WarSclerotic

Blasts rock Iranian Embassy in Beirut – Israel News, Ynetnews.

At least 20 people killed, 96 injured in southern district of Lebanese capital. Official news agency: One explosion caused by suicide bomber, second by car bomb

Roi Kais

At least 20 people were killed Tuesday morning in two strong explosions near the Iranian Embassy in Lebanon. According to one report, several rockets were fired at the area and at least one of them hit the building.

The area of the blasts in southern Beirut is considered a Hezbollah stronghold. The Shiite organization is a close ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad and is helping him in his war against Syrian rebels.

The official Lebanese news agency reported that according to an initial investigation, the first blast was caused by a suicide bomber and the second one was triggered by a terrorist driving a car bomb. According to estimates, the explosive devices weighed more than 100 kilograms (220 pounds).

The Hezbollah-affiliated al-Mayadeen network reported that at least seven people were killed and several were injured in a car bomb explosion in the al-Janah region.

Scene of blast (Photo: Reuters) 

The Hezbollah affiliated al-Manar network reported that 10 people had been killed in the explosions. The embassy building sustained heavy damage, according to the reports, and at least 10 vehicles caught fire.

According to a correspondent of the Lebanese network, clerics and security guards were hurt in the blasts near the embassy.

The Voice of Lebanon 93.3 radio station reported that the Iranian Embassy said it was not the target of the attack and that the Iranian ambassador was not hurt.

Lebanese security organizations are encircling the scene of the attack and rescue forces are attempting to assist the injured. The Hezbollah organization has stationed massive forces at the entrance to the Dahiya quarter.

The deadly attack comes several days after Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah made two rare performances in south Beirut in honor of the Shiite Ashura holiday. In a speech he delivered before the holiday, Nasrallah said: “Tomorrow nothing but will separate us from Hussein but Allah’s will. No danger, no attack, no bloodshed and no car bomb.”

Several terror attacks have taken place in Lebanon in recent months, including in the Dahiya controlled by Hezbollah. Dozens of people have been killed in the attack, which were believed to be acts of revenge over the involvement of Hassan Nasrallah’s organization in the civil war in Syria.

Four new Iranian conditions block nuclear accord in Geneva. Lavrov intercedes with Rouhani, attacks Israel.

Khamenei and Ahmadinejad nuclear buddies

The US and Russian presidents after bringing all their weight to bear on Tehran have failed to gain an inch toward a possible deal at the resumed nuclear talks in Geneva Wednesday Nov. 20, after being blocked by hardliners at the Iranian end. Tuesday, Kayhan, the mouthpiece of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards, ran an article telling Foreign Minister Javad Zarif he should not go to Geneva at all.

debkafile’s Iranian sources reveal the red lines with which the Iranian delegation to the talks has been armed for accepting an interim deal with the six powers on their nuclear program:

1)  Iran will not shut down its underground enrichment plant at Fordo.
2)  Work on building the Arak heavy water reactor will not be halted.
3)  Iran will not allow the export of a single gram of its enriched uranium from the country.
4)  Iran will not sign the Additional Protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty which expands international supervision of its nuclear program and permits snap inspections.
That the radicals are calling the shots in Tehran was obvious to every Iranian from the large blow-ups of the intransigent ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad adorning Tehran newspapers in the last couple of days. President Hassan Rouhani may be elected president, but his campaign of smiles to the West has been superseded by the radical nuclear line espoused by the man he defeated at the polls.  Ahmadinejad is riding high again in Tehran.
Zarif has admitted that his life may be forfeit if he dares make concessions to the West. Still, he is likely to take his seat at the resumed Geneva conference Wednesday, even though the fourtough  directives tie him hand and foot. Therefore, unless Tehran is suddenly persuaded to moderate its position, this conference has nowhere to go.

Given the political balance in Tehran – which debkafile began covering in exclusive reports Monday – it is hard to see a deal coming out of Geneva, unless President Barack Obama accepts the four Iranian noes and gives the radical rulers of the Islamic Republic a major success.
US Secretary of State John Kerry therefore sees no point in visiting Israel Friday as he planned. It might be a bit much for him to turn up empty-handed insofar as a nuclear deal with Iran is concerned, and also watch his second major effort, the peace track with the Palestinians, floundering between flops.

debkafile note the strange paradox of two leaders, Ayatollah Khamenei and Prime Minister Netanyahu, who are implacable adversaries in all else, maneuvering with all their might for the same object of taking the wind out of the sails of a potential nuclear deal between the six powers and Iran.
Khamenei is confident he can bring President Obama to heel and force him to live with key elements of Iran’s nuclear bomb program. Israel wants that program brought a lot closer to its dismantlement by tougher sanctions. He is seconded in this demand by France in public statements by its president Francois Hollande, and Saudi Arabia, which prefers not to admit to supporting the Israeli campaign.

