WarSclerotic

Source: Top Iranian general: We can destroy Israel ‘in three days’ | The Times of Israel

Amid rising tensions between IDF and Iranian forces in Syria, IRGC deputy leader says Jewish state ‘will not find enough graves to bury their dead’

By TOI STAFFToday, 12:54 am

A top Iranian general said Thursday his country has developed a “strategic capacity” to destroy Israel.

“We warn them [Zionists] that if a new war breaks out, it will result in their termination,” Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami, the second-in-command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said at a conference in the Iranian city of Mashhad, according to the regime-linked Tasnim news agency.

Tasnim went on to paraphrase Salami as saying that “Iran has warned the Zionist regime not to play with fire, because they will be destroyed before the US helps them.”

He vowed that a new war “will result in Israel’s defeat within three days, in a way that they will not find enough graves to bury their dead.”

The comments followed a series of reciprocal taunts by Israeli and Iranian leaders in recent weeks amid rising tensions on the Israeli-Syrian border between IDF and Iranian forces.

In this photo provided Friday, January 25, 2019, by the Iranian Army, soldiers take position in an infantry drill in the central Isfahan province, Iran. (Iranian Army via AP)

On Tuesday, Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, warned that terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah were prepared to unleash an “inferno” on the Jewish state.

Speaking at a space tech conference, Shamkhani spoke of “hundreds of kilometers of tunnels dug underneath [Israelis’] feet, and when the resistance forces in Gaza and Lebanon have missiles with pinpoint accuracy and are ready to respond to any foolish Israeli behavior with an inferno.”

Also on Tuesday, Iran’s Defense Minister Amir Hatami railed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign against Iran’s missile program. The program was among the reasons cited by US President Donald Trump for leaving the 2015 nuclear deal last year and reimposing crippling sanctions.

“The enemies say Iran’s missile power should be eliminated, but we have repeatedly said our missile capabilities are not negotiable,” Hatami said, according to Reuters.

On Monday, the IRGC’s Salami told a reporter in Tehran that Iran’s strategy was to eventually wipe Israel off the “global political map.”

An IDF tank deployed to the Golan Heights, near the Syria border, on July 1, 2018. (Israel Defense Forces)

Iran and Israel have increasingly clashed in Syria, where Jerusalem is attempting to keep Tehran’s forces from entrenching themselves militarily.

Israel sees Iranian entrenchment in Syria as a major threat and in recent years has carried out hundreds of airstrikes in Syria against targets linked to Iran, which alongside its proxies and Russia, is fighting on behalf of the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Source: Crowds chant ‘death to Israel’ as Iran marks 40 years since Islamic Revolution | The Times of Israel

Thousands gather at tomb of Islamic Republic’s founder Khomeini on the anniversary of his return from exile; senior cleric rails against US

The climactic events that year in Iran — where footage of revolutionaries in the streets gave way to black-and-white images of blindfolded American hostages in the US Embassy hostage crisis months later — not only changed Iran’s history but also helped shape today’s Middle East.

The anniversary starts every year on February 1 — the day Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned home from France, after 14 years in exile, to become the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Across Iran, sirens rang out from trains and boats and church bells chimed at 9:33 a.m. Friday — the exact time Khomeini’s chartered Air France Boeing 747 touched down 40 years ago at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport.

In this photo from February 1, 1979, at Tehran airport shows Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (C) posing aboard the Air France Boeing 747 jumbo that flew him back from exile in France to Tehran. (Gabriel Duval/AFP)

The 10-day anniversary festivities, known as the “Ten Days of Dawn,” end on February 11, the date Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s government collapsed after brief clashes between some units of the army and revolutionary gunmen and following nationwide protests.

In memory of those events, car drivers turned on their headlights and honked in celebration as helicopters dropped clusters of flowers along the 21-mile route from the airport to the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran where Khomeini made his first speech back home and where his tomb stands today.

As part of the celebrations, many Tehran buildings, mostly of government institutions and offices, dawned on Friday draped in the colors of Iran’s green-white-and-red flag while multi-colored lights decorated the main streets.

ISNA news agency posted a video of ships blasting their horns in celebration in the Gulf port of Bandar Abbas, southern Iran.

Two arms and military equipment fairs have opened in the capital, showcasing the weaponry developed and manufactured in Iran over the past four decades, especially its prized ballistic missiles.

As an army band played revolutionary anthems, the huge hall of the mausoleum was filled with people from all walks of life, amid schoolchildren dressed in the red, white and green of the Iranian flag.

