WarSclerotic

WASHINGTON — The Senate passed legislation on Friday mandating the government sanction members of Hamas and Hezbollah responsible for using human shields in warfare.

The legislation, titled the STOP Using Human Shields Act, was authored and supported by Republican and Democrats. It now moves to the House of Representatives for consideration.

Various American Jewish groups and Israel advocacy organizations praised the bill’s passage.

“Hamas and Hezbollah are blatantly violating international law by placing their terrorist infrastructure among civilian populations. In any future conflict in Gaza or Lebanon, the lives of innocent civilians will be endangered because of the reckless and illegal behavior of these terrorist organizations,” the American Israel Public Affairs Committee said in a statement.

The Senate also approved a bill that sanctions foreign government agencies, individuals and companies that support Hezbollah financially or militarily.

The Treasury Department is already increasing its pressure campaign on the Iranian proxy organization, based in Lebanon, using existing sanctions tools.

What is the desirable course that has to be taken?

“If Iran wants to help the Houthis, they should send humanitarian aid via the United Nations and not missiles. Iran’s actions have extended the conflicts and exacerbated the tragic suffering of the Yemeni people. Iran supports more than a dozen Shi’ite and Sunni militias and terrorist groups in the region. It has proliferated advanced missile technology. There is no question Iran is the primary engine of destabilization in the region and the international community. This must be stopped and Iran must be compelled to cease its behavior.”

ROULE IS reluctant to talk about himself and feels uneasy about my interest in his family background. In brief, he was a born in a small coal mining town in southeast Pennsylvania to a family, which has always expressed a sense of duty to serve community and country. His family members fought in major American wars during the last century: the two World Wars and the Korean and Vietnam wars. His family upbringing engraved in his mind that he should always fight evil and the bad guys.

He went to a small college to pursue his interests in music but discovered history and the world opened to him. While at college, he was spotted by the CIA and recruited.

He refused to talk about his career in the intelligence community, but from other sources I learned that in his long years of service he worked as an undercover agent, station chief and rose to the senior position of division head in charge of the Middle East (Near East in US jargon). In 2008, he was asked to serve at DNI, which was established in 2005 by President George W. Bush to improve cooperation among the many organs of the US intelligence community. The reorganization was a result of the tragic events of 9/11, which US intelligence agencies failed to detect and stop. In practical terms, he was the senior official responsible for managing US intelligence plans and operations against Iran.

In nearly nine years of service in this capacity, he was witness to how the ties and cooperation between the intelligence communities of Israel and the US were enhanced and upgraded to unprecedented levels. It can be assumed that he was privy at that time to all the most guarded secrets shared by the two countries.

It was reported by international media that the CIA and Mossad carried out joint operations, including the assassination of  Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s master terrorist, and the intelligence agencies of the two nations developed and unleashed malware that damaged Iran’s computers that were linked to its uranium enrichment program and performed other daring operations around the globe.

When I tried to ask him about such operations, his answer was polite but firm. “I will not discuss my past work in the intelligence community,” he said.

Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, who knows Roule well, told me that “Norman is a brilliant guy. He knows the Middle East very well. He is a superb analyst and I considered him a true friend of Israel. Every meeting with him was extremely interesting.” After his retirement in September 2017, Roule went into private business and joined UANI.

What do you think of the capture of Iran’s nuclear archive by the Mossad?

“I only know what I read in the media. But the material certainly seems like evidence that Iran was at least keeping open the option for a nuclear weaponization program in the future.”

From your vast experience, what are Iran’s patterns and modes of operation?

“Iran employs what is known as hybrid warfare or gray zone tactics. In Iran, it may be that the Supreme leader will say to his subordinates don’t risk a major conflict, but you can operate aggressively below that level. This allows Iran to move rapidly, unlike in the West where each step involves careful review by policy makers or Congress.”

How is such a model put into practice in the field?

“Iran is deeply involved in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. Iran’s aggressive actions in the region seem as if it has taken a conventional war and split it into pieces: ground operations and UAV air operations in some countries, naval operations in the Red Sea, and periodic cyber-attacks. Because these actions are divided among so many locations, the West and the United Nations ignore the conflict. But people are dying, nonetheless.”

But hasn’t the international community imposed sanctions on Iran?

“The US and the West have imposed multiple sanctions on Iran for its involvement in terrorism, the bombing of our embassy (in Beirut – Y.M.), and the missile attacks against Saudi Arabia. But these sanctions are not yet at the level that impacts on Iranian decision-making. We may have slowed the operations of Iran and Hezbollah, but we have yet to stop them.”

