BEIRUT – Islamic State took control of large parts of Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk in southern Damascus on Wednesday, witnesses and a monitoring group said.
“They pushed from the Hajar Aswad area,” one witness said, adding that the violence was ongoing. Yarmouk has been caught between government forces and Syrian insurgent groups including al Qaeda’s Nusra Front.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that Islamic State controlled some of the main streets in the camp and that clashes continued.
Syria says Jordan shuts main border crossing
BEIRUT – Syria’s state news agency said Jordanian authorities had closed the main border crossing between the two countries on Wednesday, citing a source in the Syrian foreign ministry.
The source said Syria held Jordan responsible for the social and economic impact of the closure of Nasib crossing, which had blocked traffic.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had reported earlier on Wednesday heavy clashes between insurgents and Syrian forces near Nasib after the insurgents encircled the crossing area.
Three years ago, film-goers were treated to “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” which critic Kenneth Turan called a “pleasant fantasy” about the Middle East. Today, of course, Yemen is the hub of a bloody conflict, one which U.S. President Barack Obama persists in viewing with equal unreality.
Most obviously: Yemen is not, as the administration has touted, a “success” brought about by its “smart diplomacy.” Most importantly: Iran has a plan. Yemen is a vital component.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees that. So does Saudi King Salman (and no, I will not dwell on the pun). His foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, last week called Iran “an aggressive state that is intervening and operating forces in the Arab world.” Iran’s nuclear weapons program, he added, represents “a threat to the Gulf and the entire world.”
A quick tour of the neighborhood: Much of Syria is already an Iranian satrapy. Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist foreign legion, is the most powerful force in Lebanon. Iranian military advisors and Iranian-backed Shia militias increasingly call the shots in Iraq. And now Iran is aggressively supporting the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Over the weekend, a Houthi spokesman directly threatened the Saudis. “When we decide to invade,” he said, “we won’t stop in the city of Mecca, but will continue on to Riyadh to topple the government institutions.” While that invasion may not be imminent, Iran’s strategy and objectives are now apparent.
Iran has begun what Netanyahu called a “pincer movement.” To the east of Saudi Arabia is the Persian Gulf, in and around which is the world’s largest repository of known oil and gas reserves — vital to the international economy. The Gulf’s only outlet to open waters is the 24-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz. More than a third of the petroleum traded by sea passes through this strait which Iran’s rulers have for years referred to as their “territorial waters.” On a number of occasions, U.S. ships in the strait have been harassed by Iranian vessels.
To the west of Saudi Arabia is the Red Sea. Iranian domination of Yemen would mean control of Bab-el-Mandeb, the “Gateway of Tears.” This 20-mile-wide strait separates Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula from Djibouti and Africa. Whoever controls Bab-el-Mandeb also controls marine traffic in and out of the Red Sea which has, at its northern end, Egypt’s Suez Canal.
Control of these two waterways would give Iran an economic choke hold on Europe and Asia. With Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen already under Iranian domination, other Arab nations would soon come under severe pressure to accept the suzerainty — and perhaps the hegemony — of what could legitimately be called a new Persian empire.
What about al-Qaida and the Islamic State group? The Arab nations might decide their interests are best served by supporting them (beyond the clandestine support that may have been provided in the past) so long as they continue to fight against, rather than collaborate with, Iranian imperialism. Even so, Iran’s rulers are doubtless confident that, over time, they will defeat their Sunni jihadi rivals — with Americans continuing to assist the effort.
It’s an ambitious plan. Nothing would do more to bolster it than for America and Europe to lift economic sanctions and end their opposition to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. That appears to be where the delayed and drawn-out talks are heading.
Consider: On November 24, 2013, when negotiations with Iran produced a Joint Plan of Action, Obama announced: “We have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear program.” The interim agreement, Secretary of State John Kerry added, will ensure that Iran “cannot build a nuclear weapon.”
Last week, however, Kerry implicitly acknowledged how wrong that earlier appraisal has been. “So this is not a choice, as some think it is, between the Iran of long ago and the Iran of today,” he said. “It’s not a choice between this moment and getting them to give up their entire nuclear program, as some think. It’s not going to happen.”
Over the weekend, Amir Hossein Motaghi, an Iranian public relations aide, defected to the West. According to the Telegraph (U.K.), he revealed that American diplomats have been carrying Iran’s water. “The U.S. negotiating team are mainly there to speak on Iran’s behalf with other members of the 5+1 countries and convince them of a deal,” he said in an interview.
Summing up the current state of affairs, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency — a position from which he was forced to resign in 2014 because his analyses contradicted the Obama administration’s rosy narratives — told Fox’s Chris Wallace that “Iran is clearly on the march,” in response to which the White House has adopted a policy of “willful ignorance,” and that the only way to limit the damage now is to “stop all engines on this nuclear deal.”
It is unlikely that Obama and his envoys will give up their pleasant fantasies about the Islamic Republic of Iran. On the contrary, “smart diplomacy” may soon include awarding both economic and nuclear weapons to jihadi revolutionaries vowing to annihilate America’s allies and, in time, bring “Death to America!” as well. So if Iran’s supreme leader does become a 21st century emperor, he’ll have the United States to thank — and may do so in creative ways.
Those members of Congress who see this situation clearly need to speak out loudly and push back powerfully. That’s harder for Democrats than for Republicans — I get that. But if they can’t do their jobs now, they might just as well go fishing.
Top colonel in missile defense system says Iran upgrading warheads to give Hezbollah pinpoint accuracy in striking Israel.
By Ari Yashar
First Publish: 4/1/2015, 2:26 PM
Smuggled Iranian missiles (illustration)
Yehuda Ben Itach/Flash 90
A senior Israeli security source revealed on Tuesday that Iran is smuggling rockets souped-up with advanced guided warheads to its terror proxy of Hezbollah in Lebanon, posing a direct threat to the Jewish state of Israel from right over its northern border.
Col. Aviram Hasson, a leader in the IDF’s top-level missile defenses, brought up the threat at the Israel Air and Missile Defense Conference held in Herzliya, an event hosted by the iHLS (Israel’s homeland security) defense website and the Israel Missile Defense Association.
The colonel said Iran is taking unguided Zilzal rockets and upgrading them into guided M-600 missiles by swapping out their warheads with more advanced components.
The Islamic regime is a “train engine that is not stopping for a moment. It is manufacturing new and advanced ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. It is turning unguided rockets that had an accuracy range of kilometers into weapons that are accurate to within meters,” he revealed.
Hasson stated that Hezbollah “is getting a lot of accurate weapons from Iran. It is in a very different place compared to the Second Lebanon War in 2006.”
