Just another - ''what difference does it make,' day at The White House.
From a dear friend and fellow memo reader: "Would one of you please tell the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Air Force pilots who are bombing Tikrit in Iraq are not US combat troops, nor any of the maintenance crews or any of the "non combat" soldiers who are guarding those planes when they are on the ground. Or any of the Special Forces troops that are on site assessing the damage that the bombings do. T--"
Newt's thoughts.
Don't forget he was an history professor, before entering politics, at West Georgia State University. That is where I first met him and subsequently became a member of "The Friends of Newt" and while in Atlanta we became quite close. (See 1 below.)
Worth re-posting. Prager makes valid points. (See 2 below.)
also,
a very worthwhile read: http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/
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The local paper did publish my response to Linda Brill's LTE and this is an E Mail I received from a dear friend and fellow memo reader: "Dick…….thanks for responding to Linda Brill’s letter….her letter was mean spirited and totally showed her bias."
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Israel on a collision course with Hamas and Hizbollah. (See 3 below.)
and
The Middle East nuclear race has already begun - Thanks Obama!
Perhaps it was inevitable but he helped it along.
I suspect Obama will now release information about Israel's nuclear program as a way of covering his behind. Be on the look out for it as he continues to react in a petulant manner. (See 3a below.)
He just did (See 3b below.)
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Dick
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1) We Are Losing to an Enemy We Refuse to Name
Yesterday the House Committee on Homeland Security, under the leadership of Chairman Michael McCaul, held the first of a series of very important hearings on the threat of radical Islamism.
As I told the committee in my testimony, it is vital that the United States Congress undertake a thorough, no-holds-barred review of the long, global war in which we are now engaged with radical Islamists. This review will require a number of committees to coordinate since it will have to include Intelligence, Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, and Homeland Security at a minimum.
There are three key, sobering observations about where we are today which should force this thorough, no-holds-barred review of our situation.
These three points—which are backed up by the facts—suggest the United States is drifting into a crisis that could challenge our very survival.
First, it is the case that after 35 years of conflict dating back to the Iranian seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran and the ensuing hostage crisis, the United States and its allies are losing the long, global war with radical Islamists.
We are losing to both the violent Jihad and to the cultural Jihad.
The violent Jihad has shown itself recently in Paris, Australia, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Nigeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen to name just some of the most prominent areas of violence.
Cultural Jihad is more insidious and in many ways more dangerous. Cultural Jihad strikes at our very ability to think and to have an honest dialogue about the steps necessary for our survival. Cultural Jihad is winning when the Department of Defense describes a terrorist attack at Fort Hood as “workplace violence”. Cultural Jihad is winning when the President refers to “random” killings in Paris when they were clearly the actions of Islamist terrorists and targeted against specific groups. Cultural Jihad is winning when the administration censors training documents and lecturers according to “sensitivity” so that they cannot describe radical Islamists with any reference to the religious ideology which is the primary bond that unites them.
In the 14 years since the 9/11 attacks, we have gone a long way down the road of intellectually and morally disarming in order to appease the cultural Jihadists who are increasingly aggressive in asserting their right to define how the rest of us think and talk.
Second, it is the case that, in an extraordinarily dangerous pattern, our intelligence system has been methodically limited and manipulated to sustain false narratives while suppressing or rejecting facts and analysis about those who would kill us.
For example, there is clear evidence the American people have been given remarkably misleading analysis about Al Qaeda based on a very limited translation and publication of about 24 of the 1.5 million documents captured in the Bin Laden raid. A number of outside analysts have suggested that the selective release of a small number of documents was designed to make the case that Al Qaeda was weaker. These outside analysts assert that a broader reading of more documents would indicate Al Qaeda was doubling in size when our government claimed it was getting weaker—an analysis also supported by obvious empirical facts on the ground. Furthermore, there has been what could only be deliberate foot-dragging in exploiting this extraordinary cache of material.
Both Lt. General Mike Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Colonel Derek Harvey, a leading analyst of terrorism, have described the deliberately misleading and restricted access to the Bin Laden documents.
A number of intelligence operatives have described censorship from above designed to make sure that intelligence which undermines the official narrativesimply does not see the light of day.
