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Iran prepares to attack Northern Israel

February 22, 2015

February 21, 2015

Iran prepares to attack Northern Israel

By James Lewis

via Articles: Iran prepares to attack Northern Israel.

 

Take an old-fashioned iron bar magnet and a flat piece of white paper with hundreds of scattered iron filings. As soon as the paper is placed on the magnet, all the particles align around the two separate poles of the bar’s magnetic field. Every iron particle becomes polarized around one of the two extremes.

This is what Obama and Jarrett have managed to achieve in the Middle East. It is not an accident. We know that the two-person cult of Obama-Jarrett have been secretly “negotiating” with the mullahs since the beginning of the Obama years. But time is running out, and everybody over there is planning for the post-O years.

For the Iranians that means moving as fast as possible to capitalize on a historic moment of Western weakness, collusion, and accommodation. The mullahs remember what happened when Ronald Reagan won over Jimmy Carter. They have less than two years to grab whatever they can.

That is why Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops are now moving through Syria into high mountain positions to attack the Golan Heights, the northeastern tip of Israel. Syrian Army forces and Shi’ites recruited in Pakistan and Afghanistan are working under the command of Iran’s Guards.

DEBKAfile has a detailed article on this. (Debka is linked to Israeli intelligence, but this kind of stuff they don’t kid about).

DEBKAfile February 18, 2015, 9:04 AM (IDT)

“Even in stormy winter conditions, the Syrian army continued Wednesday to press forward with Iranian, Hizballah and imported Afghani and Pakistani Shiite forces towards the Golan and Israeli lines. Their immediate objective appears to be the lofty Tel al-Hara mountain fortress, which the Syrian army lost to rebel forces. … Our military sources report that the fall of Tel al-Hara would lay Quneitra (on the Goland Heights) open to attack. …(In) Quneitra… Tehran plans to establish a major military outpost and forward command center up against Israel’s Golan deployment. This is the first instance of Syria’s Bashar Assad agreeing to pass a warfront to Iranian command.”

In response, Israel has conducted a successful decapitation strike across the border, killing half a dozen top Guard officers and half a dozen Hizb’allah planners. Syrian artillery has reportedly killed 200 Guards in a “friendly fire” accident -– but Israel probably knows how to penetrate Syrian battlefield electronics.

Of all the extremely dangerous events that are now gathering momentum in the region, the Iranian-Syrian drive against northern Israel is the most dangerous. The reason is simple. Israel has a sophisticated nuclear, WMD, and missile deterrent, to be used under military doctrines similar to our own. For rational nations, WMDs are a last resort, only usable when a threat is direct and existential. Iran has always played the crazy card, a big show of irrational fanaticism and rage. Maybe they really are crazy — nobody knows for sure.

The mullahs are now trying to push Israel to the wall –- which is when a Western-style deterrent doctrine comes into force. Ayatollah Khamenei, the “Supreme Guide,” has obviously decided this is the moment when America will not defend its former allies. Maybe Obama and Jarrett have actually told him so; maybe Iran has penetrated this supremely foolish and malignant administration. Whatever the case may be, Iran is moving military forces through Syria toward Israel. Iran is also winning power in Yemen (which controls the narrow entrance to the Red Sea). All these moves directly threaten Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as Israel and U.S. naval and air force assets in the region.

This is an enormous Iranian gamble, maybe a martyrdom gamble, following Khomeinist war theology.

This is therefore the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It is a moment of unpredictable confrontation, with nuclear weapons in the offing.

Obama and the Iranians are gambling everything on the toss of a coin.

Israel does not have the manpower to match Iran, Syria, and Hizb’allah at the Golan border. If the Iranians stage a blitzkrieg against the Golan, using a force of fifty or more tanks now located in Syria, Israel may resort to unconventional weapons. These can range from massive electronic warfare to arming the Syrian Sunni rebels, to a wide range of WMD’s.

If the Golan becomes the flashpoint, a likely outcome is a huge regional war, pitting Shi’ite Iran against Sunni Arabs. Israel has long had contacts with the Saudis and Egyptians on how to respond to Iranian aggression. If Israel is drawn into regional chaos, it is likely to support the Sunni powers, who will need all the help they can get.

Iran has a Shi’ite martyrdom creed, which suggests it is trying to provoke an Israeli strike that will predictably enrage Obama and Western liberals, so that Iran can play the aggrieved victim. The Muslim world, which is 80% Sunni, may then back Shi’ite Iran.

The most intelligent form of preemption on the Golan is therefore the most invisible one. Big nuclear bangs are self-defeating. Silent strikes may work. There is now a range of unconventional weapons available to technically advanced nations. However, any local war can spread unpredictably around the Middle East.

Obama has brought us to the nuclear brink. It is vital to understand that this is not an accident. It is purposeful. It is a continuation of the Carter-Brzezinski strategy that put Ayatollah Khomeini into power forty years ago — the first Islamic Caliphate. The Obama-Carter strategy makes no rational sense at all, except perhaps in some drunken faculty lounge. The risks are enormous, and the potential for a major violent backlash against the United States and Europe is very great. Iran now has ICBMs that can reach Europe and soon, the United States.

The single biggest factor in this crisis is the vacuum of American power. For decades the United States was trusted to keep the peace in the Persian Gulf, where Persians and Arabs have been staring at each with implacable hatred for a thousand years, across fifty miles of water.

Obama has destroyed any trust in America. We have “community disorganized” the Middle East.

When Netanyahu comes to Washington in defiance of Obama, the Iranians and ISIS will cheer for Obama.

But maybe the American people will come to their own conclusions.

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The Muslim Brotherhood-ISIS Connection

February 19, 2015

The Muslim Brotherhood-ISIS Connection

February 18, 2015 by Arnold Ahlert

via The Muslim Brotherhood-ISIS Connection | FrontPage Magazine.

 

President Obama’s ongoing antipathy towards Egypt is no accident. Our feckless president has long had a soft spot in his heart for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), and Egypt’s removal of the terror group from the corridors of power has rankled the administration. So what is it the Egyptians understand and our president denies? The Egyptian Minister of Religious Endowments insists that ISIS was birthed by the MB.

Dr. Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa and other Egyptian scholars have explained that while ISIS is publicly hostile to the MB, they share identical goals. Last August, the Ministry illuminated those goals. “They are both waging a war against their homelands with vandalism, destruction and murder—murder on behalf of the enemies of the state who fund them,” read a published statement. Other similarities include the exploitation of women to further their agenda, and the reality that both groups use “lying and deception in the name of religion,” and both have “ignorant and lying” leaders who “use religion to play with the minds of the public,” the statement explained. “The main commonality between the two groups is their terrorist acts,” it added.

A month later, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who pledged to support the Obama administration’s war against ISIS, urged the president to recognize the bigger picture of Islamic extremism that extends beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria. He cited terrorist threats in Libya, Sudan, Yemen and the Sinai Peninsula as examples of identical danger posed by ISIS. “We can’t reduce the danger lurking in the region to ISIL (ISIS). We have to bear in mind all the pieces of the puzzle,” he insisted. “We can’t just limit the confrontation to checking and destroying the Islamic State.”

Unfortunately for his nation, Al Sisi’s prescience proved correct: 21 Egyptian Christians were beheaded by ISIS in Libya, where they have established another presence. Such an opportunity was made possible by the Obama administration’s determination to topple Muammar Gaddafi—followed by its refusal to help the new U.S.-backed Libyan government train their police and military. As a result Libya is in complete chaos. Moreover the administration’s political pettiness has allegedly reached a new low: according to Oliver North, Obama denied both Egypt and Jordan targeting information on ISIS in Libya and Syria, despite the decapitation of the Egyptian Christians and the incineration of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh.

The administration’s behavior in this context runs completely counter to the reality illuminated by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukr. “Ultimately this extremist ideology is shared by all terrorist groups. We detect ties of cooperation between them and see a danger as it crosses borders,” he explained.