The statements come the same day reports revealed the IDF had updated its worst case scenarios for a war against Lebanon for the first time since 2007. The assessment posited that Hezbollah would hit Israel with 1,000-1,500 rockets every day, and the number of Israelis killed daily will be in double or even triple digits.
As far as what Israel can do against the major threat, Hasson said the “ultimate defense is a combination of counter-attack, active defenses, and passive defense,” with the later consisting of civilians following orders to stay secure.
American backing?
Also addressing the missile threat at the conference was Riki Ellison, founder and chairman of the US Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance.
Ellison remarked that the US has a policy of always leaving a warship with an Aegis naval missile defense system in the Mediterranean to provide Israel with defense from Iranian long-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting the Jewish state from Iran.
He described how the warship “can stand off the coast and shoot long-shots coming in from Iran.”
However, Ellison noted how the US wants Israel to complete developing its missile defenses for all ranges of missiles, through such systems as Arrow 3 and David’s Sling, which would free up the Aegis ships.
If needed the US could take its defense of Israel a step further, revealed Elisson, noting that Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries could be deployed to secure the Jewish state.
Even as nuclear talks reached a deadline on Tuesday that was extended by the US, Commander of Iran’s Basij (volunteer) Force, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi, said “wiping Israel off the map is not up for negotiation,” illustrating the dangers posed by the state’s nuclear program coupled with its missile capabilities.
A new horror is deployed. Then it becomes routine. The horror of one decade, such as suicide bombing, has to be made dirtier and uglier by using women and children, by targeting houses of worship and families, and then finally superseded by the horror of another decade, mass beheadings.
Terrorism is a shock tactic. It only works if you’re horrified by it. If you get bored of ISIS beheading its victims, it will bring out child beheaders. It will set men on fire. Then it will have children set men on fire.
Like an acrobat juggling at a telethon, it’s always looking for ways to top its last trick.
In a crowded market, each Jihadist group has to be ambitious about its atrocities. No matter what horrifying thing an Islamic group did last year or last decade, another group will find a way to top it.
The old group will become the lesser evil. The new group will become the greater evil.
“If Hitler invaded Hell,” Churchill said of the Nazi invasion of the USSR, “I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
There are a lot of favorable references to the Jihadist devil in Foggy Bottom where the terrible terror groups of yesteryear turn out to be misunderstood moderates who can help us fight this year’s devil. Obama’s Countering Violent Extremism program is tweeting Al Qaeda criticisms of ISIS. Iran and its Hezbollah terrorists no longer show up on the list of terror threats. Instead they’re our new allies.
When Western governments embrace the “lesser evil” doctrine, they ally with terrorists who are not fundamentally any different than the terrorists they are fighting. When ISIS broke through into the media, multiple stories emphasized that it was more extreme than Al Qaeda (despite having once identified as Al Qaeda.) But is a terrorist group that flies planes full of civilians into buildings full of civilians more moderate than a sister group that chops off heads on television? Is ISIS’s sex slavery more extreme than Iran’s practice of raping girls sentenced to death so that they don’t die as virgins?
The distinction between one evil and another is insignificant compared to their overall evil. The search for the lesser evil is really a search for ways to exonerate evil.
The Jihad creates endless greater evils. Today’s greater evil is tomorrow’s lesser evil. If another Jihadist group rises out of Syria that commits worse atrocities than ISIS, will we start thinking of the Islamic State’s rapists and headchoppers as moderates? The behavior of our diplomats suggests that we will.
Experts used the rise of ISIS to urge us to build ties with everyone from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Taliban to head off ISIS in their territories. The new president of Afghanistan is proposing apologies to the Taliban while defining ISIS as beyond the pale. Obama has chosen to turn over Iraq and Syria to Iran and its terrorist groups to fight ISIS.
If the process continues, then the United States will end up allying with terrorist groups to fight ISIS. And all this will accomplish is to make ISIS stronger while morally corrupting and discrediting our own fight against Islamic terrorism.
And if ISIS loses, there will always be a Super-ISIS that will be even worse.
We had few options in WW2, but ISIS is not the Wermacht. We don’t need to frantically scramble to ally with anyone against it; especially when the distinctions between it and our newfound allies are vague.
The Syrian opposition, that we armed and almost fought a war for, consists of Jihadists, many of them allied with Al Qaeda. But the Syrian government which we are now allied with, turned the Iraq War into a nightmare by funneling the suicide bombers across the border that ISIS used to kill American soldiers.
ISIS may be officially at war with the Syrian government, but it’s also selling oil to it, and there have been accusations that there is a secret understanding between Assad and ISIS.
How unlikely is that? Almost as unlikely as a Hitler-Stalin pact.
The Communists and the Nazis were tactically intertwined, despite their official ideological enmities, because they shared many of the same enemies (moderate governments, the rest of Europe) and many of the same goals (seizing territory, radicalizing populations, shattering the European order).
Iran and Sunni terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, cooperate based on similar premises. That was why Al Qaeda could pick up terror tips from Iranian terror groups to prep for September 11. Both Sunni and Shiite Islamic revolutionaries want to topple governments, conquer territory and radicalize populations. Despite their mutual enmity, they share bigger enemies, like America, and bigger goals, destroying the current map of the Middle East and remaking it along completely different lines.
The collapse of the Iraqi military that led to ISIS marching on Baghdad was caused by its Shiite officer corps inserted into place by a sectarian Shiite government. That government was not interested in maintaining the American fantasy of a multicultural democratic Iraq. It wanted to crush the Sunnis and Kurds through a partnership with Iran. The collapse of the Iraqi military endangered its survival, but fulfilled its overall goal of driving recruitment to Shiite militias in Iraq trained and commanded by Iran.
Obama’s avoidance of Iraqi entanglements and panic at the ISIS juggernaut led him to a deal with Iran. The deal effectively gives control of Iraq to its Shiite proxies. The sheiks of the Sunni Awakening were ignored when they came to Washington. The Kurds have trouble getting weapons. Instead they’re going to the Shiite militias. By using ISIS to create a crisis, Iraq’s Shiite leaders forced a US deal with Iran.
ISIS has killed a lot of Shiites, but for Iran taking over Iraq is a small price to pay for losing the pesky ‘not really Shiite’ Alawites of Syria. And it hasn’t actually lost them yet.
Iran’s ideal situation would be an ISIS Caliphate spread across parts of Syria and Iraq that would destabilize the Sunni sphere. Like the Hitler-Stalin pact, such an arrangement could end with the ISIS Hitler stabbing the Iranian Stalin in the back, but ISIS does not actually need to defeat Assad. It is not a nationalist group and doesn’t believe in nations. Its focus is on ruling Sunni territories.
