IAF Raid ,awakens world/Sowell reviews Agresto!

Bret Stephens has interesting op ed piece in today's WSJ, entitled: "Osirak 11," expounding on his thoughts regarding the recent attack by the IAF and suggests it has to have been of momentous nature because of the shrouded secrecy surrounding same.

Also on page A6 of today's WSJ, an article about how Olmert, believes reduced terrorism, rise in tourism to Israel now permits him to have more latitude with respect to negotiations with Abbas. Other believe lull is temporary and not permanent and terrorists will return with attacks to try and disrupt Nov. scheduled meeting.

Everyone you talk to has a different view of what Fed will do today. I wish they would do nothing but probabilities are high they will take some action and question is whether cut will be 25 or 50 basis points. I will be away when the announcement comes.

Israel enhances intelligence vis a vis Iran. (See 1 below.)

More from Herb Keinon on IAF strike, implications for world and attitudes regarding N Korea and Syrian linkage. Once again, gutsy Israel challenges the West to get their moral act together. (See 2 below.)

Tom Sowell discusses my friend, John Agresto's book - "Mugged by Realit which I reviewed in an earlier memo and urged all to read, and equates with Ge. Petraeus. (See 3 below.)

Jewish youth decide not to take European anti-Semitism lying down so they set up tents etc.. (See 4 below.)

IAF attack has elevated Olmert's standing as Israelis finally see a possible leader awakening from political torpor. (See 5 below)

Dick


1)Israel enhances military intelligence capabilities versus Iran in its first double spacecraft liftoff with India this week.



US and Indian military sources say that, if successful, the twin launch by the same Polaris/TecSat vehicle Sept. 17-20 will add Israel to the few nations with imaging radar reconnaissance satellites able to distinguish camouflaged vehicles from rocky terrain – by night and through foliage.

The Israeli military satellite will lift off along with India’s first military recon spacecraft, Cartosat 2A. They will be fired in an approximately 600-km polar orbit atop the same Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle from an island in the Bay of Bengal. The data-gathering features of Polaris 1 are especially pertinent for a potential attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Military sources add that the Israeli satellite’s ability to “see through” cloud and foliage and distinguish between camouflaged vehicles and rocks, provide an answer for Iran’s ingenious camouflaging methods employed by Hizballah in the 2006 Lebanese war.

The Indian Cartosat 2A spacecraft on the same mission is secret. It carries a powerful panchromatic camera. New Delhi is interested in buying Israel’s imaging radar satellite design for its reconnaissance operations which focus on Pakistan, China and increasingly the US.

Polaris 1 is electronically steered, and its synthetic aperture radar has a 1-meter resolution; its differing spot, mosaic and strip modes provide many different radar aspect angles from which to illuminate ground targets, a huge military asset for precise data-gathering on Iran’s military weapons systems and an improvement over the information available to ordinary spy satellites. Polaris radar-imaging intelligence features compare in quality to the U-2’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar 2A sensor, according to Jeff Grant, a Northrop Grumman official.

Our military sources report that the new radar satellite continues the spurt in Israeli milsat development and complements the features of another new imaging reconnaissance spacecraft, Ofek-7 which was launched in June and offers an improved, half-meter resolution.

Western military sources report that in February and March 2007, Israel carried out at least three more.

2) Analysis: There's a reason world is quiet on alleged IAF strike
By HERB KEINON

The world, it's fair to say, doesn't like North Korea. Indeed, it's a tough country to love, especially since dictator Kim Jong Il lets his people starve while he tests various nuclear devices.

It is also fair to say that the world, for the most part, dislikes the idea of a nuclear Middle East. Witness French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner's recent comment that France should prepare for the possibility of war over Iran's nuclear program.

So add North Korea together with foreign reports of nukes in the Middle East, and what you get is a situation for which the international community has very little patience.

And that, according to foreign new reports, is what the IAF's excursion into Syrian skies the other night was all about: stopping the proliferation, via North Korea, of nuclear capability to the Middle East.

While on an existential level, the prospect of Syrian President Bashar Assad - deep in cahoots with Hizbullah and Hamas - in possession of anything nuclear is deeply frightening, and if we believe the foreign reports, on a diplomatic level the fact that the world media is writing "North Korea," 'nuclear cache" and "Syria" together in the same sentence could actually be beneficial for Israel.

First of all, if indeed the alleged IAF sortie over Syria had to do with a nuclear shipment from Pyongyang, then Israel's stock has to go up because it will be seen in a few key capitals as the force that will not allow nuclear proliferation in the region.

It is interesting to note, by the way, the resounding lack of condemnation - either in Europe or even in the Arab world - to Israel's alleged attack.

Secondly, the alleged North Korean nuclear connection will put Damascus - already not in the world's good graces - even more on the defensive.

It's one thing to harbor terrorists who want to destroy Israel, it's another thing to allegedly have been involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, but it is something different entirely to get into the same nuclear bed with North Korea.