Congress should explore legislation which would make it illegal to instruct intelligence personnel to falsify information or analysis. Basing American security policy on politically defined distortions of reality is a very dangerous habit which could someday lead to a devastating defeat. Congress has an obligation to ensure the American people are learning the truth and have an opportunity to debate potential policies in a fact based environment.
Third, it is the case that our political elites have refused to define our enemies. Their willful ignorance has made it impossible to develop an effective strategy to defeat those who would destroy our civilization.
For example, the President’s own press secretary engages in verbal gymnastics to avoid identifying the perpetrators of violence as radical Islamists. Josh Earnest said such labels do not “accurately” describe our enemies and that to use such a label “legitimizes” them.
This is Orwellian double-speak. The radical Islamists do not need to be de-legitimized. They need to be defeated. We cannot defeat what we cannot name.
There has been a desperate desire among our elites to focus on the act of terrorism rather than the motivation behind those acts. There has been a deep desire to avoid the cultural and religious motivations behind the Jihadists’ actions. There is an amazing hostility to any effort to study or teach the history of these patterns going back to the Seventh Century.
Because our elites refuse to look at the religious and historic motivations and patterns which drive our opponents, we are responding the same way to attack after attack on our way of life without any regard for learning about what really motivates our attackers. Only once we learn what drives and informs our opponents will we not repeat the same wrong response tactics, groundhog day-like, and finally start to win this long war.
Currently each new event, each new group, each new pattern is treated as though it’s an isolated phenomenon—as if it’s not part of a larger struggle with a long history and deep roots in patterns that are 1400 years old.
There is a passion for narrowing and localizing actions. The early focus was Al Qaeda. Then it was the Taliban. Now it is ISIS. It is beginning to be Boko Haram. As long as the elites can keep treating each new eruption as a free-standing phenomenon, they can avoid having to recognize that this is a global, worldwide movement that is decentralized but not disordered.
There are ties between Minneapolis and Mogadishu. There are ties between London, Paris and ISIS. Al Qaeda exists in many forms and under many names. We are confronted by worldwide recruiting on the internet, with Islamists reaching out to people we would never have imagined were vulnerable to that kind of appeal.
We have been refusing to apply the insights and lessons of history but our enemies have been very willing to study, learn, rethink and evolve.
The cultural Jihadists have learned our language and our principles—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, tolerance—and they apply them to defeat us without believing in them themselves. We blindly play their game on their terms, and don’t even think about how absurd it is for people who accept no church, no synagogue, no temple, in their heartland to come into our society and define multicultural sensitivity totally to their advantage—meaning, in essence, that we cannot criticize their ideas.
Our elites have been morally and intellectually disarmed by their own unwillingness to look at both the immediate history of the first 35 years of the global war with radical Islamists and then to look deeper into the roots of the ideology and the military-political system our enemies draw upon as their guide to waging both physical and cultural warfare.
One of the great threats to American independence is the steady growth of foreign money pouring into our intellectual and political systems to influence our thinking and limit our options for action. Congress needs to adopt new laws to protect the United States from the kind of foreign influences which are growing in size and boldness.
Sun Tzu, in the Art of War, written 500 years before Christ, warned that "all warfare is based on deception". We are currently in a period where our enemies are deceiving us and our elites are actively deceiving themselves—and us. The deception and dishonesty of our elites is not accidental or uninformed. It is deliberate and willful. The flow of foreign money and foreign influence is a significant part of that pattern of deception.
We must clearly define our enemies before we can begin to develop strategies to defeat them.
We have lost 35 years since this war began.
We are weaker and our enemies are stronger.
Congress has a duty to pursue the truth and to think through the strategies needed and the structures which will be needed to implement those strategies.
Newt
A U.S. intelligence network in Yemen has been compromised after files were taken by Iranian-backed militia leaders amid violent protests in the Middle Eastern country.
According to a Los Angeles Times report, officials from the Yemen government have given other files about American intelligence operations in Yemen to Iranian advisers as well.
Houthi militias took over Yemen's capital of Sana last fall and overthrew the government, with President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi being placed under house arrest. He eventually fled to Aden, a city in the southwest corner of the country.
