”

And in Beirut, Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah said: “Where we need to be, we will be. Where we began assuming responsibilities, we will continue to assume responsibilities” and, he added, no one in Lebanon will be allowed to interfere with this.
Nasrallah, half of whose military strength is fighting for Bashar Assad in Syria, was warning Hizballah’s foes at home that he is still strong enough to deal with any opponents of his Syrian venture as well.
On the heels of the bravado from Tehran and Beirut, a statement heard Friday from Damascus strongly pointed to the three allies’ forthcoming direction.  Syrian President Bashar Assad said: “We have plans to open a resistance front on the Golan Heights,” adding that “such a move could unify the various factions in Syria.” This was the first time Assad had disclosed his plans to join “the resistance” against Israel as a diversion for breaking up the rebel front against his regime.
He spoke after ordering the Syrian and Hizballah troops to peel off into two heads and advance simultaneously on two fronts – one, for their major offensive to recapture Aleppo, and two, the Golan, which is divided between Syria and Israel.

debkafile’s military sources report that Thursday night, the first movements were detected heading toward the Syrian side of the Golan and the Jordanian border, from the Syrian and Hizballah military concentrations piling up in the last two weeks around the southwestern town of Deraa.

Senior officers in the IDF’s Northern command have no doubt that Assad plans to deploy Hizballah units on the border of Israeli Golan while a Syrian back-up force will take up position on the Jordanian border. According to some intelligence sources, rudimentary “limited-use” chemical weapons have been handed out to some of the Hizballah units operating in Syria. They come in the form of plastic canisters, roughly the size of a tin of canned food, which can be fired or simply lobbed by hand. Poisonous sarin nerve gas escapes through two holes upon impact.

This device was developed by Iran for the Syrian army to use on a small scale to save Assad from being accused of using a “weapon of mass destruction.”

In Washington, US and Israeli officials took turns Friday night in junking their red lines for Syria. The Obama administration confirmed that the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons against the opposition on multiple occasions was “on a small scale.”

Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said in a lecture that Israel had set the Assad regime three red lines against supplying advanced weapons to Hizballah or any other terrorist group; letting them have chemical weapons or allowing Israel to be attacked from the Golan.

Both the US administration and Israel have been overtaken by events. By downplaying the scale of Syrian chemical warfare and providing the rebels with nothing more than light weapons, Washington is in effect granting Assad a license to continue his “small scale” use of chemical weapons. And the Israeli defense minister chose to ignore the fact that the Syrian ruler is past trampling over Israel’s red lines, safe thus far from  evoking an effective response.

The sense of the rest of his remarks at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy Friday are equally abstruse: “Israel will not intervene in Syrian in part because any such intervention would harm the side Israel favors,” said Ya’alon. But he did not address the reverse situation which is more realistic, whereby Syria and Hizballah are preparing to “intervene” in Israel.

The impression gained from his remarks was that, just as the Obama administration has chosen to hold back from a pointed response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, so too Israel is backing away from coming to grips with the offensive build-up targeting its borders.
Is Moshe Ya’alon simply toeing the line of Obama’s non-intervention policy for Syria?

At all events, he never mentioned by a single word the fact that Hizballah has been armed with “limited-use chemical weapons” – either before or after his meeting with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel early Saturday.

New House bill promises to help Israel combat existential threats | The Times of Israel.

Amendment ensures Washington’s support in face of Iran’s nuclear program; still requires Senate and presidential support before becoming law

An F-16 refueling in the air during a drill. (photo credit: Jeffrey Allen, U.S. Air Force/Department of Defense)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The U.S. House of Representatives passed a defense authorization bill that would make it U.S. policy to take “all necessary steps” to ensure Israel is able to “remove existential threats,” among them nuclear facilities in Iran.

“It is the policy of the United States to take all necessary steps to ensure that Israel possesses and maintains an independent capability to remove existential threats to its security and defend its vital national interests,” said the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act passed Friday.