Early Tuesday, the heavyweights of Washington and Moscow went into action for a last-ditch bid to tip the scales back in favor of the deal.
President Obama appealed in person to US senators to postpone legislation for tougher sanctions against Iran. They are expected to agree to put off the bipartisan initiative until next month.

President Putin was on the phone to Rouhani, after which the Kremlin announced, “There is a real chance for a nuclear deal.”

Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov talked by phone and then, each according to his style, berated Netanyahu.

The US Secretary said: “I have great respect for Netanyahu’s concerns about his country.” He has “every right” to state his opposition to a potential nuclear deal with Iran and defend what “he perceives” is in Israel’s interests.  But, he aloso assured “Netanyahu, ordinary Israelis and pro-Israel members of Congress who are opposed to the proposed agreement” that “Nothing that we are doing here, in my judgment, will put Israel at any additional risk. In fact, let me make this clear, we believe it reduces risk.”

Without mentioning Israel or Netanyahu, Lavrov rejected their assessment that the deal on the table would leave Iran with the capacity to assemble a nuclear weapon within 26 days as “far from reality.” He then criticized those who cast doubt on the intelligence and integrity of the parties conducting negotiations with Iran.
This rebuff came shortly before Netanyahu was due to land in Moscow Wednesday, Nov. 20, for talks with the Russian president and may have been intended to set a stiff tone for those talks.
The contest between the White House and Kremlin over who can beat the Israeli prime minister more effectively may be convenient for venting their frustration over the Iranian leader’s ability to elude any direct attempts to force him into line, or even reach him. They find themselves beating their heads against a blank wall while the radical front, which rejects any reasonable nuclear deal with the West, gains the upper hand in Tehran.

Bennett: Bad deal with Iran will lead to military action | JPost | Israel News.

Bayit Yehudi leader and Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett warned on Monday in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that a “bad deal” with Iran will lead to a military response.

Bennett stressed that Israel wants world powers to come to an agreement on Tehran’s disputed nuclear program. “We just want the right the deal,” he said, adding that “The right deal is one that dismantles the nuclear weapons production machine”.

“There’s no one who wants a war less than us. However, it’s one of those cases where a bad deal will lead to a war, and a good deal with actually prevent war,” he said.

According to Bennett, any deal that allows Iran to keep enrichment capabilities in exchange for an easing of economic sanctions will allow the Islamic Republic to wait until international attention is not so focused on it. At which point, he said Iran would be able to break out with a bomb in six weeks.

Netanyahu: Iran has enough low-grade uranium for 5 nuclear bombs | JPost | Israel News.

PM tells German paper that he wants to be viewed by history “as someone who did everything on his watch to protect the Jewish people and the Jewish state so that the horrors of the past are not repeated.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu kept up his unrelenting lobbying against any interim deal with Iran when nuclear talks resume in Geneva this week, saying that Iran already has five bombs worth of lower enriched uranium.

Netanyahu’s comments came during an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper, published on Tuesday.  Government officials explained that this amount of uranium enriched at a lower level means that it would take relatively little effort – a matter of weeks – for the Islamic Republic to turn it into higher-grade uranium that would make up the fissile material needed for five nuclear bombs.

Netanyahu reiterated in the interview that Iran should be forced to dismantle its centrifuges and dismantle the plutonium rector being constructed at Arak.

“And if they refuse to do so, increase the sanctions,” he said. “Because the options are not a bad deal or war. There is a third option: Keep the pressure up, in fact increase the pressure.”

Netanyahu said he has made this argument to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is one of the members of the P5+1 negotiating with Iran. Up until now, Germany has not been swayed by the arguments.

The negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 will continue on Wednesday, the same day that Netanyahu will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow to argue against what he is saying at every opportunity is a “bad agreement.”

But Putin believes Iran faces a moment of “real chance” to resolve the longstanding dispute over its nuclear program with the international community, he told Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in a telephone call on Monday.

Requesting the call two days before the third round of Geneva talks, Putin characterized the interim deal being forged in Geneva between the P5+1 and Iran as a possible “solution to this long-running problem.”

US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman is scheduled to fly to Geneva on Tuesday, where she will lead the American delegation in negotiations with Iran, as well as in separate talks in Geneva concerning Syria’s civil war.

In the Bild interview, Netanyahu said the agreement being discussed was indeed “bad” because it did not obligate the Iranians to dismantle any of its capacity to make fissile material for nuclear weapons.

