WarSclerotic

Iran’s Khamenei: US intervention in Syria would be ‘disaster’ for Mideast | JPost | Israel News.

DUBAI – Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday that US intervention in Syria would be “a disaster for the region”, the ISNA state news agency reported.

“The intervention of America will be a disaster for the region. The region is like a gunpowder store and the future cannot be predicted,” the agency quoted him as saying.

As the United States mulls response to the escalating situation in Syria, Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi warned Washington of launching military action against his country on Sunday.

“The basic repercussion would be a ball of fire that would burn not only Syria but the whole Middle East,” Zoubi told Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen TV.

“An attack on Syria would be no easy trip,” he added.

Similar warnings also came from Iran, one of President Bashar Assad’s main allies.

Massoud Jazayeri, deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, warned the United States on Sunday against crossing the “red line” on Syria, saying it would have “severe consequences”, according to the Fars news agency.

“America knows the limitation of the red line of the Syrian front and any crossing of Syria’s red line will have severe consequences for the White House,” Jazayeri said, reacting to statements by Western officials regarding the possibility of military intervention in Syria, according to Fars.

Any U.S. strike against Syria likely to last ‘hours not days’ | Fox News.

Any U.S. strike against Syria is “likely to last hours not days” and probably would not come before the British Parliament votes on military action Thursday, a senior U.S. defense official told Fox News.

Sources tell Fox that a strike would be led by the U.S. Navy and its assets positioned in the Eastern Mediterranean and that it would be limited in scope.

The details about how a strike could unfold come as the administration builds its case for possible intervention in Syria, in response to an alleged chemical attack against civilians there last week.

Four U.S. Navy destroyers are in position, along with at least one nuclear-powered submarine. A British submarine is also available if Britain’s Parliament approves military action.

Air Force stand-off weapons also are likely to be used, including long range stealth bombers, according to a source.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel spoke to his British and French counterparts by phone Tuesday during a trip to Asia. In an interview with the BBC, he said the U.S. military was in position and “ready to go.”

According to U.S. military officials, there are no plans in the initial mission to strike or secure President Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons, which are spread among 50 different sites, some of which are underground.

In fact it is not even possible, experts say, to use air strikes to carry out surgical strikes on chemical weapons storage facilities, despite suggestions from some U.S. legislators in weekend interviews that that be the preferred action. Air strikes would release those toxic chemicals into the air, potentially causing more mass casualties.

Assad is estimated to have more than 1,000 tons of chemical weapons. Any plans to secure them would require Special Operations and boots on the ground – and neither is on the table right now, according to Pentagon officials.

“It seems to me that what we’re looking at here is sort of shock and awe light,” said Retired Major General Bob Scales, a Fox News military analyst and former commandant of the Army War College.

“That is a simple cruise missile strike from mostly sea-delivered platforms launched outside the umbrella of Syrian air defense intended to strike high visibility targets like command and control or perhaps some missile and weapon placements.”

The current goal, according to a senior U.S. defense official, “is to deter the regime from using chemical weapons in the future and to degrade its capabilities…we have a military solution for that.”

Pentagon officials confirm that strike plans do not include regime change, so there is little need for waves of air or missile strikes over several days.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey has said repeatedly that “there is no military solution” for regime change in Syria.

According to one senior U.S. defense official, in response to reports that a window to strike could open as early as Thursday, “the window to strike is open now from a military perspective. The decision about timing is political.”

NATO has called an emergency meeting in Brussels on Wednesday. No decision to strike is likely to be made before then.

Each U.S. Navy destroyer can carry up to 90 Tomahawks at one time. Each Tomahawk costs more than $650,000 to fire. Weather does not play a role in when a Tomahawk cruise missile can be launched.

The problem with Tomahawks is they don’t often deliver the desired effect, according to Philip Coyle, a former Obama administration official who once served as chief DoD weapons tester.

“Mostly it’s just that we don’t get the result we hoped for,” Coyle told Fox. “The leader of the country, bad guy though that leader may be, doesn’t give up, and so it leads to wider war. It leads to many innocent civilians being hurt or killed and doesn’t produce the result we hoped for in the first place.”

Dempsey returned early Tuesday from a pre-scheduled visit to Jordan, where he spoke about Syria with the Chiefs of Defense from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

Moral outrage and what comes next | Jerusalem Post – Blogs.

Ira Scharansky

As of this writing, the betting is that Obama will decide to strike Syria, as punishment for its use of chemical weapons.

“What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world. It defies any code of morality . . . Make no mistake, President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people.”

By “the world’s most vulnerable people” Kerry most likely does not mean anyone connected with the rebels who killed those truck drivers, or who have managed to kill more than a few of Assad’s troops and captured some of his tanks.

Iran’s role | JPost | Israel News.