Chairman of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, gives a speech in Tehran at the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, on the 40th anniversary of his return from exile from in Paris, on February 1, 2019. (Stringer/AFP)

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, head of the influential experts assembly which appoints the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, delivered a keynote speech rebuking factions seeking better ties with Washington.

“Curses on the wrong school of thought that thinks we can’t run the country unless America helps us,” he said, shaking a raised left hand.

“America’s power is on the decline, we should not be afraid of America,” Jannati said as the crowd shouted slogans such as “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

Iranian officials — including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani — on Wednesday paid homage to Khomeini’s tomb “to renew allegiance” to the late leader.

Iranian state TV broadcast archive footage of Khomeini’s return and the daily mass demonstrations across Iran in support to his revolution.

Khomeini was accompanied on the flight home by dozens of journalists, a few of his associates and only one family member, his younger son Ahmad.

The plane was only half full, to keep room for extra fuel in case of an immediate return to Paris if the plane couldn’t land in Tehran. Supporters of the shah’s regime had closed the airport the week before and Khomeini’s allies in Tehran feared possible threats against his life.

Source: Iran scaling up uranium production and mining, atomic chief says | The Times of Israel

Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Islamic Republic’s Atomic Energy Organization, says country is set to produce 300 tons of yellowcake per year

By TOI STAFFToday, 2:54 pm

Iran announced Wednesday that it was producing large amounts of yellowcake, a precursor to enriched uranium, and had shipped two batches of the material to a uranium conversion facility.

Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said the Islamic Republic was ready to increase its production of yellowcake to 300 tons per year over the next five to six years, and had shipped 30 tons from the Shahid Rezaeinzhad Industrial Complex in the central province of Yazd to a conversion facility in Isfahan province, according to Iranian media reports.

Salehi delivered the message to Iran’s Channel 2 news from the production complex.

“Today, we are witnessing the completion of an important link: uranium production,” Salehi said, according to a translation by the Washington-based non-profit Middle East Media Research Institute. “This is our first plant of a large scale, and we are using the latest technologies.”

Salehi said that the new facility was at full capacity, that Iran was extracting uranium from a mine in Yazd province and other still-unidentified mines, and had discovered large amounts of the material in the country through aerial surveys.

He said they were planning on building additional plants similar to the Shahid Rezaeinzhad Industrial Complex in the same province.

Yellowcake is a uranium concentrate in powder form and an early step in uranium processing. It is produced by mining uranium ore from rocks and separating the uranium from the rocks by bathing them in acid. The yellowcake can then be converted, enriched to raise its purity, and then used for weapons or energy production.

Last month, Salehi said that Iran had deceived nuclear inspectors by quietly purchasing replacement parts for its Arak nuclear reactor while it was conducting negotiations for an international agreement under which it knew it would be required to destroy the original components.

US Secretary of State John Kerry (left) speaks with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif after the UN atomic watchdog verifies that Iran has met all conditions of the July 2015 nuclear deal, in Vienna, Austria, on January 16, 2016. (AFP/Kevin Lamarque/Pool)

Salehi recalled that during talks for the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 deal that lifted sanctions on Iran in return for it dismantling the weapons-capable parts of its nuclear program, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned his country’s negotiators that he expected Western parties to renege on the agreement.

“When our team was in the midst of the negotiations, we knew that [the Westerners] would ultimately renege on their promises,” Salehi said. “The leader [Khamenei] warned us that they were violators of agreements. We had to act wisely. Not only did we avoid destroying the bridges that we had built, but we also built new bridges that would enable us to go back faster if needed.”

Salehi insisted that such subterfuge did not indicate that Iran was or is seeking nuclear weapons, as the Trump administration and Israel insist. Iran’s plan was to modernize the Arak reactor, which was based on an old Russian design, and use the new facility to produce reduced quantities of plutonium that would be used for nuclear fuel, but not weapons, he said.

US President Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal in May last year but the other signatories, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and Iran have all agreed to try to keep the pact alive on their own. Trump insists the original agreement did not go far enough in curbing Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions and wants to renegotiate the JCPOA with stricter terms. In the meantime Washington has imposed heavy sanctions on Iran that could weaken the ability of the remaining parties to maintain the deal.

Last week Salehi said Iran has begun “preliminary activities for designing” a modern process for 20-percent uranium enrichment. Restarting enrichment at that level would mean Iran had withdrawn from the 2015 nuclear deal.