Sunni nations have far more to worry about from ISIS than Iran does. Its advance challenges the bonds that hold their nations together. Its goal is the destruction of the Sunni countries and kingdoms.
That is also Iran’s goal.
Both the USSR and Nazi Germany described Poland as an illegitimate child of Versailles. Iran and the Sunni Islamists likewise view the countries of the Middle East as illegitimate children of Sykes-Picot with Israel standing in for Poland as the infuriating “foreign-created” entity ruled by a “subject” people.
ISIS and Iran want to tear down those old borders and replace them with different allegiances. The USSR and the Nazis elevated ideology and race over the nation state. Iran and ISIS elevate the Islamic religion over the nation state. It’s an appeal that can destroy the Sunni nations that block Iran’s path to power.
The trouble with the “lesser evil” doctrine is that the lesser evil is often allied with the greater evil. Hitler used Stalin to cut off any hope of support for Eastern Europe. Stalin then used Hitler to conquer Eastern Europe. While huge numbers of Russians died, Stalin got what he wanted. And that’s all he cared about.
Shiites are dying, but Iran is getting what it wants from ISIS.
Before we start saying favorable things about the devil, we might want to think about the hell we’re getting into.
Mohammad Reza Naqdi, commander of Iran’s Basij force (screen capture: YouTube/PresTVGlobalNews)
The commander of the Basij militia of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said that “erasing Israel off the map” is “nonnegotiable,” according to an Israel Radio report Tuesday.
Militia chief Mohammad Reza Naqdi also threatened Saudi Arabia, saying that the offensive it is leading in Yemen “will have a fate like the fate of Saddam Hussein.”
Naqdi’s comments were made public as Iran and six world powers prepared Tuesday to issue a general statement agreeing to continue nuclear negotiations in a new phase aimed at reaching a comprehensive accord by the end of June.
In 2014, Naqdi said Iran was stepping up efforts to arm West Bank Palestinians for battle against Israel, adding the move would lead to Israel’s annihilation, Iran’s Fars news agency reported.
“Arming the West Bank has started and weapons will be supplied to the people of this region,” Naqdi said.
“The Zionists should know that the next war won’t be confined to the present borders and the Mujahedeen will push them back,” he added. Naqdi claimed that much of Hamas’s arsenal, training and technical knowhow in the summer conflict with Israel was supplied by Iran.
The Basij is a religious volunteer force established in 1979 by the country’s revolutionary leaders, and has served as a moral police and to suppress dissent.
In January, a draft law that would give greater powers to the Basij to enforce women’s compulsory wearing of the veil was ruled unconstitutional.
The force holds annual maneuvers, sometimes with regular Iran units.
Iran was heavily involved in nuclear weapons research, according to documents given to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2005. To date, Iran has refused to acknowledge this past work on nuclear weapons, but IAEA reports leave no doubt the documents are credible and described research only suitable for a nuclear arms.
With the self-imposed deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran coming this week, now is probably a good time to recall that Iran has been lying about its nuclear ambitions for a very long time. In 2005, an IAEA member state turned over more than 1,000 pages of documents outlining a substantial nuclear research program in Iran. Known collectively as the “alleged studies documentation,” a 2011 IAEA report describes the cache as containing “correspondence, reports, view graphs from presentations, videos and engineering drawings.” The documents also contained “working level correspondence consistent with the day to day implementation of a formal programme.” In short, proof Iran had a sustained nuclear weapons program.
After carefully examining the documents and gathering additional information, the IAEA confronted Iran with the documents in 2008. Iran sent the Agency a 117-page response that confirmed some of the fine details, such as names and places, but denied all the evidence showing a nuclear weapons research project had been underway. Iran claimed the documents were “forged” and “fabricated.”
One of the details contained in the IAEA document cache was evidence that Iran had been studying how it could integrate its planned nuclear weapon with its own Shahab 3 missile (which has a range of 800 miles). Specifically, it wanted to create a firing mechanism that could detonate the nuclear payload in mid-air or upon impact. When confronted with this specific information (which may have included video), Iran claimed it was part of an “animation game.”
The IAEA decided to show the missile plans to experts from other member states (not including the nation that originally gave them the documents). They asked these experts to look at the designs and assess if there was any other military or peaceful application for them other than launching a nuclear weapon. The results of this investigation appear as Attachment 2 in the IAEA’s November 2011 report:
Clearly, the experts concluded there was no peaceful application for the designs (such as a satellite). And while some elements of the design could have been useful for other types of weapons, the overall combination of elements pointed to only one likely possibility: a nuclear payload.
In addition to the missile payload designs, the “alleged studies documents” indicated Iran was also researching detonators, neutron initiators, firing equipment for an underground test, and many other aspects of nuclear weapons research.
The 2011 IAEA report was an attempt to get Iran to come clean about its past work on nuclear weapons, but thus far, Iran has refused to acknowledge it. As recently as last week, IAEA Director Yukiya Amano has said that Iran still needs to come clean. In an interview with Judy Woodruff of PBS, Amano said, “Our information indicates that Iran engaged in activities relevant to the development of nuclear explosive devices. We do not draw conclusions. But we are requesting Iran to clarify these issues. …So far, there has been some clarification, but the progress has been very limited.”
(Don’t worry! Be Happy! Obama is in charge so everything will come up roses for sure.
Just ask Obama, the all-wise, all-knowing. He will set it right, as soon as Iran uses the nukes she deserves. — DM)
American warplanes have begun bombing the Islamic State-held Iraqi city of Tikrit in order to bail out the embattled, stalled ground campaign launched by Baghdad and Tehran two weeks ago. This operation, billed as “revenge” for the Islamic State (IS) massacre of 1,700 Shiite soldiers at Camp Speicher last June, was launched without any consultation with Washington and was meant to be over by now, three weeks after much triumphalism by the Iraqi government about how swiftly the terrorist redoubt in Saddam Hussein’s hometown was going to be retaken.
U.S. officials have variously estimated that either 23,000 or 30,000 “pro-government” forces were marshaled for the job, of which only slender minority were actual Iraqi soldiers. The rest consisted of a consortium of Shiite militia groups operating under the banner of Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Population Mobilization Units (PMU), which was assembled in answer to afatwahissued by Iraq’s revered Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani in June 2014 following ISIS’s blitzkrieg through northern Iraq. To give you a sense of the force disparity, the PMUs are said to command 120,000 fighters, whereas the Iraqi Army has only got 48,000 troops.