On Wednesday, Hadi evacuated Yemen by boat as militants closed in on him, the New York Times reports. A reported $20 million bounty had been issued for his capture.
The theft of the files deals a significant blow to intelligence activities in the region. The L.A. Times reports the program had been implemented to track down and kill operatives from Al-Qaida. A facet of the terror group, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), is based in Yemen and is considered by the U.S. to be the most dangerous branch of the group.
When Houthi forces recently gained control of Yemen's National Security Bureau office, it became clear the identities of local agents working for the Americans were uncovered, the L.A. Times reports.
Some of the files were burned before Houthi forces got to them.
The L.A. Times report does say it doesn't appear militants took files about U.S. intelligence operatives, only the names and contact information of Yemeni agents the U.S. had been using to disable the terror network in Yemen.
The U.S. presence in Yemen is quickly fizzling out, with the U.S. Embassy in Sana emptied last month and 100 special operations troops evacuated over the weekend.
Saudi Arabia is growing nervous at the chaos taking over its neighboring country and is now moving military equipment to the border it shares with Yemen.
Last week, dozens of people were killed in an attack on Yemen's capital that involved multiple suicide bombers.
The U.S. suspended its counterterrorism operations in Yemen two months ago after the government collapsed.
1a) YEMEN WAS WASHINGTON'S COUNTERTERRORISM SUCCESS STORY. NOT ANYMORE.
Author: Seán D. Naylor
The sudden departure of U.S. special operations forces from Yemen marks a devastating blow to a counterterrorism campaign that Barack Obama’s administration had heralded as a success story, officials and experts say, as Washington suffers another intelligence reverse in the fight against the al Qaeda group that poses the greatest threat to Americans.
State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf sought Monday, March 23, to downplay the weekend exodus of about 100 U.S. special operations forces who had remained in Yemen even after the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa closed last month amid growing unrest between the government and Shiite Houthi militias seeking to unseat it.
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State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf sought Monday, March 23, to downplay the weekend exodus of about 100 U.S. special operations forces who had remained in Yemen even after the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa closed last month amid growing unrest between the government and Shiite Houthi militias seeking to unseat it.
But officials familiar with the special operations mission said years of training and hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment that U.S. forces had given to Yemeni troops now will all but certainly be lost. In addition, they said, nothing beats face-to-face contacts with intelligence sources in an era when terrorist networks increasingly are able to hack into U.S. government systems.
“Because we are withdrawing completely, we will have no intelligence footprint or capabilities to monitor what AQAP and ISIS and the Shiite militants are doing in the region,” House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said Sunday on ABC’s This Week. He was referring to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has repeatedly tried to attack the United States, and to the Islamic State.
McCaul was responding to State Department comments earlier Sunday that the United States continued to “actively monitor terrorist threats emanating from Yemen” while retaining counterterrorism capabilities nearby.
“Maybe we can launch drone strikes from other countries, but if you don’t have that intelligence on the ground, how do you know who to hit and where and when?” McCaul asked.
On Monday, Harf insisted that “we have not been forced to suspend our counterterrorism operations.”
“Although we have temporarily relocated our remaining U.S. government personnel from Yemen, we continue to actively monitor threats and have resources prepared in the region to address them,” she told reporters.
She was likely referring to Washington’s continued ability to fly drones and manned intelligence-gathering flights over Yemen, according to a U.S. special operations officer familiar with the U.S. campaign in Yemen. The United States keeps a drone base in nearby Saudi Arabia and has more drones plus a special operations task force in Djibouti, just a few minutes flying time across the Bab el-Mandeb strait from Yemen.
The special operations officer, who spoke to Foreign Policy on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the mission by name, said the covert troops’ departure will create huge long-term costs to intelligence gathering in Yemen. He said it’s doubtful that Yemeni government troops who allied with the U.S. forces will remain organized for long, and he predicted that many local fighters will disband as the government collapses.
“If at some future point you want to go back in there, you’re starting from scratch,” the officer said.
Moreover, he said, U.S. equipment that was delivered to Yemeni forces is sure to be gone by the time U.S. troops return. Already, the Defense Department has lost track of more than $500 million worth of military gear it had provided to Yemen, according to the Washington Post.