Tehran has in the past warned that if the remaining parties are not able to keep up the trade and financial benefits the deal provided, it will also pull out and restart controversial parts of its nuclear program.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: US Senate: Islamists in Syria, Afghanistan still a threat – Israel Hayom

Source: Lebanese government formed, Hezbollah makes significant gains – Israel Hayom

Source: Facebook blocks 783 Iran-linked pages, accounts and groups from its service – Israel Hayom

( I’m surprised.  I thought they were only blocking conservative accounts…  – JW ))  

The social network says the fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram typically misrepresented themselves as locals with the intent of disrupting politics and elections • In Israel, the bogus Iranian accounts focused on highlighting the Palestinian issue.

Source: Nasrallah, Gaza leaders plot disruptions of Israel’s election, including rocket fire – DEBKAfile

Source: Nasrallah, Gaza leaders plot disruptions of Israel’s election, including rocket fire – DEBKAfile

This is a review of the book Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness by Kenneth Pollack.

Why do Arab militaries perform so badly in war? The answer given is below.  

(I would also specifically mention Islam as a component of the culture as well.)

The main source of Arab military ineffectiveness is culture. “It seems unlikely that it is mere coincidence that the most damaging problems that Arab armed forces have suffered in battle just happen to conform perfectly to patterns of behavior emphasized by the dominant Arab culture,” Pollack writes. “It gets even harder to buy given that Arab organizations in other walks of life experience precisely the same patterns of behavior as their armies, despite the fact that those other organizations were not trained by the Soviets, nor were they subject to coup-proofing or other forms of politicization, nor did they behave like similar organizations in other developing countries.”

Pollack identifies key aspects of Arab culture relevant to the book: conformity, centralization of authority, deference to authority and passivity, group loyalty, manipulation of information, atomization of knowledge, personal courage, and ambivalence toward manual labor and technical work. One can see how these values and behaviors will negatively affect military performance, especially the most glaring problem for Arab armed forces: poor tactical leadership from junior officers. Consistently, these officers fail to show any initiative or creativity—they rarely if ever adapt quickly to changing circumstances in battle. This makes perfect sense, though, if one considers these soldiers were trained to conform and defer to authority. This stands in stark contrast to the Israeli military, whose soldiers were raised in the “Start-Up Nation,” which encourages innovation from all ranks.

The Mirage of Arab Military Might

Why do Arab militaries perform so badly in war? Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, Chad’s defeat over Libya in 1987, the Islamic State’s humiliation of the Iraqi security forces—why do they lose when, by all objective measures, they should win? And when they win, why are their victories so small?

These questions are not just academic. Indeed, their answers are central to American foreign policy in the Middle East, for today and for the future.

Go back to May 2014, when then-President Barack Obama told a graduating class of West Point cadets that training foreign soldiers was central to his strategy on counterterrorism. “We have to develop a strategy that matches this diffuse threat—one that expands our reach without sending forces that stretch our military too thin or stir up local resentments,” Obama said. “We need partners to fight terrorists alongside us.” His idea was to deploy small numbers of military trainers and advisers to the Middle East and elsewhere to assist local forces, keeping the American footprint to a minimum.

More than four years later, President Donald Trump has continued this approach, which, along with his decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, indicate that the United States will need to rely on Middle Eastern forces to do their own fighting. Given that the United States will still have vital interests in the Middle East to protect, Washington will need to care even more about the effectiveness of Arab armed forces.

Enter Kenneth Pollack, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Pollack’s new book, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness, seeks to explain the reasons for Arab military weakness since World War II and why the same problems are consistent across the Arab world. Sweeping in its scope yet accessible to the layman, Armies of Sand is a remarkable scholarly achievement that should be required reading for anyone involved in forming American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Arab armed forces have performed poorly in numerous areas of warfare. These problems—too many to list here—range from poor tactical leadership by junior officers to poor strategic leadership by generals, from mismanagement of information to struggles handling weapons. Other problems include unit cohesion, terrible equipment maintenance, and sub-par training.

Pollack identifies four theories that experts have proposed to explain the weaknesses of Arab armed forces: reliance on Soviet-style doctrine and military methods; poor civil-military relations and the “excessive politicization of Arab militaries resulting from the constant coups—and coup-proofing—endemic to the Arab states”; economic factors, particularly the “chronic underdevelopment of the Arab states throughout the post-World War II era”; and “patterns of behavior derived from Arab culture.”

“Although numerous observers have written books, articles, and papers arguing for one explanation or another, no one has ever looked at all of them collectively to try to deduce which are wrong and which right; whether these recurrent patterns of Arab military ineffectiveness could be traced back to just one overarching source, or a combination of some or all,” Pollack writes. “No one has ever tried to sift through them and figure out which ones hold water, and which are just hogwash. That is the purpose of this book.”