Against this impressive array of paramilitaries, a mere 400 to 1,000 IS fighters have managed to hold their ground in Tikrit, driving major combat operations to a halt. This is because the Islamic State is resorting to exactly the kinds of lethal insurgency tactics which al Qaeda in Iraq (its earlier incarnation) used against the more professional and better-equipped U.S. forces. BuzzFeed’s Mike Giglio has ably documented the extent to which IS has relied upon improvised explosive devices, and just how sophisticated these have been. Even skilled explosive ordnance disposal teams — many guided by Iranian specialists — are being ripped apart by what one termed the “hidden enemy” in Tikrit.
Because IS controls hundreds of square miles of terrain in Iraq, it has an unknown number of bomb manufacturing plants, and because it knows the terrain so well, it’s been able to booby-trap houses and roads. Even Shiite prayer beads left lying on the ground are thought to be rigged to explosives. One Kurdish official told Giglio that the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters alone have “defused or detonated more than 6,000 IEDs along their 650-mile front with ISIS since the war began in August.”
The toll this has taken on the militias is extraordinary. Cemetery workers in Najaf told the Washington Postthat as many as 60 corpses are arriving per day. Former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Derek Harvey tweeted last week that an Iraqi Shiite source told him the number of militia war dead from the Tikrit offensive so far may be as high as 6,000. So the militias’ triumphalism, much of it no doubt manufactured by Iran’s propaganda machine, proved to be misplaced. Jeffrey White, another former DIA analyst now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes “there’s a failure of will on the part of the militias and government forces. They just didn’t have the sufficient desire and determination to take the fight forward given the casualties they’ve been sustaining.”
So now, the same Iraqi government which earlier dismissed the need for U.S. airpower had to put in an eleventh-hour request for it, lest an easy victory descend into embarrassing folly. But the past few months ought to have shown that even indirectly relying on Iranian agents to conduct a credible ground war against Sunni extremists was always a lousy idea for three reasons: those agents hate the United States and have threatened to attack its interest in Iraq; they’re guilty of IS-style atrocities themselves; and they’re lousy at fighting an entrenched jihadist insurgency.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey told Congress on March 3: “What we are watching carefully is whether the militias — they call themselves the popular mobilization forces — whether when they recapture lost territory, whether they engage in acts of retribution and ethnic cleansing.” He needn’t watch any longer. They are engaging in exactly that.
The crimes of war
On March 10, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a comprehensive study of human rights violations committed by both IS and pro-Iraqi forces. The Islamic State, OHCHR concluded, has likely committed genocide against the Yazidis, a ethno-religious minority in Iraq, in a catalogue of war crimes and crimes against humanity that include gang-rape and sexual slavery. But OHCHR’s language is equally unambiguous in condemning the other side on the battlefield: “Throughout the summer of 2014,” the report noted, “[PMUs], other volunteers and [Shiite] militia moved from their southern heartlands towards [Islamic State]-controlled areas in central and northern Iraq. While their military campaign against the group gained ground, the militias seem to operate with total impunity, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.” [Italics added.]
Sunni villages in Amerli and Suleiman Bek, in the Salah ad-Din province, have been looted or destroyed by militiamen operating on the specious assumption that all inhabitants once ruled by IS must be IS sympathizers or collaborators. Human Rights Watch has also lately discovered that the “liberation” of Amerli last October — another PMU/Iranian-led endeavor, only this one abetted by U.S. airstrikes in the early stages — was characterized by wide-scale abuses including the looting and burning of homes and business of Sunni residents of villages surrounding Amerli. The apparent aim was ethnic cleansing. Human Rights Watch concluded, from witness accounts, that “building destruction in at least 47 predominantly Sunni villages was methodical and driven by revenge and intended to alter the demographic composition of Iraq’s traditionally diverse provinces of Salah al-Din and Kirkuk.”
Sunnis weren’t the only demographic subjected to collective punishment. A 21-year-old Shiite Turkmen from the Yengija village was “burned with cigarettes and tied to a ceiling fan” by militants of Saraya Tala’a al-Khorasani, another Iran-backed militia. He told Human Rights Watch: “They kept saying, ‘You are ISIS,’ and I kept denying it. They were beating me randomly on my face, head, shoulders using water pipes and the butts of their weapons…. They went to have lunch and then came back and beat us for an hour and half. Later that night they asked me if I was Shia or Sunni. I told them I was Shia Turkoman and they ordered me to prove it by praying the Shia way…. They kept me for nine days.”
This account tracks with a mountain of social media-propagated video and photographic evidence showing that Iraq’s Shiite militias are behaving rather like the Islamic State — beheading and torturing people they assail as quislings, and then exhibiting these atrocities as a means of recruitment. More worrying, a six-month investigation by ABC News has found that U.S.-trained Iraqi Security Force personnel are also guilty of anti-Sunni pogroms, with officers from Iraq’s Special Forces shown in one video accusing an unarmed teenaged boy of being a shooter (a charge the boy denies) before opening fire on him.
Looking the other way
The Obama administration’s counterterrorism-driven policy for the Middle East, and a quietly pursued diplomatic reconciliation with Iran, has resulted in America’s diminishment of grave war crimes committed by Iran’s clients and proxies, and the problem is hardly just confined to Iraq. In Syria, for instance, the National Defense Force, a conglomerate of militias trained and equipped by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC) — a U.S.-designated terrorist entity — has been accused by the Syrian Network for Human Rights and the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights, of “[burning] at least 81 people to death, including 46 civilians; 18 children, 7 women, and 35 of the armed opposition fighters,” along with other pro-Assad forces. The State Department has offered condolences to Iran’s President Hasan Rouhani on the death of his mother; to date, it has not said a word about the immolation of these Syrians at the hands of a Quds Force-built guerrilla army.
All of which raises the question: Does the United States have a “common interest,” as Secretary of State John Kerry phrased it, with a regime in Tehran whose proxies are currently burning people alive in their houses, playing soccer with severed human heads, and ethnically cleansing and razing whole villages to the ground?
It really ought to surprise no one in the U.S. government that what amounts to an Iranian occupation of the Levant and Mesopotamia would lead to an increase in jihadist bloodletting. Dempsey has less of an excuse than most. A four-star general, he formerly commanded the First Armored Division in Baghdad, which in 2004 was the unit redirected, as it was about to go home, to fight the Shiite militias who had taken over Karbala and other southern cities, so he would have seen the precursor to the PMUs in action. Yet somehow managed to brief legislators that the Islamic Republic’s role in Iraq might yet prove “positive” — provided, that is, it didn’t lead to an uptick in sectarianism. This is like arguing that death wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t result in being dead. It did not take much, however, for the scales to fall from Dempsey’s eyes. He took a helicopter tour of Baghdad last week and noticedthe “plethora of flags, only one of which happens to be the Iraqi flag,” The rest, he told reporters to evident dismay, belonged to Shiite militias. (He might have also added that posters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are now omnipresent in the Iraqi capital where ones of Saddam Hussein used to be.)