Maybe it is better to use diplomacy rather than sanctions?

“During the debate on the future of the deal, I believed we should have stayed and worked with our allies to pressure Iran. The US should not be perceived as standing alone against Iran.”

So is Trump wrong in his policy?

“I will not comment on policy. We should remember that President Trump’s objections to the deal are not unique. Many, many congressmen – including Democrats – made these comments during the debate over the nuclear deal. I do believe we need to work with Europe and our other allies, but it isn’t reasonable to allow Europe to continue to delay pressure against Iran. The new sanctions increase pressure against Iran. Iran isn’t a very profitable place for any major business and large corporations cannot justify choosing the difficult, unprofitable and heavily sanctioned Iranian market over the US.”

What is the impact of sanctions on Iran?

“Iran is facing unprecedented simultaneous challenges. These challenges are demographic, economic, ecological, social, and political. Its water shortages are significant, and its infrastructure is very poor. But Iran invited this problem. It chose to send oil to Syria instead of using the funds for its own infrastructure and to assist its civilians. Iran’s generally young population has understandably lost faith in its government and many are leaving. This brain drain is another challenge.”

Is this the reason Iran came to the negotiating table, because it was on the verge of collapse?

“There is no evidence Iran was on the verge of collapse when they came to the table. They were under great pressure and they came to the table to see what deal might be possible.”

It was claimed by Israeli intelligence that Iran was 3-6 months from a bomb?

“According to many press reports, it would be more correct to say that Iran was only a few months from sufficiently highly enriched uranium for a weapon. More work would have been required to build an actual weapon.”

Can you define the purpose of the sanctions? 

“Sanctions must aim at provoking a conversation among Iran’s leaders. What do they prefer: intervention in the region or economic and political stability at home. For this reason, I support a stronger sanctions policy.

“Iran is also facing a succession crisis. Who will replace the Supreme Leader and what sort of revolution will he inherit? This question must trouble the current Supreme Leader very much. The Iranians also face municipal elections in 2020 and a presidential election in 2021. The Iranian people can use these opportunities to try to change their government.

“I believe the regime will eventually fall but its ability to use coercion makes it difficult to predict when that will happen. I do know that when it does occur, no one will be surprised.”

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s sudden resignation this week distressed a lot of Israelis. On the face of things, the widely felt concern makes little sense. After all, Haley wasn’t a lone wolf in the Trump administration.

Then-president Barack Obama’s anti-Israel UN ambassadors Susan Rice and Samantha Power weren’t free agents when they took hostile actions and made hostile statements about Israel. They were speaking and acting as representatives of their boss, Obama.
Just so, in defending Israel by word and deed, Haley was a loyal representative of the policies of her boss, President Donald Trump.
So why did her decision to resign make so many Israelis anxious?

Because while Haley was a loyal representative of the administration, she was more than a mouthpiece. She was a leader.

Leading in a place like the UN means speaking truth to the most powerful sort of mob – the elite mob.

The UN’s mob mentality doesn’t manifest itself in book burnings and mass rallies. Rather, it expresses itself in a thousand ways – often passive-aggressive – every day in UN institutions.

It isn’t just that Haley was forced to cast the lone nay vote last December, when the other 14 Security Council members (including Britain and France) voted in a favor of a resolution demanding that the US reverse its sovereign decision to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and recognize that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital city.

Every day, the UN shows its mob mentality in its obsessive-compulsive bias against the Jewish state.

Wednesday, for instance, UNESCO passed yet another resolution that pretends the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb are Palestinian world heritage sites.

Disgusted by UNESCO’s out-of-control antisemitism, last year the Trump administration announced it would leave the organization at the end of 2018.

Citing UNESCO’s moves in Hebron from last year as the impetus for the US action, Haley said at the time that UNESCO’s politicization was a “chronic embarrassment.”

“Just as we said in 1985 when President Reagan withdrew from UNESCO, US taxpayers should no longer be on the hook to pay for policies that are hostile to our values and make a mockery of justice and common sense, ” she said.

Haley was a leader at the UN because she used her bully pulpit to stand up to the braying mob every day. She put a mirror to the faces of ambassadors from allied and enemy nations alike and told them to be ashamed of themselves for joining, and sometimes leading the mob.