U.S. special operations forces have been in Yemen since 2002. Their mission has focused not only on training Yemeni security forces, but also on targeting al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which the U.S. government believes is the foreign terrorist group that poses the greatest risk to the American homeland.
Their departure this weekend, for what the Obama administration described as security reasons, followed the Feb. 11 closing of the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa and the evacuation of its staff.
With Yemen’s instability growing increasingly dire, AQAP appears determined to prove it remains a major force even as Islamic State militants ramp up attacks on Shiites. On Saturday, a day after the Islamic State’s bombings of two mosques that killed at least 137 in Sanaa, AQAP claimed it had killed more than 30 Shiite militiamen in roadside bombings in central Yemen, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militants’ online messages.
On Monday, a Yemeni division of the Islamic State said it had killed 29 government security forces and took credit for killing two other security officers whom AQAP had previously claimed to have assassinated, SITE reported.
Even with a limited U.S. special operations presence on the ground in Yemen, AQAP was able to maintain and enlarge its safe haven there, said American Enterprise Institute scholar Fred Kagan.
Without any personnel in-country, the counterterrorism outlook is even bleaker, he said, adding that operations that rely on aerial reconnaissance alone would not be sufficient to “do serious harm to AQAP as an organization.”
The special operations officer put it more bluntly. “You can’t do partnership from 8,000 miles away,” he said.
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2) America's Left-Wing Jews Ashamed of Israel's Jews
American Jews on the left were beside themselves last week. Israel's Jews did something that utterly infuriated these American Jews: Israel's Jews overwhelmingly voted for a man of the right (or for other right-of-center parties). And not just any right-winger, but the only leader in the Western world to publicly differ from their hero, President Barack Obama.
To understand their fury, one must first understand that no one is more certain of their moral superiority than the left. This is true the world over, and among Jews it is particularly so. For the leaders of the American Jewish religious left (Reform, Reconstructionist, and now Conservative Judaism) Jews who are politically or socially conservative are a disgrace to Judaism, which, for left-wing Jews, is essentially the same as leftism. Both religious and secular Jews on the left regard Jewish conservatives as moral traitors to the Jewish people.
But certitude of their moral superiority is not the only reason American Jews on the left went ballistic last week. There are deeper, psychological, reasons.
Left-wing Jews live, work and socialize with left-wing non-Jews, and they believe that they are — to their great regret — identified with the Jewish state in the eyes of fellow leftists. Now, when Israel has left-wing governments — as it did in its first few decades and periodically after that — being identified with Israel is not problematic. But with Israel's Jews repeatedly electing conservative governments, American Jews on the left believe that they must make it as clear as possible that they in no way support a right-wing Israel. Their moral self-esteem needs it and their left-wing credentials need it. Just look at how Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, a lifelong Democratic activist and fervent liberal, has been ostracized from polite left-wing company solely because he is an outspoken defender of Israel.
As American Jews on the left see it, their moral credibility in the eyes of fellow leftists in the news media, Hollywood, and academia is threatened by Israel. They must therefore make it abundantly clear that a) they not only do not support the right-wing government of Israel; they do not even support Israel at this time; b) they regard Benjamin Netanyahu as a vile human being; and c) they are ashamed — simply ashamed — of Israel's Jews for having voted for a right-winger.
Thus, to cite only a few examples:
In Time Magazine, Joe Klein wrote:
The great majority of Israel's Jews are bigots:
[Netanyahu] "won because he ran as a bigot. ... The public ratification of Netanyahu's bigotry [confirmed this]."
Most Israeli Jews are as contemptible as history's anti-Semites:
"A great many Jews have come to regard Arabs as the rest of the world traditionally regarded Jews."
Israel's very founding was steeped in evil:
"[Read about] the massacres perpetrated by Jews in 1948 to secure their homeland."
These Israeli Jews embarrass me. Don't consider me one of them:
"This [victory] is shameful and embarrassing."