Pollack’s first takeaway is that relying on Soviet military doctrine is not the cause of the Arabs’ military problems. To the contrary, the Soviets were more helpful than hurtful. Regardless, there was no correlation between an Arab military’s reliance on Soviet methods and its performance on the battlefield.

Second, politicization was a problem, but not the most important one. It definitely hurt the effectiveness of Arab armed forces in many ways, but “deficiencies in tactical leadership, tactical information management, air operations, weapons handling, and maintenance persisted regardless of how politicized or professional they were.”

Third, economic underdevelopment was similarly an “element of modern Arab military ineffectiveness, and arguably an important one—just not the most important one.” None of the non-Arab militaries that Pollack examined experienced the same difficulties that were the greatest problems of the Arab armed forces.

The main source of Arab military ineffectiveness is culture. “It seems unlikely that it is mere coincidence that the most damaging problems that Arab armed forces have suffered in battle just happen to conform perfectly to patterns of behavior emphasized by the dominant Arab culture,” Pollack writes. “It gets even harder to buy given that Arab organizations in other walks of life experience precisely the same patterns of behavior as their armies, despite the fact that those other organizations were not trained by the Soviets, nor were they subject to coup-proofing or other forms of politicization, nor did they behave like similar organizations in other developing countries.”

Pollack identifies key aspects of Arab culture relevant to the book: conformity, centralization of authority, deference to authority and passivity, group loyalty, manipulation of information, atomization of knowledge, personal courage, and ambivalence toward manual labor and technical work. One can see how these values and behaviors will negatively affect military performance, especially the most glaring problem for Arab armed forces: poor tactical leadership from junior officers. Consistently, these officers fail to show any initiative or creativity—they rarely if ever adapt quickly to changing circumstances in battle. This makes perfect sense, though, if one considers these soldiers were trained to conform and defer to authority. This stands in stark contrast to the Israeli military, whose soldiers were raised in the “Start-Up Nation,” which encourages innovation from all ranks.

The education system in Arab societies drilled in these values to the point that they became central to soldiers’ behavior. “Typical Arab educational practices relentlessly inculcated the values, preferences, and preferred behavior—the culture—of the wider society,” Pollack writes.

Pollack also explains that Arab military programs are modeled on the educational methods of the larger society, reinforcing certain patterns of behavior and conditioning soldiers to act and think in “ways that reflect the values and priorities of the dominant culture.”

Pollack’s findings present hurdles for the United States, which has spent decades trying to build more effective Arab militaries. The logic behind this approach is simple: Partners in the region can act as force multipliers for Washington, lessening the burden on the American military. When these efforts backslide, however, the United States often has to deploy more of its own soldiers or, at the very least, invest more resources to help the locals fight. If Arab culture is the main source of the Arabs’ military woes, then sending their leaders to American military schools will not be sufficient, nor will more training. The United States can take certain steps, some of which Pollack discusses, to make moderate, but still significant, progress, but anything more would require broader changes in Arab society—a much taller task.

Another related problem for Washington is that its Arab allies cannot be expected to counter the greatest threats in the region: Iran, Iran’s proxies, and Sunni jihadist groups like ISIS. The Iraqi Army’s breakdown in 2014 proves this point for the latter. The United States is effectively seeking an unofficial alliance of Arab states (and Israel) to counter Iran’s aggression in the Middle East. It may give Arab states billions of dollars in military aid and sophisticated weapons, but these countries have far fewer soldiers on whom to rely in a conflict with the Islamic Republic, and those whom they have are less battle-tested. Only Egypt and Turkey have comparable numbers, but the former is weak and the latter has close economic relations with Tehran. Beyond conventional strength, Iran is also much better than the Arabs at training foreign fighters and creating proxy forces.

Pollack makes a crucial point: The Middle East is going through unprecedented changes—social, economic, technological, and political. This transformation will affect Arab culture and may even “benefit Arab armies in combat.” Additionally, warfare in the 21st century is changing. It is possible that the Arabs will adapt better as the world moves from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. The future is uncertain, but Arab militaries could become more effective.

The United States should care about the effectiveness of Arab armed forces, but the reality is that a sustainable security system in the Middle East requires active American military power on the ground. The United States should work to strengthen allies, but that is not sufficient. History proves that when America is not actively engaged in the Middle East, it will inevitably be forced to return to the region and in a more forceful way. The United States must decide whether it will lead in the Middle East or be an uninvolved bystander. If Washington chooses the latter, it better prepare itself for the inevitable disaster to come.