Like all mobs – elite and common – the UN mob rejects facts. They reject rationality and reason in favor of passions and prejudices. The herd mentality of the UN protects tyrannies and renders free nations – first and foremost Israel – perpetually vulnerable. It rejects sovereignty and insists on uniformity of actions that invariably assists the causes of tyrants while harming the interests of free nations – again, first and foremost, Israel – as well as the US.

Haley’s leadership was critical because one of the most overlooked truths in public discourse, whether at the UN or anywhere else, is that telling inconvenient truths to mobs is a vital undertaking. Without people willing to stand up forcefully, and even sometimes brutally, to powerful mobs that uphold falsehoods as truth, the mobs will never change. They will never accept reality, even if it blows up in their faces.

One of the places where a powerful leader like Haley is desperately needed is among Israel’s foreign policy and security elites.

Much has been said over the past several years about the uniformity of the views of Israel’s legal fraternity. State prosecutors and Supreme Court justices have for years been criticized, often bitterly, for their uniform left-wing bias. This bias has made a mockery of the rule of law in Israel where Israeli residents in Judea and Samaria, free market politicians, the IDF and rabbinical authorities know that they will be subjected to biased treatment at the hands of the legal fraternity.

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s recruitment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court is rightly upheld as one of her major achievements in office. But arguably, an equally important accomplishment has been her willingness to speak bluntly to Israel’s legal establishment about their institutional bias and the deleterious impact their bias has had on the Israeli democratic system of governance and the rule of law. Until Shaked came along, no one in a position of real authority was willing to stand before Supreme Court justices and tell them to be ashamed of themselves for their constant assaults on the very foundations of Israeli democracy.

Unfortunately, Israel’s legal fraternity isn’t the only old boys’ mob where people whose views are out of step with the ruling elite are permanently shut out. Israel’s national security fraternity suffers from the same problem.

We see this most dramatically in relation to the Palestinians, although the institutional bias of Israel’s national security community is brought to bear along a spectrum of issues.

The Oslo peace process with the PLO was initiated 25 years ago. It was predicated on the “land for peace paradigm” long championed by the radical left. It failed incontrovertibly 18 years ago when the PLO rejected statehood and peace, instead initiating a massive terror war against Israel in conjunction with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Since then, virtually not a day has gone by without another Palestinian terror attack against Israelis. Rather than reach the appropriate conclusion 18 years ago – that the land for peace paradigm was wrong – the security establishment writ large, maintained faith with it. Instead of abandoning the paradigm, they, like the political left, simply updated their marketing practices. Talk of “peace” was out. First it was replaced by “separation.” Then “demography.” Then “democracy.” Then “disengagement.” Then “consolidation.”

We got “long term security arrangements.”

We got “settlement blocs vs. isolated settlements.”

And then we started getting “separation again.”

But the idea was always the same: land for peace.

As for the Palestinians, year in and year out we hear the same things, even as they are repackaged as being pathbreaking.
We are told that we have to “strengthen” Palestinian Authority chief, terror financier and virulent Jew hater Mahmoud Abbas.

Why?

Because he’s a moderate.

We need to invest in the kleptocratic wholly corrupt Palestinian economy.

Why?

Because it’s the way to make the Palestinian people feel a “peace dividend.”

THE FACT that more than $10 billion in international aid and billions more in Israeli aid have been invested in developing the Palestinian economy for 25 years and we’ve never seen a peace dividend, is no reason to stop paying them off.

All that the likes of Saudi Arabia need, to stand at Israel’s side and be part of a “regional solution,” is proof of Israel’s peaceful intentions. So Israel, we are told by the apolitical security experts, needs to make clear that it is leaving Judea and Samaria in whole or part.

The fact that the Arabs never agreed to be part of a regional solution – and wouldn’t even embrace Israel publicly when it was actively engaged in giving land to the PLO – makes no difference to Israel’s national security-experts mob.

The fact that the Arab world is plagued by political instability, which makes it impossible to bank on long-term relations with any Arab regime is also immaterial. Israel needs to give the Palestinians land to convince the Arabs to support us. And they will. We just know they will.

Politically, Israel also needs to act on behalf of the PA. We need to help strengthen it. The fact that 25 years of Israeli and international efforts to “build institutions” in the PA have brought no results beyond instilling Nazi-like Jew hatred in the hearts and minds of the Palestinian public is entirely beside the point.

And then there are the Palestinian security forces. The Israeli security brass says they are the greatest. We need to strengthen them and cooperate even more with them. The fact that dozens of Palestinian security force members have engaged in terrorist attacks against Israel is immaterial. Indeed, it’s irrelevant. So is the fact that Hamas, which those forces fight, constitutes a greater threat to those security services than it does to Israel.