In Israel's Haaretz last week, left-wing American Jewish writer Peter Beinart actually advocated that America punish Israel and join the international fight against Israel:
"[This means] backing Palestinian bids at the United Nations. It means labeling and boycotting settlement goods. It means joining and amplifying nonviolent Palestinian protest in the West Bank. ... It means pushing the Obama administration to present out its own peace plan, and to punish — yes, punish — the Israeli government for rejecting it. It means making sure that every time Benjamin Netanyahu and the members of his cabinet walk into a Jewish event outside Israel, they see Diaspora Jews protesting outside."
In The Washington Post, Harold Meyerson, another American Jewish left-wing columnist, joined the hysteria with these calumnies against Netanyahu (and the equally reviled Republicans):
"At the rate he was going, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have called for stripping Israeli
Arabs of the right to vote altogether."
"Bibi [is] henceforth the Jewish George Wallace."
"Perhaps Likud and the Republicans can open an Institute for the Prevention of Dark-Skinned People Voting."
Of course, as Charles Krauthammer, an American Jewish conservative, wrote last week, "There would be no peace and no Palestinian state if Isaac Herzog were prime minister either. Or Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert for that matter. The latter two were (non-Likud) prime ministers who offered the Palestinians their own state — with its capital in Jerusalem and every Israeli settlement in the new Palestine uprooted — only to be rudely rejected.
"This is not ancient history. This is 2000, 2001 and 2008 — three astonishingly concessionary peace offers within the past 15 years. Every one rejected."
But none of that matters to the left. The left lives in John Lennon's song "Imagine." Thus, the left imagines that if Israel completely withdrew from the West Bank and allowed a Palestinian state to be created now, it would be completely unlike Gaza and completely unlike Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Libya; it would be a peaceful Arab Muslim island in the midst of the cruel sea of Arab Muslim countries that surrounds it.
But what if they were wrong and rockets then rained down on Israel?
The Kleins and the Beinarts and the Meyersons wouldn't retract a word. As I wrote some 30 years ago: "Being on the left means never having to say you're sorry."
Anyway, only those bigoted Israelis would pay the price.
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3) ISRAEL, HAMAS AND HIZBOLLAH ON A COLLISION COURSE: UNDESIRABLE YET INEVITABLE
Author: Orit Perlov
Israel's nuclear infrastructure is "an almost exact parallel of the capability currently existing at our National Laboratories," it adds.
3) ISRAEL, HAMAS AND HIZBOLLAH ON A COLLISION COURSE: UNDESIRABLE YET INEVITABLE
Author: Orit Perlov
At the start of 2015, Israel’s two major fronts – home to the two hostile players with which Israel has had military encounters in recent months – were calm. The war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014 and the mutual attacks between Israel and Hizbollah in January 2015 seem to be at a standstill and have not been renewed. Based on an analysis of the map of interests, neither Israel, nor Hamas or Hizbollah has any desire to begin a new round of fighting at the moment. But an attempt to map the forces operating and affecting the players’ strategic considerations, especially the public discourse in the Gaza Strip, Egypt and Syria, as reflected in the social media, indicates that if current trends continue on both fronts, a confrontation in the foreseeable future is inevitable, despite the sides’ collective lack of desire to engage in fighting.
Given this, we must ask how Israel comes to find itself in a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, the two resistance organizations lack both the desire and public legitimacy to start a war that Israel doesn't want either, but on the other hand an analysis of events and trends in the Gaza Strip and southern Syria points to the assessment that a military confrontation on both fronts is virtually inevitable in the foreseeable future. Why, then, if all three players, currently sharing the same interest and lacking any desire for war, are they on the brink of the next round of violence?