UK Parliament, US Congress set to give green light on Syria strike | JPost | Israel News.

Report: Assad is in Iran – Middle East – News – Israel National News.

( Makes sense his family would accompany him for “talks” about the strike.  AKA “fleeing.” – JW )

Assad on state television channel Al-Ikhbariya

AFP photo

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and members of his family are in Tehran, after they arrived at Homeini Airport in the presidential plane Tuesday night, sources in Iran’s foreign ministry told the website of Lebanese newsaper a-Nahar. The news did not receive confirmation from other official sources.

Daily newspaper Israel Hayom, which cites the report, notes that a-Nahar is considered close to Hezbollah as well as to the leadership in Syria and Iran.

According to the a-Nahar report, Assad was also accompanied by senior members of his government. They are to hold discussions with senior Iranians regarding the Syrian response to a possible U.S. strike on Syria, which is expected to take place soon.

A senior official in the Syrian army warned the United States and its allies on Tuesday that waging a full-scale war on Syria would be reciprocated with an immediate attack on Tel Aviv.

“If Damascus comes under attack, Tel Aviv will be targeted too and a full-scale war against Syria will actually issue a license for attacking Israel,” the Syrian army source told the Iranian Fars news agency.

“Rest assured that if Syria is attacked, Israel will also be set on fire and such an attack will, in turn, engage Syria’s neighbors,” he added.

The source also warned the U.S. and other Western states that if Syria grows weak, “certain irresponsible groups” will be formed which will endanger Israel’s security.

Obama Planning Limited Missile Strike – Report – Middle East – News – Israel National News.

U.S. President Barack Obama

Flash 90

The United States is planning a limited strike in Syria that would “deter and degrade” Bashar al-Assad’s military withgout dramatically altering the balance of power between his forces and those of the rebels, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing senior defense officials.

The weapon of choice, defhints the article, would probably be Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from the U.S. destroyers currently in the Mediterranean, which would be aimed at Syrian military targets and other regime targets.

Chemical-weapons supplies are not on the list of targets because of the potential for widespread collateral damage, the officials said.

The Journal added that the Obama administration’s planning “appears likely to mirror, in scope and tone, punitive strikes taken under President Bill Clinton in 1998 against al Qaeda, and Operation Desert Fox, a four-day military campaign by U.S. and British forces against Iraq in December that same year.”

Two weeks after al Qaeda bombs caused massive carnnage at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 – killing more than 200 people, including 12 Americans – Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on al Qaeda training bases in Afghanistan and a factory in Sudan. These limited attacks later came under criticism for sending the wrong message to Al Qaeda, which was emboldened and proceeded to carry out the catastrophic 2001 9/11 attack just three years later.

In Operation Desert Fox, U.S. and British forces used cruise missiles and aircraft in a major four-day bombing campaign with an aim to degrade Iraq’s then-President Saddam Hussein’s ability to make chemical and biological weapons. The December 1998 campaign came in response to Iraq’s failure to comply with United Nations Security Council resolutions as well as their interference with United Nations Special Commission inspectors. Its stated goal was to strike military and security targets in Iraq that contribute to Iraq’s ability to produce, store, maintain and deliver weapons of mass destruction.

CNN delivered a similar message to its readers, quoting a senior Administration official who said the strike would be limited in time, and no more than “a quick response to the use of chemical weapons.”

“Factors weighing into the timing of any action include a desire to get it done before the president leaves for Russia next week and before the administration has to make a decision on whether to suspend aid to Egypt because of the ongoing political turmoil there,” the official explained.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal called on the International Community on Tuesday to take “decisive and serious” position against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“The rejection of the Syrian regime of all serious and earnest Arab efforts …. requires a decisive and serious standby the international community to stop the humanitarian tragedy of the Syrian people,” Prince al-Faisal said, according to the state news agency SPA.

Meanwhile, the Arab League blamed al-Assad for the chemical weapons attack outside Damascus a week ago, and urged the 15-member U.N. Security Council to take action. The Arab League holds Syria “fully responsible for the ugly crime and demands that all the perpetrators of this heinous crime be presented for international trials,” the statement said.

Diplomatic sources told Al Arabiya that the Arab League’s statement had been pushed through by the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in the knowledge that air strikes were being discussed.

Report: 20 injured in another chemical attack in Syria – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Media report second chemical attack in Damascus. Assad affiliates say if Syria is attacked it would strike Israel

Roi Kais

Arab media reported Wednesday that another chemical attack struck Syrian territory, injuring several people in the Jobar neighborhood in eastern Damascus.

According to Al Jazeera, the number of injured was 20, whereas Al-Arabiya reported of nine.

Media also reported of a blast in the al Mujahedeen neighborhood, also in the Syrian capital. The circumstances of the blast are still unclear.