If the first two offensives are, in the eyes of the world, pardonable because of various bilateral interests, the third would be much more difficult to forgive. The alleged Syrian-North Korean connection could move Syria from being just an unpopular state to being a pariah regime.

And Damascus doesn't want pariah state status. Syria, which has shown that it does want contact with the outside world, has no desire to be quarantined and ostracized as North Korea has been.

Which is where certain diplomatic opportunities just may present themselves.

Damascus, it is safe to assume, will want to shrug off a North Korean image and present itself as a responsible player on the international scene. It has even expressed interest in coming to the international Middle East meeting that the US is planning later this year.

The allegations of a North Korean-Syrian connection could make the time ripe, therefore, for Israel to push the world to place certain conditions on Syria's being accepted back into the international fold.

The conditions are obvious, and ones that Israel has been demanding - without any success at all - for years: kicking the terrorist organizations out of Damascus, first and foremost Hamas and its leader Khaled Mashaal, and an end to the support and the supply of weapons to Hizbullah.

In the past Syria has just ignored these calls. But now, in order to avoid being seen as North Korea's kid brother, it may have no choice but to pay a little attention.

The alleged connection to North Korea makes Syria vulnerable. The question is whether the world will seize the moment.

3) Mugged By Reality in Iraq
By Thomas Sowell

In a world where the tragedy that is Iraq is usually discussed only in media sound bites and political slogans, it is especially gratifying to see an adult, intelligent, and insightful account of life inside Iraq by someone who lived there for nine months in the early days of the occupation in 2003 and 2004, and who saw the fundamental mistakes that would later plague the attempt to create a viable Iraqi government.

John Agresto, a career American academic and former college president who volunteered to go help create a better higher education system in Iraq, learned a lot about Iraqi society in general and about American attempts to create a better society there.

His recently published book is titled "Mugged by Reality" and is subtitled: "The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions."
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What is refreshingly different about this book is that it does not take the Bush administration line, the Congressional Democrats' line or anybody else's line.

Agresto is not out to prove some theory or push some pet scheme but to convey what he saw with his own eyes and discerned from his own experiences with both Iraqis and Americans in Iraq.

He makes no claim to infallibility but in fact admits to being forced to change his mind by what he saw.

Initially a supporter of the invasion, he now says that he would not have been a supporter if he had known beforehand how the occupation would be mishandled and the results that followed. But he also recognizes that we cannot unring the bell and simply leave, for that would lead to even worse consequences, not only in Iraq but elsewhere, not only to others but to ourselves.

The worst mistake, in Agresto's view, was the failure to establish law and order in the wake of the military victory, before undertaking the grandiose project of attempting to create democracy in Iraq. From this fundamental mistake, many of the other tragedies followed.

In the absence of law and order, there was widespread violence, looting, rape -- in short, the war of each against all that Hobbes warned about, centuries ago.

As for democracy, Agresto understands that the right to vote is no guarantee of freedom, toleration or respect for the rights of others. Without those prerequisites, democracy can mean tyranny at home and terrorism abroad.

Apparently the American civilian authorities in Iraq did not understand this or else they let that understanding be overridden by political considerations. By setting up a government based on warring factions, they made cooperation in the national interest a very unlikely prospect.

Today, when more and more Iraqis are rejecting the outside terrorists whom the media keep calling "insurgents," and when our military is restoring more order than Iraq has seen in a while, the most intractable problem is the very government we set up.

General David Petraeus is mentioned only a couple of times, and briefly, in "Mugged by Reality." But those brief mentions seem to be revealing.

Right after the success of military operations in Iraq, General Petraeus' 101st Airborne had control of the city of Mosul. According to Agresto, "he ran it in radically different ways than the rest of Iraq was run" -- and Mosul was "calm" in contrast to other parts of Iraq.

Then, after control of Mosul was passed on to others, it "began to rival the worst sections of Baghdad for attacks on Coalition forces and violence against Iraqis."

One of the ways in which Petraeus ran Mosul differently from the way things were done in the rest of Iraq, according to Agresto, was not to get rid of existing public officials wholesale, despite their being members of the former ruling Baath Party.

Somebody has to run the basic institutions that make civilized life possible -- and you can't just get rid of those who know how to run those institutions before you have someone qualified to replace them. Apparently General Petraeus was pragmatic enough to understand that.

We may, belatedly, have found a man and an approach that work.

4) Tents pitched against anti-Semitism: Jewish youths across Europe simultaneously set up anti-racism tents
By Yaakov Lappin

Jewish youths across three European cities have launched a campaign against anti-Semitism by simultaneously unfolding tents designed to teach non-Jewish visitors about Jewish culture and encourage multicultural dialogue.


Inside the tents, visitors will witness Muslim-Jewish reconciliation meetings, klezmer concerts, workshops on Judaism, and an interfaith dialogue in Warsaw involving Poland's chief rabbi and a senior Roman Catholic official.