Part of that mix includes includes Hamas, also spawned by the MB. Writing for the Times of Israel, Ryan Mauro, National Security Analyst for the Clarion Project, wonders why the world agrees that ISIS is morally repugnant even as Hamas gets a pass. “Both implement sharia governance, deliberately target civilians, have genocidal beliefs and seek the establishment of a caliphate,” he writes. He further explains that ISIS’s determination to exterminate Iraq’s Yazidi population is “no more egregious” than Hamas’s determination to eliminate millions of Jews. And the only difference between the MB, Hamas and ISIS is in regard to their method of achieving the same goal. The MB and Hamas wish to establish a Muslim caliphate incrementally, while ISIS is willing to do anything and everything to bring one about as quickly as possible.

Moreover, the MB’s and Hamas’s desire to eliminate the Jews is nothing new. The MB was established in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, who admired Hitler and wrote to him expressing his desire to collaborate with the Nazi Party. During World War II, the MB made good on that desire. Its members spied for Hitler in the Middle East and formed two Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar Divisions to fight for the Nazis. Following the war, the MB was supported by the West, who saw them as a counterweight to the Soviet Union’s Middle East aspirations. And while some MB members eschewed violence and built schools and medical clinics, others continued to promote violence that included two failed assassination attempts against Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Hamas was spawned in 1987 by the MB in Israel.

Two years later, the MB’s Mujahedeen army repelled the Soviets from Afghanistan and then split into two groups—one of which was Al Qaeda. And as Americans are now fully aware, MB-educated Osama bin Laden became their leader. Both groups, along with other Sunni Islamists, were inspired by al-Banna’s successor Sayyid Qutb. In his 1964 manifesto, Milestones, he insisted that governments not based on Sharia Law are apostate, making them legitimate targets of jihad.

ISIS has ideological roots that trace all the way back to the Wahhabist strain of Islam founded by Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab during the 16th century in Saudi Arabia. Like ISIS, al-Wahhab believed in a strict and conformist form of Islam. Those who dissented were to be killed, their property confiscated, and their wives and daughters violated. The essential rift between the two groups arises from Wahhabism’s “One Ruler, One Authority, One Mosque” doctrine that refers to the Saudi king, the absolute authority of Wahhabism, and its control of the mosques and their teachings. ISIS rejects this doctrine, which explains why Saudi Arabia feels as threatened as anyone else by their rise, even as much of the kingdom still embraces Wahhabism. With the rise of Saudi oil wealth, the West preferred to look at the kingdom’s modernization, even as they ignored the Wahhabist part of the equation.

ISIS’s modern roots can be traced to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian street thug who arrived in Afghanistan too late to fight the Soviets. After a return to Jordan, he went back to Afghanistan a decade later, meeting bin Laden in 1999, but refusing to join al Qaeda. When the Taliban fell in 2001 he fled to Iraq, and in 2003 he set up ISIS’s precursor, Jama’at al-Tawhid w’al-Jihad (the Party of Monotheism and Jihad). It was comprised mostly of non-Iraqis, and al-Zarqawi’s primary targets were Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim majority. By 2004 his campaign of suicide bombings in that nation made him a jihadist superstar, earning Bin Laden’s endorsement in the process. Al-Zarqawi returned the favor by rebranding his group al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

Yet by 2005, al Qaeda began to have misgivings about AQI’s brutality towards civilians. The American troop surge, coupled with Sunni Iraq’s own disenchantment with Zarqawi’s strict sharia rules gave birth to the “Awakening” that allowed the U.S. to prevail in Iraq—until the deadly combination of a Shi’ite-dominated Maliki government looking for payback after years of Sunni Ba’athist domination, coupled with the Obama administration’s precipitous troop withdrawal in 2011, laid the groundwork for ISIS’s current rise.

In 2011, AQI was being run by current ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and had become a largely Iraqi organization. Another rebranding took place as these “Sons of Iraq” became ISI, until their ranks were swelled by former commanders and soldiers in Saddam’s military. With the addition of new troops, Baghdadi opened a second front in Syria, once again targeting Shi’ite Muslims and their Shia sub-sect Alawite rulers led by Bashar Assad. When Syrian became part of the equation, ISI became ISIS.

And while all of this was occurring, Obama not only ignored the metastasizing threat, but used his 2012 presidential campaign to assure the American public that al Qaeda had been “decimated” and terror was “on the run.” More accurately, ISIS has been on a roll, seizing large swaths of both Iraq and Syria, along with billions of dollars, courtesy of bank seizures and oil revenue that make them the richest terrorist organization in the history of the world.

Moreover despite the “conventional wisdom” that al Qaeda and ISIS are enemies, the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo indicates there was at least some indication that al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS worked together to perpetrate that atrocity.

On 25 December, Egypt declared the MB a terrorist organization, with the Egyptian courts dissolving nearly all of its institutions, organizations and charities. By contrast on Feb. 4, Obama hosted a meeting at the White House with 14 Muslim leaders, including Azhar Azeez, President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and Hoda Elshishtawy of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

Both groups were founded by members of the MB.

Former congressman Pete Hoekstra was incensed. The Michigan Republican  insisted it was “absolutely outrageous” for Obama to invite “the Muslim Brotherhood into our government to meet with the White House.” “These are people who are committed to destroying our way of life,” the Michigan Republican warned. “The policy failures go on and on and on, and that’s how we need to be addressing this president and challenging him that his policies are just not working.”

Such challenges will have to overcome that complicity, as well as the grim determination by this administration not to link terror with Islam. Both challenges are epitomized by the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism beginning today. As the AP explains, the Summit will “highlight domestic and international efforts to prevent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting and inspiring others, particularly disaffected young people.”

The words “Islamist” or “terror?” Nowhere to be found. As for complicity, one of the Summit’s attendees is the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) an organization with extensive ties to terror, including former Cambridge mosque worshipper Ahmad Abousamra who is currently ISIS’s top propagandist, as well as the Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing.  The Cambridge mosque, ISB’s first house of worship was founded in 1982 by Abdulrahman Alamoudi, currently serving a 23-year prison term for his conviction as an al Qaeda fundraiser. Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a founding trustee at the ISB’s second mosque in Roxbury.

One of the Obama administration’s ostensible ideas for preventing recruitment and radicalization? State Department spokesperson Marie Harf, epitomized their enduring recklessness, insisting we cannot “kill” our way to victory against ISIS. “We need, in the longer term, medium and longer term, to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs,” she declared.

Jobs? Twenty-one Egyptian Christians went to Libya in search of jobs. ISIS decapitated every one of them.

The Obama administration is morally bankrupt. And as the history of the MB-ISIS connections presented here suggests, it is only a matter of time before Americans pay an unconscionable price for that bankruptcy.

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ISIS Fighters Advance on Town Near US Marine Base in Iraq

February 13, 2015

Iraqi Army Repels Attack on Base Hosting U.S. Marines

Friday, 13 Feb 2015 10:37 AM

By Melanie Batley and Newsmax Wires

via ISIS Fighters Advance on Town Near US Marine Base in Iraq.

Iraqi security forces on Friday repelled an attack by Islamic State insurgents against an air base in Anbar province where U.S. Marines are training Iraqi troops, Iraqi and U.S. military officials said.

Militants from the jihadist group had attacked the Ain al-Asad base and the nearby town of al-Baghdadi a day earlier, leading to sporadic clashes in the town overnight.

Al-Baghdadi has been besieged for months by Islamic State, which captured swathes of northern and western Iraq last year, prompting a campaign of U.S.-led airstrikes and the deployment of hundreds of U.S. military advisers to the country.

A U.S. defense official said the Iraqi forces had stopped the attack and re-secured the facility.

“Coalition forces were several kilometers from the attack and at no stage were they under direct threat from this action,” the official said.

About 320 U.S. Marines are training members of the Iraqi 7th Division at the base, which has been struck by mortar fire on at least one previous occasion since December.

Iraq’s Defense Ministry said on its website the Iraqi army killed eight assailants near the base, which is about 85 km (50 miles) northwest of Ramadi.

An Iraqi military official in Baghdad told Reuters the insurgents had taken advantage of a lull in the airstrikes, caused by poor weather, to launch the offensive.

He said Islamic State had been cleared from most of al-Baghdadi, with the remaining fighting centered around a police station.

That conflicted with reports from a tribal leader who said the jihadists were still in control of much of the town.

Ongoing clashes and poor communications in the area made it difficult to confirm such reports.