The Gaza Strip: A Boiling Pot Waiting to Explode
To understand the political reality in the Gaza Strip, it is necessary to focus on two key aspects affecting Hamas. The first and most influential factor is Egypt’s policy shaped under the regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Egypt sees the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas as threats to its stability; when el-Sisi was elected president of Egypt, he announced that there would be no such thing as the Muslim Brotherhood during his term in office. This vision was enforced from his first days as president and consistently ever since; in fact, enforcement grew even stricter after the wave of attacks perpetrated in January 2015 in the Sinai Peninsula in which more than 30 Egyptian soldiers, officers and civilians was killed by militants from the ISIS-affiliated Wilayat Sinai (Province of Sinai) militant group. After the series of events in Sinai and despite the lack of any direct connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian regime accused the latter of violence and claimed that the military wing of Hamas participated in the attacks and that some of the weapons used had been traced to the Gaza Strip. Recently, a court in Cairo banned the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, and listed it as a terrorist organization. Concurrently, there is much anti-Hamas media and public pressure: the Egyptian television channels, for example, are explicitly urging el-Sisi to eradicate Hamas, even if this means harming Gaza. All of this adds to the underlying enmity between Cairo and the Gaza regime and underscores the prevalent assessments on the social media according to which Egypt under el-Sisi does not want to see Gaza, post-Operation Protective Edge, reconstructed on Hamas’s watch. Moreover, the discourse on social media suggests that, as far as Egypt is concerned, Israel did not “finish the job,” as Egypt wants to see the Hamas regime crushed.
The other and less influential factor pushing Hamas into a corner is the internal balance of power vis-à-vis the Palestinian Authority. For now, the reconciliation agreement between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has yet to be implemented, rendering the PA’s return to Gaza impossible. The difficult conditions in Gaza following Operation Protective Edge combined with significant Egyptian moves, are an obstruction to Hamas (creating a security buffer zone on the Egyptian side of the border with Sinai and Rafah, closing the border crossing and destroying houses in Rafah, and the Egyptian regime’s desire to eradicate Hamas), the PA’s refusal to transfer funds to Hamas, and the freeze on financial aid from the Arab states earmarked for reconstruction are on the one hand weakening Hamas’s ability to govern Gaza, and on the other hand leading to public criticism and anger in the Gaza Strip.
The discourse in the social media in the Gaza Strip paints a grim picture: Gaza is like a boiling pot waiting to explode and is sometimes compared to a grenade with the pin pulled out. Therefore, although Hamas does not want a war, it is in trouble and again finds itself on the slippery slope at the end of which it might opt for a frontal clash with Israel to extricate itself from its organizational disarray and public criticism in Gaza.
The Northern Front: A Zero Sum Game
Hizbollah’s agenda consists of three main challenges, and a direct confrontation with Israel is not one of them. These are: 1) Presidential vacuum: Since May 2014, there has been no president in Lebanon. As such, Hizbollah is entangled in talks with the Tayyar al-Mustaqbal political movement meant to formulate agreements that will create a lasting formula for the presidency while ensuring the organization’s status in the country. 2) Hizbollah is trying to block and eradicate the growth of Sunni radicalism led by Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS within Lebanon. 3) The Syrian front: The war Hizbollah is waging in Syria to defend Bashar al-Assad’s regime and weaken its opponents demands a great deal of investment of resources, both manpower and weapons, and this is taking a military and political toll.
In the fifth year since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, Hizbollah is facing a fundamental strategic dilemma. The rebels, led by Jabhat al-Nusra, have dug themselves into the Syrian Golan Heights southwards from Quneitra, while Hizbollah has grown more dominant in the north. The rebels’ advance northwards, toward Damascus and the Syrian-Lebanese border, is a strategic threat to Assad’s regime and the Iran-Syria-Hizbollah axis. It is critical to stop the rebels’ advance and distance them from the areas in which they’ve become entrenched. A military action together with the Quds Forces of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has already begun in the Daraa Province.
Israel, observing the Iranian-assisted entrenchment of Hizbollah infrastructures in the Golan Heights, is worried. Hizbollah’s territorial control of the Golan is liable to represent a threat to Israel. If it thinks the threat is concrete, the probability rises that Israel will act to foil it. If Hizbollah acts to realize its ambition to consolidate its power in the Golan Heights, it might be on a collision course with Israel.
Conclusion
Despite their inherent geographical and strategic differences, neither the northern front nor the southern one is interested in escalation. By contrast, one could say that, in both cases, regional developments, especially the rise of Radical Islamic movements [The Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front], are creating a chain reaction whose ripples affect both fronts and indirectly undermine the stability of the arenas of conflict between Israel and its neighbors. The Ansar Bait al-Maqdis organization operates in Sinai against the Egyptian regime in an attempt to undermine it, partly through connections with Hamas in Gaza, as attributed by the Egyptians. An escalation in the group’s operations, and countermoves by the Egyptian regime, including ramping up the pressure on Hamas in Gaza, are liable to cause an explosion in the Gaza Strip that would be directed against Israel. The presence of Jabhat al-Nusra forces in the Golan Heights represents a danger to the interests of Hizbollah and Assad’s regime in their sphere of influence south of Damascus and Beirut, and a countermove by Hizbollah is liable to result in a confrontation between the organization and Israel.