“And if Iran won’t dismantle their centrifuges and their plutonium reactor now with all the pressure, when you reduce the [sanctions] pressure, you think you will get a better deal tomorrow? This is a mistake, a terrible mistake, a historic error,” he said.

Netanyahu said that rather than giving Iran sanctions relief – something he said will give Iran “billions of dollars” – the international community should ratchet up the sanctions.

“And just at a decisive moment when you can actually get Iran to back off – look who’s backing off… The P5+1 would make a terrible mistake by reducing sanctions,” he said.

Strengthening the sanctions, he added, may lead to “a better deal.”

Regarding the public dispute with US Secretary of State John Kerry over Washington’s Iranian policy, Netanyahu said that even among friends there will be disagreements.

“We agree on a lot of things, and on this point we disagree,” he said. “I have to think about the survival of my country and the survival of my people and we are not going to let Ayatollahs with nuclear weapons threaten that.”

Asked how – “considering the Iranian threat” – he wanted to be viewed by history, Netanyahu replied, “As someone who did everything on his watch to protect the Jewish people and the Jewish state so that the horrors of the past are not repeated.”

Obama to Appeal to Senators on Sanctions – News from America – News – Israel National News.

U.S. President Barack Obama

Flash 90

President Barack Obama plans to personally appeal to senators and ask them to hold off on passing new sanctions on Iran.

According to Fox News, Obama is preparing to meet on Tuesday with key senators as part of an ongoing campaign by the administration to convince Congress not to pass new sanctions on Iran while talks in Geneva are under way.

A Senate Democratic leadership aide confirmed to Fox News on Monday that Obama will meet with members of the Senate leadership, as well as the chairmen and top Republicans on several key committees.

The administration is concerned that Congress might press ahead with a new round of tough sanctions on Iran. While lawmakers think additional sanctions could help make Iran more pliable at the negotiating table over its nuclear program, the administration argues it would have the opposite effect.

Tuesday’s meetings will come days after Obama issued a public warning to Congress, saying that a deal in the works could prevent the “unintended consequences” of war.

Obama warned that military action, if diplomacy fails, would have dangerous effects and only fuel an Iranian desire for nuclear weapons.

Over the past few weeks, the President has sent his top officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, to meet with senators and convince them to drop their plans to impose new sanctions on Iran.

The Senate Banking panel has been considering whether to act on legislation hitting Iran’s oil industry. The House overwhelmingly passed such legislation in July, but the White House has been urging Senate Democrats to hold off while multilateral talks on Iran’s nuclear program continue.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry briefed members of the Banking Committee and reportedly told the senators they should ignore anything Israel says about the Iranian nuclear issue.

Negotiators are to meet again later this week in Geneva in hopes of concluding a deal.

The Axis of Hope?.

By Jennifer Rubin
November 18 at 2:30 pm

French President Francois Hollande, left, rekindles the eternal flame at the Hall of Remembrance at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on , Sunday. (Menahem Kahana/Associated Press)

It is a measure of how little respect the Obama administration commands that the best hope for heading off a nuclear-armed Iran may be the Israeli-Saudi-French axis. Unfortunately, the world’s sole superpower seems bent on coming up with excuses (including a flimsy interim deal) not to act. As Aaron David Miller is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, “When the U.S. and Israel are at fundamental odds, it weakens U.S. power in the region and sends very bad signals to America’s other allies. . . . Israel has more in common now with Saudi Arabia.”

The same might be true of Israel and France. Israel gave a hero’s welcome to the French President François Hollande over the weekend. Unlike President Obama, Hollande spoke to the Knesset, promising not to allow Iran to get the bomb. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tells me, “Hollande appears genuinely determined to prevent the West from entering into a deal that would allow Iran to maintain some of the more dangerous components of its illicit nuclear program. As a result, the Iranians are already warning that the next round of talks in Geneva may be ‘difficult.’” This is all the more remarkable insofar as the French are very vocal about their objections to Israel’s settlements. “In other words, France’s opposition to the West’s apparent willingness to enter into a bad deal with Iran stems from its broader concerns about Tehran’s threat to international security,” remarks Schanzer.

As we should be doing, the Israeli-Saudi-French team is deploying two basic strategies.

The first is to make clear the consequences of a bad interim deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has talked about the difficulty in restarting sanctions after businesses have rushed in for their piece of the Iran market. The Saudis have been threatening to get that nuclear weapon on back order with Pakistan.