U.S. defense officials told CNN there are no plans to evacuate U.S. personnel from the air base, which is just a few miles from al-Baghdadi, but security officials said the militants are closing in on it and Iraqi forces are calling for reinforcements.

According to officials, the base has not been attacked but is taking sporadic indirect fire from militants in the form of rocket launchers and mortars.

Two security officials told CNN that security forces from the base killed eight suicide bombers on Friday who were trying to penetrate the air base.

At the same time, a U.S. defense official said that U.S. troops do not consider themselves trapped, are not contemplating a ground engagement with the Islamic State, and there have been no injuries to U.S. forces at the base, CNN said.

“It bears watching,” retired Col. Thomas Lynch, a National Defense University fellow, told Fox News, regarding the reports.

He stressed, however, that for the militants to be a real threat to the base they would need get through the perimeter.

“It’s not impossible,” Lynch said, but to do it they would have to amass a large number of fighters — which would make them “vulnerable” to airstrikes.

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The Only Strategy to Defeat Jihad

February 11, 2015

The Only Strategy to Defeat Jihad

By Jonathan David Carson

February 11, 2015

via Articles: The Only Strategy to Defeat Jihad.

 

An imam on British television taught me more in a few minutes than any of the books I have read on Islam, some of them quite instructive.  After railing at Israel and America, the imam smiled knowingly and said that if God did not want those skyscrapers to fall, he wouldn’t have let airplanes fly into them.  I almost shouted, “Then I guess God wants Palestinians to suffer, or else he wouldn’t let Israelis do all those awful things you say they do!”

I hear endless lamentations about our not having a strategy to defeat “Islamic extremism” or whatever the day’s euphemism is.  The cynic in me says that what we really need is to get rid of our strategy of helping the Muslim Brotherhood and the mullahs in Iran.  But if we have to have a strategy, here it is.

We blow some ISIS bastard to smithereens and shout, “Allahu Akbar!”  We take out Iran’s nuclear reactors and say, “If Allah wanted Iran to have a nuclear bomb, he wouldn’t have dropped those bunker-busters.”

Islam holds that there are no “secondary causes,” that is, that God never acts indirectly, by means of natural law, but always directly, willing everything that happens.  Fine, then, let secondary causes, cruise missiles, for instance, or rifle bullets, kill as many of our enemies as it takes for them to have to come to their senses.  Make them believe that Allah is killing them.  Make them believe it for so long that they stop believing the absurd promise that heaven is full of beautiful virgins waiting lustfully for their smelly carcasses.  Tell them over and over again that Allah is killing them, and doing it directly, without intermediaries, such as drone pilots or Marine snipers, and they will just want a drink.

Franklin Roosevelt said that the Doolittle Raid was launched from Shangri-La.  That’s the idea.  We won that war.

People frequently make the mistake of thinking that Islam is like Christianity, only different.  They are opposites.

Christianity thrives under adversity.  What’s killing Christianity is comfort and ease.  Christianity is for people in trouble.  Judaism too.

Islam thrives on success.  Muslims won one battle, and Mohammed said it was God’s will.  That seemed to make sense.  They won another battle, and they were convinced.  They won another battle, and Mohammed’s boast began to make sense to their enemies.  They won another battle, and their enemies were convinced.  Enemies fled and fled until they had a mighty empire.

Then they ran into men who knew to fight the long defeat, as the elves in The Lord of the Rings put it, and, lo, the defeat was not so long anymore.

We must fight whether we expect to win or not.  We are not cowards who won’t fight without a guarantee of victory from God.

I don’t want to hear any “moderate Muslim” crap.  Who are these mythical beasts?  The Saudis, who in the name of sexual morality won’t let girls escape from burning buildings improperly dressed and who then buy sex slaves from India and Pakistan?  Selling us oil makes them moderate?   They won’t even drill for it themselves.  We have to do it, just as we have to defend them from Saddam Hussein.  What makes them moderate is that we are fools.

I also don’t want to hear that most victims of Islamic extremism are Muslims.

For a while the hobbits sat in silence. At length Sam stirred. ‘Well, I call that neat as neat,’ he said. ‘If this nice friendliness would spread about in Mordor, half our trouble would be over.’

‘Quietly, Sam,’ Frodo whispered. ‘There may be others about. We have evidently had a very narrow escape, and the hunt was hotter on our tracks than we guessed. But that is the spirit of Mordor, Sam; and it has spread to every corner of it. Orcs have always behaved like that, or so all tales say, when they are on their own. But you can’t get much hope out of it. They hate us far more, altogether and all the time. If those two had seen us, they would have dropped all their quarrel until we were dead.

Colonialism has been roundly condemned as oppressive.  Maybe so.  But what the Islamic world needs is oppression.  When the West oppressed the Muslim world, we didn’t have this problem.  And the Muslims were better off.  They could gradually become sane,  as they noticed that Allah was not winning any battles for them.

The reason so many of us are complacent about the threat from Islam is that the colonial era, which ended only recently in historical terms, made us feel safe.  It made Muslims feel impotent and made us feel invincible.  We got swelled heads and saw too many movies and decided that Muslims were peaceful when they were simply afraid.  Now the Establishment reassures them of our peaceful intentions and destroys our best defense: their fear.

Not every Muslim is a terrorist, but Islam is a terrorist religion.  Mohammed was a mass murderer and child molester, and devout Muslims have been following his example ever since.  As long as there is Islam, there will be “Islamic extremists.”

The only way to get rid of Islamic extremism is to get rid of Islam, and it can be done.  Several times Islam has been near collapse, only to be rescued by infidels.  The Great Powers of the West, more fearful of each other than of Islam, rescued it in hopes of using it against their European enemies.  During the Cold War, Russians and Americans tried to turn the Islamic world against each other.  Now both live in fear of it.

Islam will collapse in reverse order.  One victory led to another and another and another.  One defeat will lead to another and another until either some Obama rescues it or it collapses.  The no secondary causes doctrine works only on the way up.

The reason we lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that we don’t know our enemies — or anybody else for that matter.  We think that we have to “win the hearts and minds” of Muslims.  That is insane.  No Iraqi or Afghan is going to fight for us.  They will fight for themselves, some of them.  Afghans will not fight for America; they might fight to protect themselves from the Taliban.

We don’t have to be liked or even respected.  Afghans have to be brave enough to fight for freedom.  We can help them be brave by killing some of their enemies.  The Muslim god is an illusion, American military might real.

Do not in your arrogance think that Afghan villagers are so much less intelligent than we are that it is impossible for them to grasp the obvious: Allah cannot protect the Taliban from determined Americans.  Afghans are like anyone else: they want to be on the winning side.  So don’t lose.

Squeamishness means death all around, even death for our enemies.  Wait until a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, or the anti-Semites have their way and Israel is on the brink of destruction.  That is when you will see real death of Muslims, deaths of millions or tens of millions.

The issue is how many Muslims we will have to kill.  The liberals would have us kill more, far more, than is necessary.  We could kill a billion Muslims on a lazy afternoon.  We don’t do it because we are not killers, not because we can’t.  They, on the other hand, would kill a billion of us if they could.  They just can’t.

The more we wring our hands and say we are weary, the more we praise Islam without any real knowledge of it or any intention to obey its cruel rules, the more we temporize, the more we pride ourselves on our compassion and understanding, the more Muslims will die.

Obama is presenting a false American face to the Islamic world, which is getting the idea that Americans are just a bunch of European weenies, just when Europeans giving up on being weenies.  We are not “war weary”; we are weary of wars we lose.  Even if we win, we lose, as when we put in place a regime in Iraq more beholden to Iran than to us or a regime in Afghanistan no one should have to live under.

Obama is not America, as Muslims are going to find out.  The sooner, the better

 

 

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U.S. Embassy Met With Group Trying to Influence Israeli Elections

February 10, 2015

U.S. Embassy Met With Group Trying to Influence Israeli Elections

State Department helped group of Arab-Israeli mayors get last-minute visas

BY:
February 9, 2015 2:30 pm

via U.S. Embassy Met With Group Trying to Influence Israeli Elections | Washington Free Beacon.

 

Top officials at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv met in late January with one of the main progressive groups working to tip the upcoming Israeli elections against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and helped facilitate the organization’s visit to the United States this week to learn political organizing techniques.