Both scenarios – a clash between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and one between Israel and Hizbollah in southern Syria – seem possible in the foreseeable future. Only a change in the strategic reality in Gaza and southern Syria, as the result of a political initiative, a change in the regional balance of power, or any other major shift, may be able to divert the players off their collision course.
3a) THE MIDDLE EAST NUCLEAR RACE IS ALREADY UNDER WAY
Author: Unknown
One of the most important reasons why the U.S. is trying to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran is to prevent an Iranian bomb from triggering a nuclear race in the Middle East. Yet even as talks continue now in Switzerland, Tehran’s regional rivals have already begun quietly acting on their own atomic ambitions. Nuclear power may be on the wane almost everywhere else in the world, but it’s all the rage in the place with all that oil.
Egypt’s announcement last month that it was hiring Russia to build a reactor near Alexandria made it only the latest entrant in an emerging atomic derby. Every other major Sunni power in the region has announced similar plans. And though none appear either as ambitious nor as ambiguous as what’s taken place in Iran — which set out to master the entire atomic-fuel cycle, a red flag for a military program — each announcement lays down a marker in a region that, until recently, was notable as the one place on the planet where governments had made little progress on nuclear power.
With the exception of Israel, which has never publicly acknowledged its widely known nuclear arsenal, no Middle Eastern country beyond Iran had a nuclear program — peaceful or otherwise — until the wealthy United Arab Emirates began building a reactor in July 2012 (due for completion in 2017). The list now includes, in addition to Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — the last Iran’s archrival, and which last year revealed plans to build 16 nuclear plants over the next two decades. When the President of South Korea — which has 23 nuclear plants of its own — visited the Kingdom earlier this month, leaders of both countries signed a memo of understanding calling for Seoul to build two of the nuclear plants. The Saudis have made similar arrangements with China, Argentina and France.
“It’s not just because nuclear power is seen as a first step toward a nuclear-weapons option,” says Mark Fitzpatrick, a former U.S. State Department nuclear expert who now runs the nonproliferation and disarmament program at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There is also a prestige factor: keeping up with the neighbors.”
Middle Eastern nations may have legitimate reasons to invest in nuclear energy. Jordan, for instance, has almost no oil in liquid form, and almost less water. Saudi Arabia and the UAE possess huge crude reserves, but lose potential export revenue when they burn oil at home to create electricity — huge amounts of which are sucked up by desalination plants. Turkey, despite impressive hydroelectric potential, must import oil and natural gas.
But all that has been true for decades. What’s changed in recent years is the nuclear capabilities of Iran — a Shi‘ite Muslim country Sunni leaders have come to regard as major threat. Jordan’s King Abdullah II famously warned of a “Shia crescent” of Iran-aligned countries reaching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The Saudis have made it clear that they will acquire a nuclear weapon should Iran get one.
“This is not the shortest way to a nuclear weapon, by any means,” says Sharon Squassoni, director of the proliferation-prevention program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “But if I put myself in their shoes, I’d think it probably makes sense to start down this path to see if we can develop a civilian nuclear [program], and if we pick up some capabilities along the way, that’s all right.”‘
Suspicion rises with every new announcement partly because the Middle East is bucking a global trend. Worldwide, the number of nuclear plants has declined since the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011. Reactions differed by country. Germany forswore nuclear energy altogether after the disaster, while China pressed ahead, planning more than 100 new reactors. But in most places, the environmental risks and high costs have turned countries off nuclear power.
“My beef with nuclear energy is that it’s sort of held up as this very prestigious thing,” Squassoni tells TIME. “We do nuclear deals with our best allies … all this stuff about strategic partnership. And really, it’s this extremely expensive, complicated, slightly dangerous way to boil water. And that’s what you’re doing, right? You’re boiling water to turn those turbines.”