Everyone from Gen. David Petraeus to Kurdish intelligence chief Masrour Barzani is acknowledging the obvious: that Shiite militias pose more of a long-term threat to the stability of Iraq than does the Islamic State. Even Ayatollah Sistani has made noises lately about the rampant abuses committed by the “volunteers” he assembled through a religious edict.
While it is true that most Iraqis do not wish to live in a state of vassalage to Iran, it also true that most of the “units” in the PMUs are well-known subsidiaries of the Quds Force. “The indoctrination they’ve been getting is anti-American, Khomeinist ideology,” said Phillip Smyth, an expert on Shiite militias and author of a comprehensive survey of them put out by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Sectarianism has been promoted whether we like it or not.”
According to Chris Harmer, a former U.S. Naval officer and now an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, there really is no dressing up who the supposed “good guys” in Iraq now are. “They killed hundreds of Americans during the war,” Harmer said. “These are not ‘affiliated’ organizations — they are same guys, the same organizations. And can you find me anybody stupid enough to say that what Iran wants is a stable, unified, secular, non-sectarian Iraq?”
The enemies of our enemy are our enemy
Indeed, quite apart from having American blood on their hands and American interests furthest from their mind, Shiite militias — following Tehran’s favorite playbook — have also taken to conspiratorially blaming the United States for inventing and militarily supporting the Islamic State, while decrying any American anti-IS involvement in Iraq. Take, for instance, the Badr Corps, headed by Hadi al-Amiri, the commander of Hashd al-Shaabi, and a man infamous for “using a power drill to pierce the skulls of his adversaries,” or so the State Department found in a 2009 cable to Washington, which also alleged that al-Amiri “may have personally ordered attacks on up to 2,000 Sunnis.” (Despite this grim record, al-Amiri was invited to the Obama White House in 2011 when he was Iraq’s transportation minister.)
Lately al-Amiri taken to both boasting that Stuart Jones, the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, personally offered him close air support, whilereprehending those Iraqis who “kiss the hands of the Americans and get nothing in return.” But when it comes to Tehran, he’s full of praise for the “unconditional” support his country has received. Now al-Amiri has found a more modest tongue. He told the Guardian’s Martin Chulov on March 26: “We did not ask for [U.S. airstrikes on Tikrit] and we have no direct contact with the Americans. From what I understand, Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi made the request. However, we respect his decision.”
Kataeb Hezbollah may be the only Iraqi Shiite militia in Iraq to be designated a terrorist entity by the United States, but that hasn’t stopped it from driving around in Abrams tanks, Humvees, armored personnel carriers, MRAPs, and toting M4 and M16 rifles — all the accidental largesse of Uncle Sam, which has sent $1 billion in military equipment to Baghdad, but has no oversight as to which actors, foreign or domestic, ultimately receive what. An abundance of U.S. weapons hasn’t dissuaded Kataeb Hezbollah from openly inciting violence against the American-led coalition to destroy the Islamic State.
“Recently we had them accusing the United States of supplying [IS] via helicopters,” said Smyth. “Kataeb Hezbollah then came out with a bullshit article claiming that they shot down a British cargo plane carrying arms to [IS]. They also said they were going to move antiaircraft missile batteries in Anbar and north of Baghdad to counter U.S. airdrops to [IS]. Whenever they sense too much of a U.S. influence in Iraq, they start to threaten American soldiers.” Kataeb Hezbollah, it bears mentioning, is headed by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iranian spy who is widely believed to have planned the bombings of both the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in the 1980s. There’s even a photograph of him holding up a Kuwaiti newspaper fingering him for this act of international terrorism. Kataeb Hezbollah has also been caught on video playing bongos with severed human heads.
Another prominent Shiite militia is Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, which in 2007 set an ambush which killed 5 U.S. servicemen in Karbala. It, too, now also happily motors around Iraq in U.S. armored vehicles, some of them thought to have been stolen from the U.S. consulate in Basra. One unnamed U.S. official told Al Jazeera that Asaib was most recently responsible for burning down homes in Albu Ajil, a village near Tikrit in retaliation for massacres carried out by the Islamic State. It has also been implicated in the abduction and murder of Sheik Qassem Sweidan al-Janabi, one of the Sunni tribal leaders who worked cheek-by-jowl with U.S. forces in fighting al Qaeda in Iraq during the so-called Awakening period.
Remarkably, the demagogic Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, once the bane of U.S. forces in Baghdad, condemned al-Janabi’s murder — in language more severe than anything contrived by the U.S. State Department’s Marie Harf or Jennifer Psaki. “Did not I tell you that Iraq will suffer from the brazen militias?” al-Sadr was quoted as saying. “Did I tell you that the army must handle the reins?” Al-Sadr demanded that Shiite head-loppers be punished and actually backed up his rhetoric with action, suspending the participation of his own al-Salam Brigades and al-Yaom ak-Mawood military in ongoing operations. (He unsuspended these militias a week ago to help with the battle in Tikrit, but so far, because of the frozen nature of the ground campaign, none of the Sadrists have seen any real action.)
Assad’s friends in Iraq want to kill Americans
The Basij-ization of Iraq of was both inevitable, given the defunct and corrupted state of the U.S.-trained military, and Iran’s outsize influence in Baghdad even before ISIS conquered a third of the country. “When the Iraqi Army was destroyed last July, this was a gift to Iran to build up these militias,” Gen. Najim Jibouri, the former mayor and police chief of Tal Afar, a crucial Iraqi border town now held by the Islamic State, said in a recent interview. “A few days ago, Khaled al-Obaidi, Iraq’s minister of defense, went to Tikrit, but the militias wouldn’t allow him to enter. He had to stay in Samarra.”
All of which makes risible U.S. officials’ continued emphasis that there is no direct American coordination with Iran or its proxies. Gen. James Terry, the U.S. commander of the coalition, claims that the “ongoing Iraqi and coalition air strikes are setting the conditions for offensive action to be conducted by Iraqi forces currently surrounding Tikrit. Iraqi security forces supported by the coalition will continue to gain territory.”
One of the authors personally witnessed in Baghdad how the IRGC targets make their way into the U.S. targeting queue. Shiite militia commanders pass Quds Force-selected targets to Badr-affiliated Iraqi Security Force commanders on the ground (many of whom are, in fact, agents of the militias), who then pass them on as legitimate targets to Iraq’s Defense Ministry representatives in the Joint Operations Centers where U.S. advisors then put those targets into a queue for aerial sorties. This is the pattern of target development that U.S. forces tried to stop during the American occupation of Iraq — when there was actually a military strategy for countering Iranian influence in the country.