The State Department helped the nonprofit group Givat Haviva secure last-minute visas for a delegation of Arab-Israeli mayors, which is in the United States this week meeting with civic leaders and attending discussions on voter outreach and community organizing. The delegation arrived on Feb. 4 and is in Washington, D.C., through Wednesday.

Givat Haviva is part of a coalition of U.S.-funded progressive groups working to influence the Israeli elections, the Washington Free Beacon reported last week. The organization, which has chapters in both the United States and Israel, is leading an effort to increase voter turnout among Arab Israelis, who traditionally oppose right-leaning parties such as Netanyahu’s Likud.

Top American diplomats met with Givat Haviva and the Arab-Israeli mayors at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv on Jan. 29, where they discussed the plans for this week’s visit. U.S. officials at the meeting included the deputy mission chief, the CIA station chief, and the cultural attaché, according to an attendee.

The Givat Haviva Institute’s co-executive director Mohammad Darawshe, the main organizer of the delegation, told the Free Beacon that the meeting was just a “farewell greeting from the embassy staff after they helped with getting the visas.”

The State Department said it would provide a summary of the meeting to the Free Beacon last Wednesday, but as of Monday afternoon had not provided one.

Givat Haviva was also scheduled to meet with the State Department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs in Washington, D.C., on Monday, but the meeting was abruptly canceled following inquiries from the Free Beacon.

Moti Kahana, an Israeli American businessman who funded the delegation visit, told the Free Beacon on Monday morning that he was not sure why the meeting was canceled.

The State Department, which has provided funding for Givat Haviva in the past, said last week that it would not be meeting with the mayoral delegation.

“The State Department, including [the Middle East Partnership Initiative], had no involvement in organizing or funding the trip, and will not be meeting with the delegation,” said a State Department official.

The agency did not respond to request for comment when asked specifically about the scheduled meeting on Monday. The delegation organizer Darawshe had previously said they had no meetings scheduled with U.S. officials.

The State Department declined to comment on whether it helped expedite the mayoral delegation’s visas. However, internal Givat Haviva correspondence shared with the Free Beacon indicates that the delegation received special attention from U.S. officials.

On Jan. 22, Darawshe wrote to other trip organizers and asked for the names and information about the mayors planning to attend the trip.

“[State Department Program Specialist] Manal Haddad from the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv is ready to help get the visas for mayors,” wrote Darawshe.

The delegation received its visas one week later. The State Department told the Free Beacon that the approval process for travel visas from Israel typically takes around 12 weeks to complete.

American involvement in the Israeli elections recently came under scrutiny after Ha’aretz reported that President Obama’s reelection team and the U.S. nonprofit group OneVoice were helping the V15 campaign to oust Netanyahu. OneVoice, which received State Department funding last year, described its work as a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote effort.

On Thursday, the Free Beacon published a confidential strategy proposal drafted by U.S.-based group Ameinu, which outlined a “massive” $3 million get-out-the-vote initiative funded by American donors. The campaign would target Israeli communities that traditionally oppose right-leaning parties such as Likud.

According to the memo, Obama’s reelection team was involved in the effort. Givat Haviva was “chosen to carry out the Arab community GOTV [Get-Out-the-Vote] initiative.”

Givat Haviva has had a close relationship with the State Department for many years, according to Darawshe.

“Givat Haviva has been an awardee of the State Department grant for more than 20 years already,” he said.

While the Free Beacon was unable to independently verify 20 years of grants, Givat Haviva did receive State Department funding in 2011, 2012 and 2013, according to public records. U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro gave a keynote address at the group’s conference last May.

“The United States has a long history of partnership with Givat Haviva, through our Embassy in Tel Aviv, the USAID Conflict Management and Mitigation program, and the Middle East Partnership Initiative,” said Shapiro.

In addition to the meetings with the State Department, Givat Haviva’s mayoral delegation also attended discussion sessions on political organizing at George Mason University on Monday morning. On Monday evening, Jeremiah Baronberg will host a reception for the delegation at McKenna, Long & Aldridge LLP.

Special guests at the reception will include Howard Dean, Thomas Pickering, and former Washington mayor Anthony Williams.

According to the confidential strategy memo published last week, Givat Haviva’s get-out-the-vote-effort in Israel would include bi-weekly polling, messaging, an advertising effort, grassroots outreach, and an operation to bring targeted voters to the polls on Election Day.

The memo stressed the urgency of securing funding in a timely manner and indicated that the plan would be put into place immediately.

“As of the writing of this document on December 17, there are only 91 days until the election,” said the document. “We need to raise the necessary funds immediately to allow the operations to get established in order to maximize the remaining time until voting day.”

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Bibi, Iran’s Nukes, and Military Force in a Changed Middle East

January 30, 2015

By: J. E. Dyer

Published: January 30th, 2015

via The Jewish Press » » Bibi, Iran’s Nukes, and Military Force in a Changed Middle East.

 

IRAN-US-POLITICS-MILITARY

{Originally posted on author’s website, Liberty Unyielding}

Over at The Atlantic, there’s a comprehensive worldview being built on the question of whether there’s a “military solution” to the Iran nuclear problem, and how Benjamin Netanyahu has Israel positioned vis-à-vis the problem in general.

Jeffrey Goldberg thinks Netanyahu has Israel positioned very poorly indeed.

James Fallows’ conclusion, agreeing with Goldberg on the worldview, is encapsulated in a quote from a war-game director and retired Air Force officer in 2004:

“After all this effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers,” our main war-game designer, retired Air Force colonel Sam Gardiner, said at the end of our 2004 exercise. “You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work.” That was true then, and truer now.

I don’t doubt at all the sincere belief Fallows has in this conclusion.  But if you unpack the work that led to it 2004, you find that it was based on a fatally flawed premise. (More on that in a moment.)

Moreover, the situation of 2004 no longer obtains.  That means that the calculations of two major players must now be different.  One is Israel; the other is the United States.  The calculations I refer to include not merely the consequences of each party’s actions, and whether the parties’ capabilities are sufficient for the necessary task.  They also include what the threat has become, and the fact that it is graver now than in 2004.

Don’t make assumptions about what I mean by that.  It may not be what you think.

Why the 2004 conclusion about “military force” is flawed

I’ll begin by explaining my point that the premise of the 2004 war game sponsored by The Atlantic was flawed.  There are several criticisms that can be levied, but this is the one that matters most.  (And I don’t mean to impugn the care and diligence that went into the war game.  You’ll see, however, why I found it fatally flawed at the time – before I was an active blogger – and still do.)

To illustrate what I’m talking about, I’ll quote a key passage from the 2004 war-game summary.  Several players were assembled to act out the roles of the Principals Committee of the National Security Council, and James Fallows narrates the events of the game:

The President wanted to understand the options he actually had for a military approach to Iran. The general and his staff had prepared plans for three escalating levels of involvement: a punitive raid against key Revolutionary Guard units, to retaliate for Iranian actions elsewhere, most likely in Iraq; a pre-emptive air strike on possible nuclear facilities; and a “regime change” operation, involving the forcible removal of the mullahs’ government in Tehran. Either of the first two could be done on its own, but the third would require the first two as preparatory steps. In the real world the second option—a pre-emptive air strike against Iranian nuclear sites—is the one most often discussed. Gardiner said that in his briefing as war-game leader he would present versions of all three plans based as closely as possible on current military thinking. He would then ask the principals to recommend not that an attack be launched but that the President authorize the preparatory steps to make all three possible.

The fatal flaw here is posing the problem set by the president as one of creating options for a “military approach” to Iran.  That’s why the options end up being, respectively, useless, vague, and appalling.

Asking what a “military approach to Iran” would look like is asking the wrong question.  The first question – the right question – is always what the objective is.  If you read through the war-game summary, I believe you’ll agree with me that no strategic objective was ever set for the players.  The three options outlined above imply three different objectives.  If I were the president, and those three options were presented to me, I would ask what could have possessed my staff to forward options one and three.

Fallows relates that the Principals Committee players spent most of their time thinking of reasons why option three was bad.  Of course they did.  But why they were even discussing it is the real question.