The expense alone may prevent some Middle Eastern nations from ever actually joining the “nuclear club.” Building an atomic plant costs at least $5 billion, Fitzpatrick notes, and Egypt is desperately poor; Jordan relies heavily on remittances and foreign aid. But the Saudis still have money to burn and, according to former White House official Gary Samore, have consistently rebuffed U.S. imprecations to sign a pledge not to divert any nuclear program toward producing a bomb (a pledge the UAE took). Saudi Arabia has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but then so has Iran, and in the end a race can be run by as few as two: India and Pakistan, bitter neighbors, neither of which are rich, went nuclear in 1974 and 1998, respectively. They’ve gone to war once since, raising anxiety levels around the world.
So the talks in Switzerland are about more than preventing Iran from getting the bomb. They are also about persuading Iran’s neighbors that the nuclear option is effectively off the table. If the talks end with a final agreement that looks like a win for the Islamic Republic, diplomats say its neighbors will fast track their own plans. “If the accord is not sufficiently solid then regional countries would say it’s not serious enough, so we are also going to get the nuclear weapon,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told Europe 1 Radio on Saturday. “And that would lead to an extremely dangerous nuclear proliferation.”
3b) US Declassifies Document Revealing Israel's Nuclear Program
Obama revenge for Netanyahu's Congress talk? 1987 report on Israel's top secret nuclear program released in unprecedented move.
By Ari Yashar, Matt Wanderman
National Security Archive/Flash 90
In a development that has largely been missed by mainstream media, the Pentagon early last month quietly declassified a Department of Defense top-secret document detailing Israel's nuclear program, a highly covert topic that Israel has never formally announced to avoid a regional nuclear arms race, and which the US until now has respected by remaining silent.
But by publishing the declassified document from 1987, the US reportedly breached the silent agreement to keep quiet on Israel's nuclear powers for the first time ever, detailing the nuclear program in great depth.
The timing of the revelation is highly suspect, given that it came as tensions spiraled out of control between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama ahead of Netanyahu's March 3 address in Congress, in which he warned against the dangers of Iran's nuclear program and how the deal being formed on that program leaves the Islamic regime with nuclear breakout capabilities.
Another highly suspicious aspect of the document is that while the Pentagon saw fit to declassify sections on Israel's sensitive nuclear program, it kept sections on Italy, France, West Germany and other NATO countries classified, with those sections blocked out in the document.
The 386-page report entitled "Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations" gives a detailed description of how Israel advanced its military technology and developed its nuclear infrastructure and research in the 1970s and 1980s.
Israel is "developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level," reveals the report, stating that in the 1980s Israelis were reaching the ability to create bombs considered a thousand times more powerful than atom bombs.
The revelation marks a first in which the US published in a document a description of how Israel attained hydrogen bombs.
The report also notes research laboratories in Israel "are equivalent to our Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories," the key labs in developing America's nuclear arsenal.
Israel's nuclear infrastructure is "an almost exact parallel of the capability currently existing at our National Laboratories," it adds.
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As far as nuclear technology is concerned the Israelis are roughly where the U.S. was in the fission weapon field in about 1955 to 1960," the report reveals, noting a time frame just after America tested its first hydrogen bomb.
Institute for Defense Analysis, a federally funded agency operating under the Pentagon, penned the report back in 1987.
Aside from nuclear capabilities, the report revealed Israel at the time had "a totally integrated effort in systems development throughout the nation," with electronic combat all in one "integrated system, not separated systems for the Army, Navy and Air Force." It even acknowledged that in some cases, Israeli military technology "is more advanced than in the U.S."
Declassifying the report comes at a sensitive timing as noted above, and given that the process to have it published was started three years ago, that timing is seen as having been the choice of the American government.
US journalist Grant Smith petitioned to have the report published based on the Freedom of Information Act. Initially the Pentagon took its time answering, leading Smith to sue, and a District Court judge to order the Pentagon to respond to the request.
Smith, who heads the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, reportedly said he thinks this is the first time the US government has officially confirmed that Israel is a nuclear power, a status that Israel has long been widely known to have despite being undeclared.
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