The amendment, initiated by Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) and first reported by Americans for Peace Now weekly legislative roundup, would require the president to report every 90 days on how the policy is being implemented.

That report would identify “all aerial refueling platforms, bunker-buster munitions, and other capabilities and maintenance by Israel of a robust independent capability to remove existential security threats, including nuclear and ballistic missile facilities in Iran, and defend its vital national interests.”

The language must survive the reconciliation process with the Senate and then be signed by the president in order to become law.

The amendment is similar to a non-binding resolution passed last month in the Senate that urged the president to provide “diplomatic, military, and economic support” to Israel should it be “compelled” to strike Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program.

The House version of the defense authorization act already included a number of Israel-related measures, including tripling Obama’s request for missile defense cooperation funding from $96 million to $284 million.

The whole act passed Friday 315-108 and Roskam’s amendment passed by voice vote.

Report: 73 Syrian officers flee to Turkey – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Though it seems tide turned in Assad’s favor, Turkey reports mass defection, including 20 colonels, 7 generals. In Beirut, Hezbollah leader stays committed to Syrian fighting

Roi Kais

Turkey’s state-run news agency says 73 Syrian military officers – including seven generals and 20 colonels – have crossed the border with their families “seeking refuge” in Turkey.

The Anadolu Agency said Friday that the group totaled 202 people. It said they arrived in the town of Reyhanli and were taken to a Turkish refugee camp that houses military officers who have defected from the Syrian army.

At the same time, the Assad regime got a welcome boost from Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah, who made it clear he will not be deterred by internal Lebanese criticism of his group’s support for Damascus.

Nasrallah, who gave a speech on Friday marking “Lebanese casualty day,” announced the Shiite organization does not intend to abandon its Syrian ally or the Syrian fighting.

“We’ll be were we should be, and will keep shouldering the responsibility until the end,” he committed.

Hezbollah’s involvement in the Syrian crisis, especially in the battles over the border-town of Qusair, caused an uproar in Lebanon and raised concerns that violence may spill across the border.

But Nasrallah insisted: “We’re the last ones to intervene in Syria. There are those who want to see the Syrian regime deposed as if the alternative is a different regime. But the alternative is anarchy.”

Commenting on the possibility that foreign nations will supply the Syrian rebels with arms following reports of chemical weapons use by the regime, Nasrallah declared that “they were armed long ago.”

“Against this international attack, we take part in the existential struggle which wants to see to whole region fall, not only Syria. This is the heretic American-Israeli project,” he accused.

Hezbollah’s leader said his organization’s involvement was completely transparent: “We declared it openly. It’s not as if we sent our men to Syria and said we’re delivering milk and blankets, and it’s not as if we buried our men in Syria and silenced their relatives in Lebanon.”

According to Nasrallah, “The story of a people and a regime is long over. There’s a rift – some of the people support the regime and we’re backing that part, and there’s another part that we’re for with regards to reforms, but we don’t support those who call for the destruction of Syria.”

His speech was broadcast on massive screens in a ceremony in Beirut, and was aired on the Al-Manar TV channel, owned by Hezbollah.

During the ceremony, Nasrallah commended the “Lebanese resistance which acted to defend the holy places.”

“This resistance liberated Lebanon from the occupation,” he said. “Without it, Lebanon’s water would have gone over to the settlements and the original inhabitants wouldn’t be able to use them, just like in the West Bank.

“Without the resistance, our oil our oil reserves would have been transferred to the Tamar deposit, and our government would have had to answer to Israel like in Tyre and Sidon.

“And who was it who drove them out? Who fought and who remained silent? Who fought the occupier and who shook his hand?” Nasrallah said.

The news agencies contributed to this report

Barack Obama’s plan to arm Syrian rebels falls short – Jeffrey Goldberg.