They spent very little time on option two, according to Fallows, which is the only option that would have fit the objective as most Americans understood it: to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons by inflicting destruction on her nuclear program.  This is his account of the time they gave to it:

The participants touched only briefly on the Osirak-style strike [i.e., option two] during the war game, but afterward most of them expressed doubt about its feasibility.

This is by no means the only reason to dispute the conclusion the war-gamers came to.  But it’s the most important one.  They were not asked to respond to a specific objective with options for accomplishing it.  In particular, they weren’t told to focus on the objective that was relevant and widely understood to be the potential purpose of military operations – and they didn’t focus on it!

They were asked, in the absence of a specific objective, to discuss some random options for using military force.  That tells us nothing about the efficacy of military force.  It tells us that the planning process asked the wrong question.*

Fast-forward to 2015

In 2015, we are no longer in the situation of 2004.  Three important conditions have changed since then.  The importance of these conditions can’t be overstated, in fact, because they change both what’s possible, and what matters.

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote the following on Tuesday (emphases below are added by James Fallows):

Whatever the case, the only other way for Netanyahu to stop Iran would be to convince the president of the United States, the leader of the nation that is Israel’s closest ally and most crucial benefactor, to confront Iran decisively. An Israeli strike could theoretically set back Iran’s nuclear program, but only the U.S. has the military capabilities to set back the program in anything approaching a semi-permanent way.

Fallows disagrees with him, invoking the 2004 war game to assert that “military force,” per se, just can’t get the job done:

Israel doesn’t have the military capacity to “stop” Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and neither does the United States, at least not in circumstances short of total war.

The key problem with working off of either of these premises, Goldberg’s or Fallows’, is that their framing is stuck in 2004.  Here are the three conditions that have changed since then:

(1)  The U.S. no longer has the conventional military capability to “set back Iran’s nuclear program in something approaching a semi-permanent way.”  This is a relative condition, and it’s because of the loss of readiness in our armed forces, independent of any other reason.

(2)  Iran’s nuclear program is considerably advanced from 2004, and setting it back has a different definition now.  This doesn’t mean it’s infeasible, but it does mean that no one now has the capability to use a conventional strike campaign to set Iran’s program back to where it was ca. 2004 or earlier.  A setback can only be to some much more advanced point in Iran’s progress.

(3)  Iran’s geopolitical posture in the Middle East has changed materially since 2004.  The regime’s intentions have never changed, but the facts on the ground about what territory Iran can use to menace her neighbors – as well as U.S. interests – have changed dramatically.

I’ll discuss each of these factors in turn.

Decline in U.S. military capabilities

Here is the thing to keep in mind about U.S. capabilities.  In 2004, it was correct to say that the capabilities we had were sufficient to contemplate destroying every Iranian facility related to the nuclear weapons program, using conventional means.  Not only did we have the weaponry; the weapon systems were in a readiness state high enough to be deployed and used.

There was a political question, certainly, about how hard we wanted to hit Iran.  There were a number of factors to consider, and valid reasons why it was not done.  But it was feasible to do it, with the arsenal we had readily available.

In 2015, we could no longer conduct that same attack: the attack that was necessary in 2004, against a smaller and less advanced nuclear program.  We don’t have the same assets available now, because our strike-fighters, in the Air Force and Navy, are unable to maintain the same level of force-wide readiness they could in 2004.  When they’re not deployed or within 3-5 months of deploying, our strike fleet aircrew and aircraft now fall to the lowest level of readiness, and can’t be “worked up” on a short timeline.

There are no extra ready squadrons to call on today, and fewer are routinely present in the CENTCOM area of responsibility than in 2004.  The same is true of aircraft carriers and Tomahawk missile shooters.  (Read more about how we got to this point here, here, here, here, and here.)

If the president wanted to assemble a force to attack Iran, the force would be smaller than what he would have had in 2004, and any “build-up” would involve pulling assets off the front line in other theaters: Europe, where NATO is trying to deter Russia with an enhanced military presence, or the Far East, where we are trying to deter North Korea and China.

Alternatively, the president could ask Congress for the funding to increase force readiness so that there would be more of the strike fleet available at a given time.  Implementing that approach would take at least six months to see the first effects: e.g., one or two squadrons at improved readiness.  The issue isn’t just things like pilot qualifications; it’s things like non-deployed aircraft being cannibalized for parts, and the whole fleet being backed up with deferred maintenance.

We continue to keep our global strategic bombers – B-2s and B-52s – at a generally higher level of readiness, and could use them to attack Iran with conventional ordnance.  Their operations would be constrained, however, by the limitations of strike-fighter readiness and specialty aircraft (e.g., the Navy F/A-18 “Growlers” that provide electronic warfare support).  The bombers need escorts, as they need in-flight refueling; having enough ready bombers isn’t the same thing as having enough ready capability.

Moreover, the U.S. could expect to have limited access to airfields in the Persian Gulf region.  It became clear as early as 2010 that Gulf nations would seek to restrain U.S. operations against Iran from their bases, and today, we should expect the Gulf emirates to be very picky about what they allow.  They won’t buy into tentative, non-decisive military operations that leave Iran able to retaliate against them.  If they fear that we aren’t going to act decisively enough, it’s likely that all three of our major hosts – Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait – would deny us the use of their bases for an operation against Iran.

That limiting condition would take out the Air Force as a source of strike-fighters, and make it much harder to operate tankers, reconnaissance aircraft, and AWACS.

Add in factors like the uncertain future of the Tomahawk missile (the Obama administration proposed to end production in 2014), and what we have today is a much more limited set of options than we had in 2004.  Although we still have a capability to attack Iran’s nuclear-related facilities, we can’t mount the kind of crippling attack we could have in 2004.  What we could achieve now is limited to a smaller effect.

Put it this way: in 2004, the five-day attack described in option two of the Atlantic war game was less than what was needed to impose that “semi-permanent setback” referred to by Jeffrey Goldberg.  But we could have mounted that option two attack with negligible inconvenience to ourselves.  It was well within our capabilities.  We also had the means, by deploying more force, to bring off the larger attack required to administer the “semi-permanent setback.”

In 2015, something like the five-day attack is the very most we could bring off.  It was less than what was needed to achieve a semi-permanent setback to Iran’s program in 2004 – and today, it is far less.

Advances in Iran’s nuclear and missile programs

Iran has made significant advances in her nuclear and missile programs since 2004, demonstrating the ability to enrich uranium to near-weapons-grade purity; demonstrating the ability to enrich uranium on an industrial scale; acquiring enough enriched-uranium stock for 7-8 warheads; and demonstrating the ability to boost a payload into orbit, and therefore, inevitably, a ballistic missile to ICBM ranges.  Iran had none of these capabilities in 2004, and in fact was not even close to having them.

(It is worth noting that the January 2015 appearance in Iran of a launch platform capable of supporting an ICBM has occurred right on schedule, in terms of when analysts in the last decade thought it would.  As of 2015, we have seen most of the developments that were predicted in the Iranian nuclear program in the 2005 NIE – see here as well – and the missile-system developments predicted in that NIE and an East-West Institute analysis published in 2009.)

ICBM-capable launcher observed near Tehran in Jan 2015. (Israel Ch. 2)

ICBM-capable launcher observed near Tehran in Jan 2015. (Israel Ch. 2)

The Iranians have also installed missile silos for their medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) – hardening them against attack – and, according to British intelligence, successfully launched a solid-fuel mobile MRBM to a range of 2,000 km (1,200 statute miles) in 2011.  The latter feats mean Iran has a no-notice, shoot-and-scoot MRBM capability that can reach well into Europe.

These various advances, and other related ones, have two significant implications.  One is that the “bottleneck” of Iran’s nuclear weapons program – the part of it we would get the highest payoff from attacking – has shifted.

There are other, related implications, such as the right way to attack elements of the program.  It wouldn’t be enough today to simply blast away at the Natanz uranium enrichment complex, for example; we would have to follow through afterward and actively prevent Iran from rebuilding a uranium enrichment capability, which the Iranians now have more than ample expertise to do.  In 2004, it would have been a tremendous setback to them to lose Natanz.  They still couldn’t absorb such a loss easily, but their recovery now would be a matter of time and money, not rebuilding from scratch.