Syria’s opposition coalition said on Tuesday President Bashar Assad‘s forces had dropped phosphorus bombs and napalm on civilians in rural Aleppo on Monday, killing at least 10 people and wounding dozens.

Video footage uploaded on the Internet, apparently of Monday’s attack, showed doctors frantically smearing white cream on the reddened skin of several screaming people, many of them young boys. “Assad’s military aircraft have hit populated areas with the internationally prohibited phosphorus bombs and napalm,” the opposition coalition said in a statement.

According to a Tuesday Foreign Policy magazine, US intelligence has intercepted an urgent phone call placed by a senior Syrian Defense Ministry official with a commander in a chemical weapons unit.

According to the report, the official contacted the commander to demand answers for the alleged chemical attack that killed more than 1,000 people in a Damascus suburb August 21. The call is the US’ main proof that Assad’s regime is responsible for the attack.

Assad affiliates insinuate Scud attack on Israel

Kuwait paper Al Rai has quoted sources close to Syrian President Bashar Assad as hinting that the embattled regime would attack Israel if Western forces launch an attack on its territory.

“Iraqi Scuds flew thousands of kilometers to reach Israel while Syrian missiles are no more than 50 km away from Israel’s most sensitive facilities,” the source said.

“If Israel wants to retaliate to a Syrian attack, the regime’s response will go further because it has nothing to lose,” he added, noting “A drowning man is not afraid to get wet.”

Israel’s interest: That Assad not be victorious | The Times of Israel.

On the eve of what seems to be imminent US action in Syria, two local experts have similar conclusions about Jerusalem’s preferred scenario

A Tomahawk cruise missile fired from aboard a US destroyer. (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

With four US warships prowling the eastern Mediterranean, poised to respond to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s apparent usage of chemical weapons, Israeli security chiefs have likely swiveled their intelligence-collecting antennae to the Syrian front and lowered their public profiles, seeking neither to be seen as the instigator of a US strike, nor as provoking a Syrian response.

The US, for reasons ranging from presidential prestige to moral imperatives to strict national interests, seems ready to act. “I think it is fair to say that, as difficult as the problem is, this is something that is going to require America’s attention and hopefully the entire international community’s attention,” President Barack Obama told CNN over the weekend.

But of the many options open to the US — from a tongue lashing to a limited strike to a debilitating blow to the Assad regime — which, if any, serves Israel’s national interests?

Brig. Gen. (ret) Shlomo Brom, a senior research fellow at the Institute of National Security Studies, said his view has changed over the course of the brutal war in Syria. “At first, I was one of those who said that the best possible scenario is that Assad put down the rebellion like his father did,” said Brom, a former head of the IDF’s Strategic Planning Division. His thinking at the time, he said, was that if Syria was deterred by Israel, the chances of war were slim to none, and he believed that Assad, despite his ties to Hezbollah and Iran, sincerely sought a peace agreement with Israel.

“But now Syria has begun playing on a much bigger court,” Brom said Sunday, noting that the Syrian civil war had pitted Saudi Arabia and Qatar against Iran and, to a certain extent, the US against Russia. “Therefore, Israel’s interest is that he not be victorious,” he said of Assad.

Syrian President Bashar Assad speaks at the Opera House in central Damascus, Syria, on Sunday, January 6, 2013. (photo credit: AP/SANA)

From Israel’s perspective, there are two good US options and one bad one, Brom went on. The first and most likely scenario entails a strike that is punitive in nature and limited in time and scope. A one-time barrage of Tomahawk sea-to-surface missiles against a symbolic Syrian target — much like the 1998 US strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan — would not have a significant impact on the outcome of the conflict, said Brom, but it would be helpful in that it would likely deter Assad from continuing to use chemical weapons.

On the other end of the spectrum is a “true and effective intervention.” That type of move, perhaps entailing actions akin to the March 1999 invasion of Yugoslavia, is not likely, Brom said.

Shlomo Brom (photo credit: Courtesy)

But it would be far preferable to the middle ground — the bad alternative — which might entail “a true intervention that is not effective,” Brom said characterizing such a step as the kind that “allowed the war to grind on and on.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, in July wrote a letter to Congress outlining five possible options for US action in Syria, the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported. Options No. 4 and 5 — creating buffer zones to protect civilians and seizing control of all chemical weapons, respectively — would fit neatly into Brom’s least desirable category.

Professor Efraim Inbar, the head of the BESA Center for Strategic Studies, was unequivocal about the ultimate Israeli interest. “There are no good options,” he said of the situation in Syria. “But the Israeli interest is that Bashar not survive.”

As an ally of Iran, Israel’s No. 1 enemy, Assad has to go, even at the cost of anarchy or extremist Sunni control in Damascus, Inbar indicated.