Anti-Semitism

Rabbi stabbed on street in Frankfurt bank quarter / Reuters
Police say 42-year-old rabbi was approached on street by man he believed was speaking Arabic; assailant pulled out a pocket knife, uttered a death threat in German and stabbed him in abdomen before fleeing the scene

"This is an initiative joined by the World Jewish Congress (WJC), which received a request from the Council of Europe to combine Jewish themes into the annual 'All Equal All Different; Campaign," said Peleg Reshef, director of the WJC's Future Generations Division in Jerusalem.


"The idea is to set up huge tents in European cities to expose non-Jewish Europeans to Jewish culture and Judaism. We will show them what Jewish life was like before the Holocaust, and in modernity," Reshef said.


Citing increasing levels of anti-Semitism across Europe, Reshef said the initiative was aimed at "opening European Jewish communities, which are perceived as closed ghettos.


We don't like to deal with it, but anti-Semitism is rising in Europe. And there are things to do to uproot this," Reshef added.


Tent against anti-Semitism in Paris (photo courtesy of the European Jewish Congress)


Noam Levi, a 29 year-old French-Jewish activist, spoke to Ynetnews from one of the tents in central Paris. Other tents have been pitched in Warsaw and Kiev. He agreed that the way forward to curb anti-Semitism was for European Jews "to work on our image."


"That's part of being Jewish," Levi said, adding that in the Parisian tent, hundreds of people came to hear traditional Jewish story tellers recite tales in the Ashkenazi tradition. "There is lots of curiosity. I'm amazed, people are very interested in showing up, and entering the tent. They are listening to the stories being told," he said, describing the scenes inside.


While conceding that a growing number of French Jews have decided to make Israel their new home, Levi said that Jews would always remain in France.


"Jews have been here almost forever. France is fully part of international Judaism. I couldn't imagine France without Jews. Not many people in France could, either," Levi said. He added that part of the campaign was aimed at bringing together North African French Muslims with the French Jewish community, and a meeting between a Muslim - Jewish friendship group would take place in the tent.


In Warsaw, Poland, 23 year-old Beata Gladis, a student at Krakow University, described a busy morning for the Polish tent, pitched nearby a central synagogue.



"The most important discussion was about anti-Semitism in Poland. Many non-governmental organizations and police took part. We do not have anti-Semitism aimed against people here, but there is destruction of historic monuments and anti-Semitic graffiti here. So we will discuss this problem with police," Gladis said, adding that serious anti-Semitic attacks begin with small acts.


"There will also be lots of workshops about Jewish holidays, dances, singing, and a lecture on Yom Kippur," she added.

5) Sparkle back in our eyes: Reports of Syria operation welcomed by Israelis, boost Olmert's popularity
By Sima Kadmon

What did we want after all? Something that would bring a bloom back to our cheeks and a sparkle to our eyes? Something that would once again make us stand erect? Something reminiscent of the past, when all our aircraft returned safely to base and the foreign media leaked more and more details concerning the Israeli acts of heroism carried out in enemy territory?


We wanted another Entebbe. We wanted a nuclear plant bombing. We would have sufficed with any bold, sophisticated and justified maneuver in enemy territory. Something that the world looks upon in silent admiration. Something that no country condemns besides North Korea. Something over which there is no moral dispute. We can't remember the last time we were in such a position. We forgot how pleasant it was.


And indeed, the Israeli public is reveling, based on the findings of a survey conducted among the Jewish public on Monday evening by the Dahaf Institute headed by Dr Mina Tzemach.


According to the survey, it appears that the vast majority, 78 percent, supports this operation, which according to foreign sources saw Israel strike nuclear targets in Syria. And the key beneficiary is of course the prime minister: A total of 20 percent of the overall Jewish population admits that they have changed their views in favor of Olmert. Or in other words: A fifth now holds Olmert in higher esteem than it did 10 days ago.



Faith in IDF boosted

Indeed, how easy it is to buy our hearts. For an entire year Olmert struggled with his lack of popularity –


in vain. The public turned its back on him in a way that until now seemed irreversible. Then, lo and behold, the prime minister's popularity rating soared by 10 percent: As to the question, how do you evaluate Olmert's performance as a prime minister? Some 35% responded "good", as opposed to 25 percent who gave this answer in a survey conducted on the eve of the New Year and published in the weekend supplement of Yedioth Ahronoth.


On Monday some 63 percent responded that Olmert's performance was "not good," which presented a drop of seven percent from the former survey. It appears that it is not only the Israeli Air Force that took off, according to foreign reports; the prime minister took off as well.


Even the IDF has improved its status in the eyes of the public. Some 41 percent of the overall Jewish population responded that their faith in the military has increased following foreign reports on the operation in Syria. Only three percent said that their faith in the military decreased.



And following the pride, the admiration and the restoring of confidence, what remains is the anxiety: 32 percent believe that the operation in Syria increases the chance of a war with Syria. Only 13 percent believe that such an operation is likely to mitigate the chances of a war.