Published: June 14, 2013 3:28 PM
By JEFFREY GOLDBERG, Bloomberg View

Photo credit: AP | A Syrian woman cries near Dar El Shifa hospital while the body of her brother, killed by Syrian Army, lies on the street in Aleppo, Syria. (Sept. 25, 2012)

Here are five observations, most of them depressing, about the Syrian civil war, formulated in light of the announcement by the White House that President Bashar al- Assad’s regime has, in fact, used chemical weapons and that, in response, the U.S. will supply small arms and ammunition to the Syrian rebels.

1. This move is possibly not too late, but it is certainly too little if the goal is to defeat Assad. The battle for Aleppo, the center of rebel strength, appears to be upon us. If Aleppo falls to the combined forces of Assad and the Iranian- backed terrorist group Hezbollah, many thousands of people will be killed and the uprising will, in all likelihood, come to an end. Civil unrest will continue, but the back of the rebellion will have been broken.

The rebels haven’t been doing well lately — they’ve been making headlines mainly for YouTube videos showing atrocities committed by some in their ranks, rather than for military victories — and small arms won’t alter the balance. Even if handguns and rifles are all that the rebels would need for victory, delivering such weapons isn’t simply a matter of driving trucks into Aleppo. It will take time to build a proper pipeline to “vetted” rebels, which is to say, rebels who promise not to one day kill Americans with these weapons. Anti-tank weapons may be of help, but at the moment these don’t appear to be forthcoming, and portable surface-to-air missiles will most definitely not be forthcoming.

2. That’s because we don’t actually know who we’ll be helping. Will these small arms find their way to al-Qaeda- associated groups, like the Nusra Front? We don’t even know who owns guns in the U.S. — how are we going to know for sure who owns our taxpayer-supplied firearms in Syria? Recent history in Afghanistan is very much on President Barack Obama’s mind: The weapons the U.S. supplied to mujahedeen fighters there to battle the Soviets three decades ago eventually were used against the U.S. and its allies. It would be best, from the president’s perspective, if this did not happen again.

3. From the president’s perspective, in fact, it would be best not to get involved at all. But the pressure on him this week became too much to bear. Former President Bill Clinton essentially called Obama a dithering coward because of his unwillingness to enter the Syrian conflict, and the intelligence community found evidence that Assad’s regime has definitively crossed the chemical weapons “red line” the president had spoken of — surely to his everlasting regret — last year.

Obama sees no clean way out, and no clear rationale for deepening U.S. involvement. He also sees a rebel coalition that is both dysfunctional and radicalized, and he knows that there is an outcome to this war that is worse than the continuation of Assad’s rule: the dissolution of the Syrian state and its replacement, in some locations, with al-Qaeda havens. Even an all-in move by Obama to make the rebels’ cause his own probably wouldn’t prevent the country’s collapse (it has, in fact, already collapsed as a unitary state). And he knows that if terrorist groups establish footholds in Syria — geographically close to our crucial allies, Jordan and Israel — he will have to act against them.

4. Many commentators (including, at times, this one) have argued that Obama’s irresolute approach to Syria is emboldening Iran, making it more likely that its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will hasten his pursuit of nuclear weapons. A hesitant Obama on Syria equals a hesitant Obama on Iran, or so the thinking goes. But there are two assumptions built into this analysis that I hadn’t fully considered before. One is that Khamenei — who this week said, for the thousandth or so time, that America should go to hell — wasn’t already intent on bringing his country to the nuclear threshold. No one has explained why Khamenei would halt his quest for nuclear weapons if his allies were defeated in Syria. Couldn’t this instead lead him to think that he’s surrounded and friendless and so needs nukes more than ever?

The second assumption is that Obama is a comprehensively vacillating president. I won’t rule this out, particularly because if he hadn’t vacillated early on support for Syria’s rebels (who weren’t always this radicalized), we might be facing a slightly different situation today. But Obama’s overriding concern in the Middle East has always been Iran’s nuclear program; he has never wavered from his position that the U.S. will stop Iran by any means necessary, and it’s not unreasonable to think that he’s keeping his eye on this ball and this ball alone. He knows that, apart from Senator John McCain (and now, apparently, Clinton) there are very few Americans who want to see the U.S. inject itself into the Syrian civil war, especially now that it is shaping up in some ways to be a battle between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda.