But this nefarious chain of putting intelligence into action — and making the United States do the dirty work — has been resurrected. Soleimani knows it, al-Muhandis knows it, al-Amiri and his Badr agents in the Iraq Security Forces know it — so, too, should the Pentagon, whatever claims to the contrary it puts out. Iranian intelligence operatives are now America’s eyes on the ground.
What does this mean for Tikrit? The Islamic State will no doubt be flushed from the city or bombed to death eventually, but it will be a tactical loss for IS, not a strategic one. They’ll still have Mosul and most of Anbar province. The Institute for the Study of War’s Chris Harmer notes that this will have a direct bearing on bigger fights ahead. “These militiamen will say, ‘This is how badly we got beat up in Tikrit, who wants to volunteer to storm that castle in Mosul?’”
Even if Iran’s proxies do end up massing on Mosul, they’ll remain the ultimate occupying force in post-Islamic State Tikrit. The Washington Post’s Loveday Morris tweeted on March 26 that Kataeb Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq have now “suspended” their operations in the city, no doubt out of a desire to not appear to be coordinating with the hated United States. But once the Pentagon declares victory, the militias will no doubt try to hijack it and move right in to serve as the occupying force in Tikrit.
Despite reports on Thursday that three Shiite militias were “withdrawing” from operations in objection to U.S. airstrikes, now the news has come that they’ve called off their boycott, largely owing to another edict by Ayatollah Sistani. Even an alleged accidental hit by U.S. warplanes on Asaib Ahl al-Haq barely raised that militia’s pique, according to the New York Times. A Badr Corps representative also told the newspaper, “We haven’t retreated from our positions near Tikrit.” Still, others have indicated that they’re not going to let a good turn go unpunished and intend to strike at American soldiers in Iraq.
Akram al-Kabi, the leader of the Al Nujabaa Brigade, which has also fought with the Assad regime in Syria, has said: “We are staying in Tikrit, we are not leaving and we are going to target the American led coalition in Tikrit and their creation, ISIS.” Today, one of al-Kabi’s spokesmen reiterated thatthreat. Al-Kabi was once a deputy in Asaib Ahl al-Haq and was associatedwith that militia’s attacks against U.S. and British troops in 2008-2011, including an incident in which British contractors were abducted from the Iraqi Finance Ministry and later murdered. CENTCOM commander Gen. Lloyd Austin’s nevertheless briefed the Senate on Thursday with a straight face that “[c]urrently, there are no [Shiite] militia and as reported by the Iraqis today, no [PMU] in that area as well.” This is either propaganda or sheer ignorance about what is transpiring in Austin’s theatre of operations. The Guardian’s Chulov, who just returned from Tikrit, confirmed to one of the authors, in fact, that both al-Amiri and al-Muhandis were indeed in the center of the city on March 26.
Recrimination and resentment by these militias is no light matter. According to Politico, U.S. military planners are now worried that any decision to engage or isolate the Assad regime in Syria will encourage Iran or its cut-outs to attack the some 3,000 U.S. military trainers currently stationed in Iraq. It’s hard to tell where genuine concern bleeds into further excuse-making on the part of an Obama administration that has shown no intention of engaging or isolating the Assad regime, which is responsible for the vast majority of war dead and war crimes in Syria. Regardless, the result is the same: Washington is now behaving as if it needs Tehran’s permission to pursue its own anti-IS strategy, if it can even be called that.
You call this a plan?
“What strategy?” asks Chris Harmer. “We have only consequentially intervened in one part in Syria — Kobani. What’s the plan for countering [the Islamic State] there? Training 5,000 Syrian rebels per year. That is laughable when you consider the 200,000 dead from four years of attritional warfare, the four million refugees, and slow-motion destruction of the country. Five thousand doesn’t even get you into the ballgame. You have to have a significant portion of the population on your side. Moderate Syrians should be on our side. They’re saying the Americans are unreliable, they’re not on our side. This is why the moderate opposition has collapsed and the beneficiaries of that collapse have been al Qaeda, the Islamic State and Assad.”
The loss of confidence in the United States by moderate Sunnis in Syria is mirrored in Iraq. New polling data has confirmed that most Mosulawis, for instance, welcomed IS back into Iraq’s second city not out of ideological sympathy for the terror group, but out of deep-seated political grievances with the Iraqi government. Yet the Obama administration is doing next to nothing to redress these grievances. The Anbar tribal leader Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, whose charismatic brother was notoriously gunned down by al Qaeda just days after meeting with President George W. Bush in Baghdad in 2007, simply could not get a meeting with any significant official in White House during a 10-day tour of Washington last February. Vice President Joe Biden was good enough to drop in on a lesser confab, mainly to smile and pat them on the head and tell them to work constructively with the new government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
“Many of the people in Mosul will stand with [the Islamic State] if Shiite militias invade,” said Gen. Najim Jibouri. “Eighty percent of the population is does not like [IS], but if the militias are involved — 80 percent will stand very strong with [IS]. I told the Americans before, the image now is not like it was in 2003. Now the Sunni people want American forces. They will throw the flowers on them now, because the battle now is not between them and the United States and [IS], it’s between the Sunnis and Iran.” Yet far too many Sunnis still see the United States as aligned with Iran against them, Jibouri said.
Whether or not a nuclear agreement with Iran gets signed in Lausanne this weekend, whether or not Obama inaugurates a perestroika with Tehran as a result, the unshakable truth is that most of Iraq looks in the long term to remain a satrapy of the mullahs. This will only lead to further sectarian violence and civil war. “I met with almost two dozen national leaders in Iraq last week,” Ali Khedery, the longest consecutively serving U.S. diplomat in the Green Zone, told us. “I heard from Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish officials and virtually all of them told me that the real prime minster of the country is Qasem Soleimani and his deputy is Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.”
US President Barack Obama meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, October 1, 2014. (photo credit:REUTERS)
As Max Boot explained Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, the administration’s animosity toward Israel is a function of Obama’s twin strategic aims, both evident since he entered office: realigning US policy in the Middle East toward Iran and away from its traditional allies Israel and the Sunni Arab states, and ending the US’s strategic alliance with Israel.
Obama has reached a point in his presidency where he is prepared to give full expression to his plan to end the US’s strategic alliance with Israel.
He thinks that doing so is both an end to itself and a means of succeeding in his bid to achieve a rapprochement with Iran.