Every few months, these positions are repackaged and presented to the public by a group of retired generals. They tell us to trust them because they were generals in the IDF or senior commanders in the Mossad and Shin Bet. They are professionals. They are apolitical. Zionism is their only agenda.

All criticism against these unbiased, entirely professional, apolitical experts is castigated as politically motivated. Their critics are dismissed as fanatics, or messianics, or right-wing extremists.

LAST WEEK, we saw this process unfold yet again with the launch of yet another “groundbreaking” report about the way “forward” with the Palestinians, produced by Tel Aviv University’s elite Institute for National Security Studies, staffed by retired senior security brass.

The INSS report titled, “A Political-Security Framework for the Israeli-Palestinian Arena” was, we are told, the result of two years of work.

Led by Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, the INSS’s professional, apolitical researchers met with Americans, Europeans, Palestinians – and Arabs from states without peace with Israel – to talk about the way to move forward with the Palestinians.

And, surprise, surprise, they came up with the same failed “land for peace” plan that the Left has come up with for the last 25 years.
The INSS’s “pathbreaking” report contains no reconsideration of any consistently failed strategic assumptions.

Which brings us back to Haley and the Trump administration she so ably represented.

The INSS “experts” claim that Israel needs to seize the opportunity that the friendly Trump administration affords us to set a new agenda with the Palestinians.

But while this assertion is true enough, the INSS report – like all the reports of security “experts” that preceded it – does no such thing. Instead, the INSS’s wise men and women, with their vast national security experience, tell us that we should use Trump’s time in office to convince the friendliest US administration in history to embrace the policies of the most unfriendly US administrations in the history of US-Israel ties. They advocate convincing Trump to embrace the same policies they have advocated, which have failed consistently for a generation.

Haley’s replacement will likely share her positions on Israel and her criticisms of the UN’s institutional antisemitism, since her successor will also be representing the Trump administration. But it is hard to imagine her replacement will replicate the extraordinary moral leadership she exercised.

This is not because he or she will be less moral, but because, as the mob mentality of Israel’s security brass shows, leaders like Haley – who can effectively stand up to braying mobs of well-heeled elitists – don’t grow on trees.

The secretary praised Germany’s decision a day prior to extradite Asadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomat accredited in Austria, to Belgium, where officials first hatched a plan to trigger explosives at a June 30 rally of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

“The scale of this plot, which involved arrests of numerous suspects across Europe – including in Belgium, France and Germany – reminds us that Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” Pompeo said. “We support our European allies in exposing and countering the threat that Iranian-backed terrorism poses around the world.”

Last week, France seized assets belonging to Iran’s intelligence services and two Iranian nationals in response to the plot. “An incident of such gravity on our national territory could not go unpunished,” said a joint statement by its foreign, interior and economy ministries.

Two Iranian individuals are already being held in Belgium suspected of involvement in the bomb plot. They were caught in possession of explosive material.

The State Department recently released a glossy 45-page guide to Iran’s “destructive activities,” highlighting its sustained support for terrorism worldwide.

“After a brief lull in the 1990s and early 2000s, Iran has ramped up its active involvement in worldwide terrorist plotting and attacks, with numerous terrorist operations uncovered or disrupted in Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia since 2009,” asserts the report, published during the administration’s push for additional pressure on Tehran during the UN General Assembly in New York last month.

“The pace of these activities indicates that Iran remains committed to using terrorism to achieve its objectives and is confident in its ability to operate anywhere in the world,” the report continues. As examples, the paper refers to 17 arrests and searches of Iranian officials linked to terrorism in Bulgaria, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Germany – in addition to those arrested in connection to this latest plot – since 2012.

According to State Department officials, the purpose of the paper was to organize the administration’s argument for the resumption of nuclear-related sanctions. US President Donald Trump withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and five world powers last May, arguing the agreement should have demanded Tehran moderate its other malign behavior, including its military activities in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

Critics of the nuclear deal, including those in Israel, argue that the purpose of Iran’s nuclear program was to provide deterrence and cover for its other destructive activities worldwide. The administration is hoping to make this argument to the five powers– France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia – that have thus far remained in the agreement.

So far, however, these countries have resisted renewed US sanctions, claiming that Iran’s nuclear work should remain decoupled from its other malign activities, including its support for terrorism.

The harshest of Washington’s sanctions, including those on Iran’s oil and gas sector, are scheduled to resume next month.