5. Humanitarian interventionists argue that Obama may inadvertently be presiding over another Rwanda. Clinton’s great regret, he says, was allowing the Rwandan genocide to take place without making a more aggressive effort to stop it. Obama, the thinking goes, doesn’t want to be burdened with the knowledge that he failed to stop a genocide. However, Syria is not Rwanda.

The death toll in Syria is horrendous, topping 90,000 now, but it isn’t genocide — it’s a civil war.

Jeffrey Goldberg is a Bloomberg View columnist.

Obama’s Sensible, Risky Syrian Strategy – Bloomberg.

President Barack Obama’s decision to arm rebels in Syria comes too late and carries enormous risks. It’s also the right thing to do — so long as its aim is to bring about a political settlement, not victory for the rebels.

U.S. officials have acknowledged in briefings that the motivating factor in their decision was the recent intervention by forces from Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah to turn the war in favor of President Bashar al-Assad, although in public they cited the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons.

The Hezbollah-Iran axis undoubtedly prompted U.S. action for several reasons. First, a diplomatic settlement is possible only if both sides understand they cannot win. Hezbollah changed that calculus; Assad no longer has an incentive to negotiate an end to the fighting.

Second, the U.S. is already involved in the Middle East, like it or not, and has interests and allies to secure. There would be significant costs to U.S. interests in letting the war rage on until Iran and Hezbollah secure a victory for Assad.

Third, the United Nations now estimates that 93,000 people have died in the Syrian conflict. Former President Bill Clinton’s invocation of the “wuss” doctrine this week was over the top, but he was right about this: Failing to act as tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians are massacred — as Clinton did in Rwanda and, for several years, in Bosnia — will be hard to explain in the future, even if it seems sensible in the present.

Which is not to say that arming the rebels isn’t risky. Arms might end up in the hands of al-Qaeda. Victory for the rebels might produce a new Sunni regime that’s anti-American, and turn Syrian territory into a haven for Sunni extremists to rekindle the civil war in Iraq. Or U.S. arms could be used by the rebels to massacre Alawites and Christians.

These are all reasons to limit support for the rebels to what it takes to force a settlement and protect U.S. allies. They are also reasons for Obama to continue to try to internationalize Syria policy.

Fortunately, the president will have a chance to make his case at next week’s Group of Eight summit in Northern Ireland. His mission: Win over skeptical allies such as Germany (which opposes arming the rebels), and explain to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. isn’t interested in starting a proxy war in Syria, nor in a victory for the rebels, but in forcing a settlement.

The president’s words might take on added credibility if they were coupled with assurances that he will continue to rebuff calls in Congress to knock out Syria’s air force and create a no-fly zone across the country. Unless in response to escalation by Russia and Iran, those actions could render impossible the strategic equilibrium that could drive the warring parties to stop fighting — and may end with the U.S. “owning” another war in a broken Middle Eastern country.

And now the big questions: How do you arm Syria’s rebels so that they are strong enough to hold their own but not strong enough to win? How do you keep weapons out of the hands of Islamic extremists? How do you bring about balance in a civil war a world away? Is such a balance even possible?

The only honest answer is this: It’s impossible to say. It’s slightly easier to imagine the alternatives at either end of the spectrum. One is to involve U.S. forces in another large-scale military action in the Middle East, in the unlikely hope that this produces a moderate and tolerant regime; the other is to allow the slaughter to continue, leaving Iran and Hezbollah free to gain ever-greater control of Syria. In this world of bad choices, the best option for Obama is to persuade U.S. allies to help arm the Free Syrian Army with a specific aim of leading both sides in the conflict to accept a political settlement.