Efraim Inbar (photo credit: Courtesy)

Asked whether a US strike could trigger a retaliation against Israel, as happened during the first Gulf War, and whether the nature of the US strike might dictate the severity of Assad’s response, both Brom and Inbar were cautious yet dubious of Assad’s willingness to attack Israel.

“There was a broad Arab coalition against Saddam,” Inbar claimed, asserting that the point of Saddam Hussein’s missile launches in January 1991 was to drag Israel into the fray and thereby fracture the Arab unity. “Here there’s hardly any Arab coalition at all.”

Brom said Assad’s bottom line was “survivability” — a goal that clashed with a major strike against Israel. “Syria is right on our border,” he said. “We can be very effective there… actually, more so than the Americans.”

Exclusive: Intercepted Calls Prove Syrian Army Used Nerve Gas, U.S. Spies Say | The Cable.

Posted By Noah Shachtman Tuesday, August 27, 2013 – 8:54 PM

Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned. And that is the major reason why American officials now say they’re certain that the attacks were the work of the Bashar al-Assad regime — and why the U.S. military is likely to attack that regime in a matter of days.

But the intercept raises questions about culpability for the chemical massacre, even as it answers others: Was the attack on Aug. 21 the work of a Syrian officer overstepping his bounds? Or was the strike explicitly directed by senior members of the Assad regime? “It’s unclear where control lies,” one U.S. intelligence official told The Cable. “Is there just some sort of general blessing to use these things? Or are there explicit orders for each attack?”

Nor are U.S. analysts sure of the Syrian military’s rationale for launching the strike — if it had a rationale at all. Perhaps it was a lone general putting a long-standing battle plan in motion; perhaps it was a miscalculation by the Assad government. Whatever the reason, the attack has triggered worldwide outrage, and put the Obama administration on the brink of launching a strike of its own in Syria. “We don’t know exactly why it happened,” the intelligence official added. “We just know it was pretty fucking stupid.”

American intelligence analysts are certain that chemical weapons were used on Aug. 21 — the captured phone calls, combined with local doctors’ accounts and video documentation of the tragedy — are considered proof positive. That is why the U.S. government, from the president on down, has been unequivocal in its declarations that the Syrian military gassed thousands of civilians in the East Ghouta region.

However, U.S. spy services still have not acquired the evidence traditionally considered to be the gold standard in chemical weapons cases: soil, blood, and other environmental samples that test positive for reactions with nerve agent. That’s the kind of proof that America and its allies processed from earlier, small-scale attacks that the White House described in equivocal tones, and declined to muster a military response to in retaliation.

There is an ongoing debate within the Obama administration about whether to strike Assad immediately — or whether to allow United Nations inspectors to try and collect that proof before the bombing begins. On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called the work of that team “redundant … because it is clearly established already that chemical weapons have been used on a significant scale.”

But within the intelligence community, at least, “there’s an interest in letting the U.N. piece run its course,” the official said. “It puts the period on the end of the sentence.”

When news about the Ghouta incident first trickled out, there were questions about whether or not a chemical agent was to blame for the massacre. But when weapons experts and U.S. intelligence analysts began reviewing the dozens of videos and pictures allegedly taken from the scene of the attacks, they quickly concluded that a nerve gas, such as sarin, had been used there. The videos showed young victims who were barely able to breathe and, in some cases, twitching. Close-up photos revealed that their pupils were severely constricted. Doctors and nurses who say they treated the victims reported that they later became short of breath as well. Eyewitnesses talk of young children so confused, they couldn’t even indentify their own parents. All of these are classic signs of exposure to a nerve agent like sarin, the Assad regime’s chemical weapon of choice.

Making the case even more conclusive were the images of the missiles that supposedly delivered the deadly attacks. If they were carrying conventional warheads, they would have likely been all but destroyed as they detonated. But several missiles in East Ghouta were found largely intact. “Why is there so much rocket left? There shouldn’t be so much rocket left,” the intelligence official told The Cable. The answer, the official and his colleagues concluded, was that the weapon was filled with nerve agent, not a conventional explosive.

In the days after the attacks, there was a great deal of public discussion about which side in Syria’s horrific civil war actually launched the strike. Allies of the Assad regime, like Iran and Russia, pointed the finger at the opposition. The intercepted communications told a different story — one in which the Syrian government was clearly to blame.

The official White House line is that the president is still considering his options for Syria. But all of Washington is talking about a punitive strike on the Assad government in terms of when, not if. Even some congressional doves have said they’re now at least open to the possibility of U.S. airstrikes in Syria. Images of dead children, neatly stacked in rows, have a way of changing minds.

“It’s horrible, it’s stupid,” the intelligence official said about the East Ghouta attack by the Syrian military. “Whatever happens in the next few days — they get what they deserve.”