*********************
On Wednesday the Jerusalem Municipality announced it is shelving plans to build 1,500 apartments in the Har Homa neighborhood. Officials gave no explanation for its sudden move. But none was needed.
Obviously the construction of apartments for Jews in Jerusalem was blocked in the hopes of appeasing US President Barack Obama.
But is there any reason to believe he can be appeased? Today the White House is issuing condemnations of Israel faster than the UN.
To determine how to handle what is happening, we need to understand the nature of what is happening.
First we need to understand that the administration’s hostility has little to do with Israel’s actions.
As Max Boot explained Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, the administration’s animosity toward Israel is a function of Obama’s twin strategic aims, both evident since he entered office: realigning US policy in the Middle East toward Iran and away from its traditional allies Israel and the Sunni Arab states, and ending the US’s strategic alliance with Israel.
Over the past six years we have seen how Obama has consistently, but gradually, taken steps to advance these two goals. Toward Iran, he has demonstrated an unflappable determination to accommodate the terrorism supporting, nuclear proliferating, human rights repressing and empire building mullahs.
Beginning last November, as the deadline for nuclear talks between the US and its partners and Tehran approached, Obama’s attempts to accommodate Tehran escalated steeply.
Obama has thrown caution to the winds in a last-ditch effort to convince Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei to sign a deal with him. Last month the administration published a top secret report on Israel’s nuclear installations. Last week, Obama’s director of national intelligence James Clapper published an annual terrorism threat assessment that failed to mention either Iran or Hezbollah as threats.
And this week, the administration accused Israel of spying on its talks with Iran in order to tell members of Congress the details of the nuclear deal that Obama and his advisers have been trying to hide from them.
In the regional context, the administration has had nothing to say in the face of Iran’s takeover of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden this week. With its Houthi-proxy now in charge of the strategic waterway, and with its own control over the Straits of Hormuz, Iran is poised to exercise naval control over the two choke points of access to Arab oil.
The administration is assisting Iranian Shi’ite proxies in their battle to defeat Islamic State forces in the Iraqi city of Tikrit. It has said nothing about the Shi’ite massacres of Sunnis that come under their control.
Parallel to its endless patience for Tehran, the Obama administration has been treating Israel with bristling and ever-escalating hostility. This hostility has been manifested among other things through strategic leaks of highly classified information, implementing an arms embargo on weapons exports to Israel in time of war, ending a 40-year agreement to provide Israel with fuel in times of emergency, blaming Israel for the absence of peace, expressing tolerance and understanding for Palestinian terrorism, providing indirect support for Europe’s economic war against Israel, and providing indirect support for the BDS movement by constantly accusing Israel of ill intentions and dishonesty.
Then there is the UN. Since he first entered office, Obama has been threatening to withhold support for Israel at the UN. To date, the administration has vetoed one anti-Israel resolution at the UN Security Council and convinced the Palestinians not to submit another one for a vote.
In the months that preceded these actions, the administration exploited Israel’s vulnerability to extort massive concessions to the Palestinians.
Obama forced Benjamin Netanyahu to announce his support for Palestinian statehood in September 2009. He used the UN threat to coerce Netanyahu to agree to negotiations based on the 1949 armistice lines, to deny Jews their property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to release scores of terrorist murderers from prison.
Following the nationalist camp’s victory in last week’s election, Obama brought to a head the crisis in relations he instigated. He has done so for two reasons.
First, next week is the deadline for signing a nuclear agreement with Iran. Obama views Netanyahu as the prospective deal’s most articulate and effective opponent.
As Obama sees it, Netanyahu threatens his nuclear diplomacy with Iran because he has a unique ability to communicate his concerns about the deal to US lawmakers and the American people, and mobilize them to join him in opposing Obama’s actions. The letters sent by 47 senators to the Iranian regime explaining the constitutional limitations on presidential power to conclude treaties without Senate approval, like the letter to Obama from 367 House members expressing grave and urgent concerns about the substance of the deal he seeks to conclude, are evidence of Netanyahu’s success.
The second reason Obama has gone to war against Israel is because he views the results of last week’s election as an opportunity to market his anti-Israel and pro-Iranian positions to the American public.
If Netanyahu can convince Americans to oppose Obama on Iran, Obama believes that by accusing Netanyahu of destroying chances for peace and calling him a racist, Obama will be able to win sufficient public support for his anti-Israel policies to intimidate pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers into accepting his pro-Iranian policies.
To this end, Obama has announced that the threat that he will abandon Israel at the UN has now become a certainty. There is no peace process, Obama says, because Netanyahu had the temerity to point out that there is no way for Israel to risk the transformation of Judea and Samaria into a new terror base. As a consequence, he has all but made it official that he is abandoning the peace process and joining the anti-Israel bandwagon at the UN.
Given Obama’s decision to abandon support for a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians, modes of appeasement aimed at showing Israel’s good faith, such as Jewish building freezes, are no longer relevant. Scrapping plans to build apartments in Jewish neighborhoods like Har Homa will make no difference.
Obama has reached a point in his presidency where he is prepared to give full expression to his plan to end the US’s strategic alliance with Israel.
He thinks that doing so is both an end to itself and a means of succeeding in his bid to achieve a rapprochement with Iran.
Given this dismal reality, Israel needs to develop ways to minimize the damage Obama can cause.
Israel needs to oppose Obama’s policies while preserving its relations with its US supporters, including its Democratic supporters. Doing so will ensure that it is in a position to renew its alliance with the US immediately after Obama leaves office.
With regards to Iran, such a policy requires Israel to act with the US’s spurned Arab allies to check Iran’s expansionism and nuclear progress. It also requires Israel to galvanize strong opposition to Obama’s goal of replacing Israel with Iran as America’s chief ally in the Middle East and enabling it to develop nuclear weapons.
As for the Palestinians, Israel needs to view Obama’s abandonment of the peace process as an opportunity to improve our diplomatic position by resetting our relations with the Palestinians. Since 1993, Israel has been entrapped by the chimerical promise of a “two-state solution.”
By late 2000, the majority of Israelis had recognized that there is no way to achieve the two-state solution. There is no way to make peace with the PLO. But due to successive governments’ aversion to risking a crisis in relations with Washington, no one dared abandon the failed two-state strategy.
Now, with Obama himself declaring the peace process dead and replacing it with a policy of pure hostility toward Israel, Israel has nothing to gain from upholding a policy that blames it for the absence of peace.
No matter how loudly Netanyahu declares his allegiance to the establishment of a Palestinian state in Israel’s heartland, Obama will keep castigating him and Israel as the destroyer of peace.
The prevailing, 23-year-old view among our leadership posits that if we abandon the two-state model, we will lose American support, particularly liberal American support. But the truth is more complicated.