At any rate, the bottleneck, or critical node, in their program shifted some time ago, from uranium enrichment, which Iran has mastered, to weaponization of a warhead: that is, fitting a functioning warhead to a delivery system (presumably a ballistic missile, at least to begin with.  Cruise missiles would come later).  Although we have a reasonable idea of which sites to hit to attack that “weaponization” bottleneck, it is the most shadowy aspect of the Iranian nuclear program.  Our confidence in what to hit is slightly lower than it is for the uranium chain or the missile design and production chain.

The other key implication about Iran’s advances is, of course, that the threat has increased.  It is greater today, and it’s more imminent.  We can less afford to do nothing about it than we could in 2004.

And what that means is that even if we can only do less now than we would prefer, the urgency of doing it has increased.

Iran’s geopolitical posture and the resulting threat

That is one facet of the situation faced by Israel.  It’s also a situation faced by the United States, now that Iran is ten years closer to having an ICBM capability, and at the very least could soon be able to hold every partner we have in the Middle East hostage with nuclear-armed MRBMs.

For Israel, however, it isn’t possible to separate the security implications of the nuclear-missile problem from the geopolitical problem.  Both work together to change Israel’s security conditions – which is what Iran intends.

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote his piece Tuesday as if nothing has changed for Israel, other than that there are now face-to-face negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.  But since January 2011, Israel’s security situation has changed significantly, and Iran is one of the biggest factors in that.

Graphic used by retired Gen. Jack Keane to brief Congress 27 Jan on 4-fold increase in radical Islamic threat since 2010. (Graphic: Institute for the Study of War; CSPAN video)

Graphic used by retired Gen. Jack Keane to brief Congress 27 Jan on 4-fold increase in radical Islamic threat since 2010. (Graphic: Institute for the Study of War; CSPAN video)

 

It’s particularly meaningful to frame the issue by starting from the fact that Israel’s capability against the Iranian nuclear program has always been more limited than America’s.  (Stay with me; this does relate to the Iranian geopolitical posture.)  It’s possible for America to recover the ability to pressure and intimidate Iran into a level of compliance, along the lines of the strategy outlined in my footnote below.  It will never be possible for Israel to do that.

If Israel is going to act, it will have to be with an actual attack.  And that means that what Iran has to do is make it as hard as possible for Israel to bring off such an attack.  That is a driving facet of the geopolitical problem Iran sets for herself.  Iran has larger designs on the region; her plans against Israel “nest” into them.  But the focus on Israel is unmistakable, and one of the key reasons is that hemming Israel in with threats will dilute Israel’s capability to mount an attack against Iran’s high-value facilities.

As little as five years ago, Iran’s options for servicing this requirement were quite limited.  Hamas and Hezbollah could launch rockets and dig tunnels from Gaza and southern Lebanon.  Hezbollah had successfully used an Iranian-supplied anti-ship missile in 2006, but there was little likelihood of such an attack being brought off again.

Iran, however, had begun sending warships to the Horn of Africa for antipiracy operations as early as December 2008, and with the onset of the Arab Spring, her military profile across the region metastasized.  The presence of Iranian warships has become routine in the Red Sea, and in 2011, Iran sent warships through the Suez Canal for the first time since the 1979 revolution.  Iran has announced deploying submarines to the Red Sea as well.  Every new weapon the Iranian navy tests or drills with in the Persian Gulf – including cruise missiles and high-speed torpedoes – it intends to use in its forward patrol areas, which now include the waters of the Red Sea, and potentially the Eastern Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, Iran now has Special Forces deployed in Iraq, as well as wherever the Assad regime is in (nominal) control of territory in Syria.  There is intriguing evidence that the Iranians have taken over a nuclear-related facility in western Syria: in fact, that they arranged for Hezbollah to “liberate” it from Sunni jihadists because it’s a nuclear facility, and is being used for Iran’s purposes.

Iran’s aggressively expanding posture across the region. (Google map; author annotation.)

Iran’s aggressively expanding posture across the region. (Google map; author annotation.)

 

And earlier this month, the Iranians sent a very high-level military delegation to perform reconnaissance in the Golan Heights – just one of the recent pieces of evidence that Iran wants to open a new front for Israel to have to defend.  The Iranians want to preoccupy Israel’s military, and increase her insecurity overall by forcing Israel to counterattack into Syria, thus creating the ongoing danger of escalating an already unstable situation.

(Google map; author annotation. Inset: Wikimedia Commons, author annotation)

Google map; author annotation. Inset: Wikimedia Commons, author annotation)

 

It’s important to understand that Iran’s campaign serves multiple purposes, because its implications for Israel are therefore bigger.  Israel isn’t just concerned now about Iran’s nuclear program.  Netanyahu has to be concerned about what Iran, with or without nuclear arms, will do with her expanding territorial leverage in the region.  Iran gaining a foothold in Yemen with the Houthi coup there is the latest disturbing development, one that could give the Iranians a base from which to deploy midget submarines into the Red Sea, for example, or base military aircraft, or position missile launchers to complicate Israel’s missile defense picture.  Yemen could certainly become a waypoint for the flow of illicit arms from Iran to a variety of recipients.  Where once Israeli intelligence could focus on ports in Sudan, it now may have the entire western coast of Yemen to contend with.

The brewing crisis in the Golan may by itself be enough to present Israel with a matrix of game-changing decision points in the next 12 months.  There’s a limit to how much harassment Israel can afford to live with and retain viability as a free and secure nation, making a good life possible for her people.  The confrontation with Iran is growing in more than one dimension, and Israel can’t treat the Iranian nuclear program as a theoretical, specialized threat, separate from the overall menace Iran presents to her.

At right, IRGC General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, one of two IRGC general officers and six Iranians conducting reconnaissance in the Golan Heights on 18 Jan 2015, when their convoy was struck by (presumably) the IDF. Allahdadi is seen here hanging with former President Khatami in 2009. (Image: Iranian TV via Twitter)

right, IRGC General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, one of two IRGC general officers and six Iranians conducting reconnaissance in the Golan Heights on 18 Jan 2015, when their convoy was struck by (presumably) the IDF. Allahdadi is seen here hanging with former President Khatami in 2009. (Image: Iranian TV via Twitter)

It’s not 2004 anymore

The profile of Iran’s activities makes it abundantly clear that none of what she does is “about” Israel making concessions on West Bank settlements, or otherwise falling in with proposals made by the Obama administration for a final status agreement.  Iran is all over the region – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan – taking advantage of the opportunities created by the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Jeffrey Goldberg suggests that Israel should strengthen Obama’s negotiating position by making more concessions to the Palestinian Arabs.  But in 2015, nothing in the region’s main dynamic is even about that anymore.  The main dynamic is the feeding frenzy for the territory of Syria and Iraq.  The various actors are shaping up to be Iran, ISIS, the Kurds, and some combination of others who still retain a legacy set of “status quo” objectives (including, e.g., the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Turkey).

Not one of those actors can be deterred or influenced by artificially forced developments in the now-defunct Oslo process.  But at least two of the actors – Iran and ISIS – will exploit Israel however they have to, to gain advantage for themselves.  That’s what Iran is doing with her foray into the Golan, which gives “top cover” to her nuclear program, but also has the real potential to become as much of an existential threat to Israel as an Iranian bomb.

Israel can’t afford to ignore the fact that the whole unfolding strategy interlocks.  In essence, Iran has already begun a new phase in her long-running campaign against Israel, and the Obama administration is asking Israel to behave toward the negotiations with Iran as if that hasn’t happened: as if it’s still 2004, and everyone still has the same situation and the same options.

An emerging trigger point

Israel doesn’t.  It’s not 2004 anymore.  There was a time, as little as a year ago, when the triggers for Israel to have to attack boiled down mainly to these two: either Iran was about to cross the “red line” Bibi briefed to the UN in 2012, or the Iranians were about to deploy a modern anti-air missile system that would make it too difficult for Israel to pull the attack off, once it was in place.

But we’re past that point now.  Developments in the nuclear program, or inside Iran, aren’t Israel’s only concern.  The Israelis may well have to execute a preemptive strategy that baffles and blunts Iran’s whole package of activities in the Israeli security perimeter.  Attacking the Iranian nuclear program – facilities in Iran – will probably form some element of that, but it won’t be enough.