The second is to make a military threat very believable. Rumors begin circulating in the press about an Israeli-Saudi military alliance: “Israel and Saudi Arabia are secretly working together on plans for a possible attack against Iran in case the Geneva talks fail to roll back its nuclear program, British paper The Sunday Times reported. . . . According to the diplomatic source quoted by the Times, Saudi Arabia has agreed to let Israel use its air space, and assist an Israeli attack by cooperating on the use of drones, rescue helicopters and tanker planes.”

Meanwhile, the Israelis are stating quite clearly and frequently that they do not need the United States in order to act militarily. Israel Hayom reports:

As world powers gear up to continue nuclear negotiations with Iran in Geneva this Wednesday, and as Israel steps up its efforts to prevent a deal that would fail to demand a full suspension of the Iranian nuclear program, former National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror said Sunday that Israel could halt Iran’s nuclear weapons capability “for a very long time.” Amidror, who stepped down officially on Nov. 4, told the Financial Times that the Israeli Air Force had been conducting “very long-range flights . . . all around the world” as part of what he called Israel’s preparations for a possible military strike on Iran. “We are not the United States of America, of course, and believe it or not they have more capabilities than we do, but we have enough to stop the Iranians for a very long time,” he said.

It may be hard for France to resist pressure from the United States to sign on to an interim agreement when the parties meet again this week. But having seized the reins of European leadership (perhaps the West more generally), the French may like their new role and want to remain the critical party in the P5+1 coalition ( United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany). If the U.S. Senate proceeds with sanctions, that may stiffen the French negotiators’ spines even more. In the meantime, we can only marvel that Iranian “linkage” is alive and well — that is, it has brought together Israel and the leading Sunni monarchy. Not exactly what the left had in mind when it badgered Israel on the “peace process,” but then few expected the United States to become so irrelevant in the region.

U.S., Israel need to agree on an Iran deal – The Washington Post.

By Editorial Board, Tuesday, November 19, 2:45 AM

THE RIFT between the United States and Israel over Iran, which some are describing as the worst dispute between the two countries in 30 years, might be seen as yet another chapter in the consistently rocky and sometimes poisonous relations between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That would be a misreading. In reality, the argument reflects a more profound divergence of U.S. and Israeli national interests.

For the war-weary United States, a deal that halts Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon in exchange for partial sanctions relief, which the Obama administration hopes to conclude this week, would greatly reduce the possibility that the United States would be forced to take military action against Iran in the coming months. That risk has been growing because of Tehran’s installation of a new generation of centrifuges for uranium enrichment and because of the approaching completion of a reactor that could produce plutonium. If a long-term accord can be struck during a planned negotiating period of six months, the dangers of a new Middle East war and an Iranian bomb could be alleviated.

Israel, of course, also wishes to avoid war. But Israeli leaders have more to fear than do Americans from a bargain that leaves the bulk of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure in place, even temporarily. If no final settlement were reached, and the larger sanctions regime began to crumble — as the Israelis fear it would — Iran could be left with a nuclear breakout capacity as well as a revived economy. From Israel’s point of view, keeping sanctions in place until Iran agrees to a definitive compromise — or its regime buckles — looks like a safer bet.

But even a permanent settlement would be unattractive to Israel if it meant that the United States would step back from the regional conflict spawned by Iran’s decades-old effort to gain hegemony over the Middle East. Like Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab governments, Israel does not wish to be left alone to face Iranian aggression in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon or its terrorist activities across the region.

In the short run, there’s probably no way to bridge the divide between Jerusalem and Washington — unless Iran turns down the generous offer the United States and a coalition of five other nations have put forward. The administration has flatly rejected Mr. Netanyahu’s objections to an interim deal, and Congress appears unlikely to respond to Israeli lobbying for additional sanctions before the next Geneva meeting. Mr. Netanyahu would be wise to accept that an interim accord is likely to go forward without his agreement and let Iran take the blame if it does not.

Rather than argue in public, U.S. and Israeli officials should be working to forge a consensus on the terms of an acceptable final settlement with Iran. There, differences may not be as great: While Mr. Netanyahu campaigns for a permanent end to Iranian enrichment, a large reduction in Iran’s nuclear capacity, combined with more intrusive inspections, would leave Israel far more secure than at present. At the same time, the Obama administration ought to be assuring Israel and Arab allies that it will continue to reject Iran’s regional ambitions, respond to its aggressive acts and support the aspirations of Iranians for a democratic regime that respects human rights. With such understandings in place, the U.S.-Israeli argument would be manageable.

© The Washington Post Company

If Israel strikes Iran, Dempsey says U.S. ‘would meet’ obligations – CNN Security Clearance – CNN.com Blogs.

( What’s the significance of this?  Too cryptic for me to decipher… – JW )