Inspired by the White House and the Israeli Left, pro-Israel Democrats now have difficulty believing Netanyahu’s statements of support for the establishment of a Palestinians state. But those who truly uphold liberal values of human rights can be convinced of the rightness of Israel’s conviction that peace is currently impossible and as a consequence, the two-state model must be put on the back burner.
We can maintain support among Republicans and Democrats alike if we present an alternative policy that makes sense in the absence of an option for the two-state model.
Such a policy is the Israeli sovereignty model. If the government adopts a policy of applying Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria in whole – as I recommend in my book The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, or in part, in Area C, as Economy Minister Naftali Bennett recommends, our leaders will be able to defend their actions before the American people, including pro-Israel Democrats.
Israel must base its policy of sovereignty on two principles. First, this is a liberal policy that will ensure the civil rights of Palestinians and Israelis alike, and improve the Palestinians’ standard of living.
Second, such a policy is not necessarily a longterm or permanent “solution,” but it is a stable equilibrium for now.
Just as Israel’s decision to apply its laws to united Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the past didn’t prevent it from conducting negotiations regarding the possible transfer of control over the areas to the Palestinians and Syrians, respectively, so an administrative decision to apply Israeli law to all or parts of Judea and Samaria will not block the path for negotiations with the Palestinians when regional and internal Palestinian conditions render them practicable.
The sovereignty policy is both liberal and strategically viable. If the government adopts it, the move will rebuild Israel’s credibility and preserve Israel’s standing on both sides of the aisle in Washington.
Never before has Israel had to deal with such an openly hostile US administration. Indeed, until 2009, the very notion that a day would come when an American president would prefer an alliance with Khamenei’s Iran to its traditional alliances with Israel and the Sunni Arab states was never even considered. But here we are.
Our current situation is unpleasant. But it isn’t the end of the world. We aren’t helpless. If we act wisely, we can stem Iran’s nuclear and regional advance. If we act boldly, we can preserve our alliance with the US while adopting a policy toward the Palestinians that for the first time in decades will advance our interests and our liberal values on the world stage.
Israel lies at the center of the territorial caliphate envisioned by ISIS – and that’s only it’s second greatest security concern.
The US is racing toward an agreement that will legitimize the nuclear threshold status of Iran
Israel’s main challenge is to maintain its freedom of action, while on a collision course with current American policy.
Israel must prepare for worst-case scenarios, not best-case dreams.
************************
A new Likud-led government will take office in Jerusalem in the upcoming weeks. The government will have to face many security challenges emerging from the turbulent strategic environment.
The most important issue is Iran. The US is racing toward an agreement that will legitimize the nuclear threshold status of Iran. Many key Mideast powers have signaled their displeasure with the nascent accord, as well as their desire to develop uranium enrichment capabilities on par with Iran.
The American attempt to offer a nuclear umbrella to forestall regional nuclear proliferation – which is a strategic nightmare – is doomed to failure. No Arab leader trusts President Obama. Therefore, only a military strike to destroy the Iranian capability to produce fissionable material needed for nuclear bombs can stop nuclear proliferation in the region.
The only country with ‘enough guts’ to do this is Israel. This decision must be taken by the next Israeli government. The timetable for such a strike is not to be determined by additional Iranian progress on the nuclear path, but by the perceptions of regional leaders of Iranian ambitions and power. The expansion of Iranian influence to Iraq and Yemen, in addition to its grip over Syria and Lebanon, has heightened threat perceptions. American willingness to accept a greater Iranian regional role undermines American credibility and underscores the need for Israeli action in the near future.
An Israeli strike is needed to prevent nuclear proliferation and to prevent imperial and Islamist Iran from acquiring hegemony in the Middle East. History indicates that such Israeli actions are not welcomed by American administrations, but are highly appreciated later on. In this case, it is Israel that will have to save the Americans from themselves.
Israel’s main challenge is to maintain its freedom of action, while on a collision course with current American policy. This is not an easy endeavor, but Israel has large reservoirs of goodwill in the US that should allow Israel to act on its cardinal security interests against the will of an unpopular American president.
Despite the fact that some of the Arab armies that posed a threat to Israel have largely disintegrated and the power differential between Israel and its Arab neighbors grows constantly, the Jewish state still faces great hostility from Islamist sub-state armed groups. Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad cannot conquer Israel, but have acquired impressive capabilities to cause massive damage to Israel. Large armored formations are still needed to tackle those challenges. In addition, Israel’s active defense missile capabilities must be augmented.
Unfortunately, the IDF is underfunded, which has led to cuts in ground forces and in training for the regular army and its reserves. Whoever will be the new defense minister has the task of securing a much larger, multi-year military budget on which the IDF can definitively plan a sustained force build-up. Israel’s strong economy can definitely sustain larger defense layouts.
Another area that needs attention is the navy. Over 90 percent of Israel’s exports travel via the East Mediterranean. Moreover, this area is rich in energy resources that are vital for Israel’s future prosperity. Yet, the East Mediterranean is increasingly becoming an Islamic lake.
Turkey under Erdogan grows more hostile every month. Syria is an Iranian ally, and its civil war has brought about the rise of Islamist militias of all kinds. Lebanon is largely ruled by Hezbollah – a Shiite radical organization aligned with Iran. Hezbollah occasionally perpetrates attacks against Israel and has threatened to hit Israel’s gas rigs at sea. Hamas, a radical Sunni terrorist group linked to Iran, has taken over Gaza. It has launched thousands of rockets into Israel and staged attacks on Israeli gas installations in the Mediterranean. In Sinai, a plethora of Islamist armed groups are challenging the sovereignty of Egypt and even attacked targets along the Suez Canal. Libya is no longer a real state and the Islamist militias are fighting to carve out areas of influence. In short, we may soon see real piracy and terrorist attacks in the East Mediterranean.
Israel’s responses must include a larger and stronger navy. This is an expensive project that has already started. Hopefully, all budgetary problems will be overcome. Fortunately, some of the vessels needed for this are procured in Germany (not the US), while others can be built in Israel if enough money is allocated.
The strategic landscape of the Middle East is begetting new leaders and new ruling elites. Israel’s intelligence apparatus faces a difficult job in identifying the important players and their modus operandi. Many of the devils Israel knew are no longer in power. This means greater uncertainty and higher chances of surprises. Since Israel cannot prevent all surprises (that is their nature), it must prepare for worst-case scenarios rather than be tempted by best-case, rosy dreams.
anneinpt
artaxes
danmillerinpanama
davidking1530
Peter Hofman
Joseph Wouk
Peter
Louisiana Steve
WarSclerotic 
Recent Comments