And the trigger matrix has changed.  The intolerable juncture for Israel is likely to be connected with Iran’s emerging campaign in the Golan.  Neither the prompts for military action, nor its purpose and targets, will be bounded by the old outlines of the “Iranian nuclear” problem.  The problem is bigger now: simultaneously more threatening and immediate, and more diffuse.  A strike campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities, with F-15s, is no longer the main mental picture we should have.

Like the Oslo-legacy negotiations, the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran have little relevance to the security conditions Israel faces today.  One of the most important things the U.S. could do to reset the clock is now out of reach: that is, pacify and effectively settle the situation in Syria and Iraq, where Iran, like ISIS, is gaining strength and position from conflict.  The Obama administration doesn’t seem aware that the situation has changed, and with it the motives and concerns of everyone in the region.  Netanyahu has to deal, nevertheless, with a reality that’s changing under our feet with each passing day.

Center, with scarf: Iranian Qods Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, with local Iraqi military leaders in Iraq in 2014. A U.S. defense official said in 2013 that Soleimani was “running the whole Syrian war by himself.” (Quoted by Dexter Filkins in “Shadow Commander,” The New Yorker, 30 Sep 2103. Image via Twitter)

Center, with scarf: Iranian Qods Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, with local Iraqi military leaders in Iraq in 2014. A U.S. defense official said in 2013 that Soleimani was “running the whole Syrian war by himself.” (Quoted by Dexter Filkins in “Shadow Commander,” The New Yorker, 30 Sep 2103. Image via Twitter)

 

* I’m fully aware, incidentally, that policy is sometimes made in just this way.  But that doesn’t mean that we can accurately judge whether military force would be effective by approaching our evaluation through an inherently flawed policy-making process.

An objective and a strategy

For what it’s worth, this is what I would have asked the NSC and principals to look at back in 2004.  The strategic objective would have been to rope Iran into a heavily and genuinely supervised mode with her nuclear program, understanding that political change in Iran might be encouraged that way (alongside other methods), through frustrating the regime and weakening its reputation, but would ultimately have to come in other ways from the Iranian people.  Outreach to reformers in Iran would have been the highest American priority overall.

The objective of using military force would have been to set Iran’s nuclear program back significantly – by at least 24 months – and inflict some level of additional damage as a deterrent, against both immediate retaliation and future activities.

I would have wanted a process of escalating pressure on Iran with a concurrent military build-up in the Gulf region, designed to force Iran to open up all the facilities identified by the IAEA and Western intelligence as suspect.  If Iran didn’t comply in good faith by a deadline, the strikes would start.  The strike threat would have been implied, not spelled out.  The deadline would have been a short one (30-45 days), only long enough to accommodate the build-up, but not so long that Iran could change all her program arrangements to evade attack.

The scope of military strikes for which the build-up was designed would have included the significant “bottleneck,” or critical node, of Iran’s program at the time – the uranium enrichment complex at Natanz – as well as the suspicious special-use facilities in the Parchin area southeast of Tehran.

There would have been some other targets in the nuclear and missile programs, but those two installations would have been the top priorities.  Equally important targets would have been the IRGC assets most useful for projecting power outside Iran’s borders, including ballistic missiles, coastal cruise missiles, and submarines, as well as the IRGC’s paramilitary organization.  Attacking the air defense network and national command and control nodes would have been necessary to hold air superiority for U.S. forces while they were operating in Iranian air space.

Ideally, the preparations for this, and the escalating pressure on Iran (very possibly including intense economic pressure), would have gotten Iran to make some meaningful concessions at the time.  We need not oversell what we could have wrested from Iran without an attack, but odds were better than even that we could have gotten meaningful concessions: concessions that justified the effort, even if they weren’t everything we wanted.  Rinsing and repeating would almost certainly have been necessary.

My own preference would be for an extended process in which we could force Iran’s program more into the open, and keep pushing Iran back, without having to strike.  Instead of letting Iran play for time, we should be playing for time: time for Iranian reformers, who poked their heads up in 2009, and who are still there to be worked with.

About the Author: J.E. Dyer is a retired US Naval intelligence officer who served around the world, afloat and ashore, from 1983 to 2004.

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US says it did not pass Israel Iran warning of ‘consequences’

January 28, 2015

US says it did not pass Israel Iran warning of ‘consequences’

State Department condemns threats after foreign minister in Tehran says Americans told to tell Israel of coming retaliation over deadly airstrike last week

By AP and Times of Israel staff January 27, 2015, 7:14 pm Updated: January 27, 2015, 9:43 pm

via US says it did not pass Israel Iran warning of ‘consequences’ | The Times of Israel.

As predictable, the spinning is on high speed.

 

an said Tuesday it has sent a warning to Israel through the United States over the recent killing of an Iranian general in an alleged Israeli airstrike, though Washington quickly denied conveying any such message.

The report came as Israel’s Golan Heights came under rocket attack from Syria, over a week after several Hezbollah and Iranian operatives were killed in the airstrike in Syria.

“We told the Americans that the leaders of the Zionist regime should await the consequences of their act,” Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian was quoted by the official IRNA as saying.

He added, “The Zionist regime has crossed our red lines.”

Iranian General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guard, was killed along with six Lebanese Hezbollah fighters in a January 18 airstrike in the Syrian-controlled part of the Golan Heights.

Both Iran and Hezbollah blamed Israel for the strike and vowed to respond; the Israeli government refused to comment.

Amirabdollahian said Iran delivered the message to US officials via diplomatic channels. He did not elaborate.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki would not comment on private diplomatic talks with Iran, beyond saying that no threat to Israel was delivered in the latest round nuclear talks between US and Iranian officials.

“We absolutely condemn any such threats, that come in any form,” Psaki told reporters.

There was no official comment in Israel over the Iranian report.

Amirabdollahian’s remarks came during a commemoration ceremony in Tehran for the slain general and the Hezbollah fighters. In the same ceremony, General Hossein Salami, acting commander of the Guard, said Iran will retaliate soon.

“We tell [Israel] to await retaliation, but we will decide about its timing, place and the strength,” he said, according to the IRNA report.

Allahdadi was one of the highest ranking Iranian officers known to have been killed abroad in decades.

On Tuesday afternoon, two rockets slammed into open Israeli territory in what was widely viewed as retaliation for the airstrike. Israel responded to the rockets by shooting 20 shells into Syria.

The Israeli military has been on high alert along the northern border since the airstrike, fearing retaliatory action from Hezbollah or its patron in Tehran.

At the same time Israeli leaders have warned that Hezbollah, Lebanon and Syria will pay a price for any attacks against Israel.

“They who play with fire – will be hit with fire,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday.

On Monday, Arabic daily al-Hayat reported that Israel had sent a message to Hezbollah via foreign diplomats warning against attacking Israeli or Jewish interests abroad.

Iran and the US cut diplomatic ties after militant Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran during the 1979 revolution and held a group of American diplomats for 444 days.

The two nations normally exchange diplomatic messages through the Swiss embassy, which looks after US interests in Iran. But diplomats from both countries also meet directly on other occasions — such as the current negotiations to limit the scope of the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for easing harsh international sanctions against Tehran.

Also on Tuesday, Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan stressed that his country fully supported Hezbollah and added that Tehran would aim to heavily arm Palestinians in the West Bank, the Iranian Fars news site reported.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran’s position on the Zionist regime is unchangeable, and given the fact that the resistance stream is standing against the Zionists and the terrorist and Takfiri groups, we will make our utmost efforts to support and strengthen Hezbollah and the resistance of the Lebanese people,” Dehqan told reporters in Tehran on Tuesday.

“The constant and general policy of the Islamic Republic is arming the West Bank and strengthening the resistance stream and Hezbollah forces to confront the Zionists’ usurping and occupying regime,” Dehqan said.

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Iran says it sent warning to Israel via US officials

January 27, 2015

Iran says it sent warning to Israel via US officials

As rockets hit Golan Heights, foreign minister in Tehran says Americans told to tell Israel to ‘await consequences’ of deadly airstrike last week

By AP and Times of Israel staff January 27, 2015, 7:14 pm

via Iran says it sent warning to Israel via US officials | The Times of Israel.

 

This is a banger, lets watch who is spinning this like an iranian centrifuge .

 


Civilians and members of the armed forces carry the flag draped coffin of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Brig. Gen. Mohammad Ali Allahdadi during his funeral ceremony outside the Guard compound in Tehran, Iran, January 21, 2015 (photo credit: AP/Vahid Salemi)

 
Iran said Tuesday it has sent a warning to Israel through the United States over the recent killing of an Iranian general in an alleged Israeli airstrike, the official IRNA news agency reported.

The report came as Israel’s Golan Heights came under rocket attack from Syria, over a week after several Hezbollah and Iranian operatives were killed in the airstrike in Syria.

“We told the Americans that the leaders of the Zionist regime should await the consequences of their act,” Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian was quoted by IRNA as saying.

He added, “The Zionist regime has crossed our red lines.”

Iranian General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guard, was killed along with six Lebanese Hezbollah fighters in a January 18 airstrike in the Syrian-controlled part of the Golan Heights.

Both Iran and Hezbollah blamed Israel for the strike and vowed to respond; the Israeli government refused to comment.

Amirabdollahian said Iran delivered the message to US officials via diplomatic channels. He did not elaborate.

Amirabdollahian’s remarks came during a commemoration ceremony in Tehran for the slain general and the Hezbollah fighters. In the same ceremony, General Hossein Salami, acting commander of the Guard, said Iran will retaliate soon.

“We tell [Israel] to await retaliation, but we will decide about its timing, place and the strength,” he said, according to the IRNA report.

Allahdadi was one of the highest ranking Iranian officers known to have been killed abroad in decades.

On Tuesday afternoon, two rockets slammed into open Israeli territory in what was widely viewed as retaliation for the airstrike. Israel responded to the rockets by shooting 20 shells into Syria.

The Israeli military has been on high alert along the northern border since the airstrike, fearing retaliatory action from Hezbollah or its patron in Tehran.

At the same time Israeli leaders have warned that Hezbollah, Lebanon and Syria will pay a price for any attacks against Israel.

“They who play with fire – will be hit with fire,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday.

On Monday, Arabic daily al-Hayat reported that Israel had sent a message to Hezbollah via foreign diplomats warning against attacking Israeli or Jewish interests abroad.

Iran and the US cut diplomatic ties after militant Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran during the 1979 revolution and held a group of American diplomats for 444 days.

The two nations normally exchange diplomatic messages through the Swiss embassy, which looks after US interests in Iran. But diplomats from both countries also meet directly on other occasions — such as the current negotiations to limit the scope of the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for easing harsh international sanctions against Tehran.

Also on Tuesday, Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan stressed that his country fully supported Hezbollah and added that Tehran would aim to heavily arm Palestinians in the West Bank, the Iranian Fars news site reported.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran’s position on the Zionist regime is unchangeable, and given the fact that the resistance stream is standing against the Zionists and the terrorist and Takfiri groups, we will make our utmost efforts to support and strengthen Hezbollah and the resistance of the Lebanese people,” Dehqan told reporters in Tehran on Tuesday.

“The constant and general policy of the Islamic Republic is arming the West Bank and strengthening the resistance stream and Hezbollah forces to confront the Zionists’ usurping and occupying regime,” Dehqan said.

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Mission Accomplished: ISIS Overruns Libyan Hotel Used by United Nations

January 27, 2015

Mission Accomplished: ISIS Overruns Libyan Hotel Used by United Nations

January 27, 2015 by Daniel Greenfield

via Mission Accomplished: ISIS Overruns Libyan Hotel Used by United Nations | FrontPage Magazine.

 

 
Remember the time that Obama lied and claimed that Gaddafi was committing genocide and began bombing Libya? That turned out really well. We currently don’t recognize the government in charge of Libya which almost got taken out by ISIS.

Which is now also in Libya. Because Obama’s regime change in Libya turned out almost as well as ObamaCare.

Gunmen stormed a luxury hotel in Libya’s capital Tuesday, killing at least five foreigners and three guards, authorities said.

The attack, which included a car bombing, struck the Corinthia Hotel, which sits along the Mediterranean Sea.

Another security official earlier said the gunmen killed three guards and took hostages, but had no further information on the captives’ identities.

Mahmoud Hamza, commander of the so-called Special Deterrent Force, said five foreigners were killed, without elaborating.

Another security official earlier said the gunmen killed three guards and took hostages, but had no further information on the captives’ identities.

He said the hotel had Italian, British and Turkish guests, but the hotel was largely empty at the time of the attack. He said the militia-backed Prime Minister Omar al-Hassi usually resides at the hotel, but was not there Tuesday.

Why is Hamza’s force so-called? Because we don’t recognize it either.

Fighters wearing black uniforms labeled “police” and loyal to the Tripoli government — one of two rival governments now fighting for control of Libya — responded to the attack, cordoning off streets and surrounding the hotel. Their forces entered a long standoff with assailants still inside.

A group calling itself the Tripoli Province of the Islamic State, the extremist group that has seized territory in Syria and Iraq, issued a statement on social media claiming responsibility for the attack just as it was beginning. The group portrayed the assault as retaliation for the abduction last year by American commandos of a Libyan Qaeda operative, Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, also known as Abu Anas al-Libi.

Mr. Ruqai, 50, died this month in a New York hospital of complications from liver surgery as he was waiting to stand trial for a role in Qaeda bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Tripoli is currently controlled by an alliance of Islamists ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood (as the New York Times calls them “moderate Islamists” to straight up Al Qaeda.

Since ISIS likes to pick fights with its own pals, it may have been targeting them. Or it may have been aiming for the UN. Or random foreign hostages.

The Malta-owned hotel is also where the United Nations support mission in Libya holds its meetings. The mission is currently hosting political talks with rival Libyan groups in Geneva.

So that’s going well.

Meanwhile here’s a brief overview of the latest headlines from the Libya Herald, not even counting this attack, to give you a snapshot of how screwed up things are.

United States reiterates it does not recognize GNC and its Tripoli Hassi government

Hardline Hassi claims US coming to the rescue

Confusion as Audit Bureau reverses its freezing of all government accounts

Abducted Deputy Foreign Minister freed; government probe begins

Tanker crew still held over fuel smuggling claim

Many reported dead in Benghazi as LNA moves to flush out Ansar Al-Sharia

Further clashes in both east and west despite ceasefire

Libyan Ambassador to Egypt insists he is still in post

Civilians involved in Zawia attacks

Health sector legal advisor kidnapped in Tripoli

Tripoli’s Dat Al-Imad office complex received ”serious destruction threat” – LANA

This is what happens when a really smart ‘smart power’ guy like Obama practices regime change. He walks away whistling and the media pretends nothing happened.

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Israel News – Hamas test-fired 10 rockets from Gaza into the sea

January 26, 2015

Hamas test-fired 10 rockets from Gaza into the sea

Hamas fired 10 rockets into the Mediterranean Sea today, testing its rocket range limit.

Jan 26, 2015, 01:30PM | Yael Klein

via Israel News – Hamas test-fired 10 rockets from Gaza into the sea – JerusalemOnline.

 

Archive photo

Archive photo Photo Credit: Reuters/Channel 2 News

Today (Sun), the Palestinians completed a series of rocket testing. They fired 10 rockets toward the Mediterranean Sea.

Hamas has been conducting many tests over the past several months.  However, a barrage of 10 rockets is considered rare. 70 rockets have been fired by Hamas in tests conducted since Operation Protective Edge. The Palestinians are attempting to improve the rockets’ range limit. However, they are facing difficulties in doing so due to the lack of supplies delivered to them from outside the Gaza Strip. Therefore, they manufacture the explosives themselves, which is another reason for conducting the many tests.

One month ago, a siren alarm went off in a number of communities in the Eshkol Regional Council, after a rocket fired from Gaza exploded in Southern Israel, without causing injuries or damage.

Eshkol Mayor Haim Yalin stated following the incident: “The state had an extraordinary opportunity to agree upon a long-term arrangement with the Palestinians. Instead, we find ourselves with a ticking clock in hour hands, counting down to the next war.”

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