McCain and Obama campaigns focus on sanctions as Iran threat looms By Ron Kampeas. [excerpt] WASHINGTON (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, www.jta.org) 9/16/2008 -- The mounting anxiety over Iran’s nuclear program is sparking campaign chatter over a possible Israeli strike and prompting a bipartisan effort to revive long-stalled sanctions legislation in the U.S. Congress. ...
European Jewish Congress President: military action against Iran only under UN auspices by: Yossi Lempkowicz Updated: 15/Sep/2008 European Jewish Press
BRUSSELS (EJP)---The President of the European Jewish Congress (EJC) Moshe Kantor said that «if there is an obvious evidence that Iranians are going to have the nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it, somebody should stop them on behalf of the United Nations, even by military action.”
Kantor made the comment to journalists Monday in Brussels where he chaired a gathering of a dozen international experts on nuclear non-proliferation who discussed the danger of the Iranian nuclear program and the potential propagation of nuclear terrorism around the globe.
“If Israel or the US will be authorized to do a military action is not the question but rather that it (the Iranian nuclear program) should be stopped because it is a danger for the whole world,” Kantor said, stressing that Iran is not a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“If such military action is done legally, it is a very good protection for the European Jewry,” he added, insisting that everything “should be done legally”, and within the framework of the UN Security Council resolutions.
Kantor deplored the fact that around 10,000 companies in Europe are still collaborating with Iran on the development of its gas and oil industry. “A market with a turnover of about 100 billion dollars,” he stressed.
“The collaboration continues and even big EU countries cannot stop their business community from investing in Iran’s proliferation process,” Kantor, who is also president of the International Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe, said.
Iran is still blocking attempts to investigate allegations that Teheran carried out research and experiments linked to a nuclear weapons program, said a report released Monday by the UN nuclear agency.
At the gathering, a Russian expert, Vladimir Dvorkin, a retired general, reported about the different scenarios of an attack of Iran or from Iran.
He said that the disaster would be smaller if somebody attacks Iran first. “If we wait for Iran to have the nuclear weapon, it will be more problematic,” Dvorkin reportedly said.
The experts stressed that economic sanctions against Tehran “are not effective” because they do not hit the sensitive part of the Iranian society. “Any critic against the nuclear program is seen by the Iranians as a threat against the position of Iran in the world.”
There is a mobilization of the society around the current leadership, they said.
Monday’s roundtable discussion was also attended by experts from the US, UK, Norway, Israel, Belgium, Holland and the Czech Republic.
Monday, September 15, 2008
New IAEA Report: Iran Continues to Withhold Nuclear Program Info
IAEA Report released Sept. 15, 2008
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) today (Sept. 15) released new findings that Iran is continuing to refuse to provide information about the nature of its nuclear program and its uranium enrichment activities. The Islamic Republic could face a new round of sanctions for its intransigence. See below for additional information about past reports and visit www.theisraelproject.org/iranpresskit for more information about Iran.
The IAEA's reports about Iran’s nuclear program have consistently found that Iran has failed – and continues to fail – to fully cooperate with the IAEA, pointing to a military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program.[1] Iran has acknowledged working on a nuclear program for more than 20 years[2] and pursued a policy of concealment until October 2003. Since then, Iran has failed to provide satisfactory information about and access to its program.[3]
The reports have also found that Iran is continuously developing and operating new centrifuges[4] and enriching uranium in violation of several U.N. Security Council Resolutions. This is a major concern for the IAEA.[5] Other findings conclude that Iran apparently is conducting secret studies to convert uranium dioxide into “green salt,” which can be used to make fuel for a nuclear reactor or fissile material for a bomb. Iran is also testing “high explosives” and redesigning the inner cone of the Shahab-3 missile re-entry head to accommodate a nuclear warhead, a subject of concern to the Agency.[6]
IAEA Report released Sept. 15, 2008
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) today (Sept. 15) released new findings that Iran is continuing to refuse to provide information about the nature of its nuclear program and its uranium enrichment activities. The Islamic Republic could face a new round of sanctions for its intransigence. See below for additional information about past reports and visit www.theisraelproject.org/iranpresskit for more information about Iran.
The IAEA's reports about Iran’s nuclear program have consistently found that Iran has failed – and continues to fail – to fully cooperate with the IAEA, pointing to a military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program.[1] Iran has acknowledged working on a nuclear program for more than 20 years[2] and pursued a policy of concealment until October 2003. Since then, Iran has failed to provide satisfactory information about and access to its program.[3]
The reports have also found that Iran is continuously developing and operating new centrifuges[4] and enriching uranium in violation of several U.N. Security Council Resolutions. This is a major concern for the IAEA.[5] Other findings conclude that Iran apparently is conducting secret studies to convert uranium dioxide into “green salt,” which can be used to make fuel for a nuclear reactor or fissile material for a bomb. Iran is also testing “high explosives” and redesigning the inner cone of the Shahab-3 missile re-entry head to accommodate a nuclear warhead, a subject of concern to the Agency.[6]
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Of pertinence.
"If all of these activities are real, it would mean that Iran is moving faster and is closer to obtaining a nuclear-weapons capability than the hard facts suggest. .... [I]f Tehran were to believe that American -- not Israeli -- military action is imminent, it might slow work on the elements of its program that it thinks the world can observe." -- David Kay, Washington Post, September 14, 2008 Op Ed
OPED / David Kay
What's missing from Iran debateBuilding a security framework for a nuclear TehranBy David Kay • Special to The Washington Post • September 14, 2008
It would be impossible and foolish to predict what lies immediately ahead for Iran. Inflation runs rampant and domestic unrest is growing, but the leadership is banding together in support of the country's nuclear program. Threat assessment and war planning are (or should be) about best-guessing capabilities and intentions. When it comes to Iran, these calculations are difficult, but there are things we can -- and must -- figure out. Given what we know and what we can best-guess, it looks as if Iran is 80 percent of the way to a functioning nuclear weapon.
Every nuclear program needs raw materials, a way to refine them and, in the final stage, weaponization. Getting and enriching the materials is the hardest part; without this, a nuclear reaction is impossible. How does Iran's nuclear program measure up?
The situation is a bit murky, but we know, basically, that Tehran has a handle on the fissionable material. Iran imported significant amounts of raw uranium from China in 1991. It has also attempted to produce weapons-grade material, conducting secret enrichment efforts and acquiring designs, materials and samples of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment from the A.Q. Khan network. Plus, over the past 18 years, the Iranians have developed and tested state-of-the-art centrifuges and enrichment techniques. If Iran's 6,000 forthcoming new-design centrifuges were working for a year, the program could produce about five weapons. My best guess is that they are about two to four years away from accomplishing this.
Next comes weaponization. The fissionable material must be converted into metal and packaged. Here again, Iran has made substantial progress. What remains is to produce these elements in adequate numbers and amounts; combine them in an engineering design that ensures that they work and that fits on a missile; and gain confidence that the resulting weapons will get the job done.
All of this is public knowledge, but the answers to most of the important questions relating to intent and progress on crucial elements of weaponization are unknown. It's the only partially understood and suspected activities of Iran that are most alarming. Signs of these activities include detection by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors of samples of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium; more extensive plutonium separation than Iran has admitted; weapons design work; construction of a heavy-water reactor and its associated heavy-water production facility; design work on missile re-entry vehicles that seem to be for a nuclear weapon; and reports of yet-undiscovered programs and facilities.
If all of these activities are real, it would mean that Iran is moving faster and is closer to obtaining a nuclear-weapons capability than the hard facts suggest. Obtaining that last 20 percent of the elements needed to make a nuclear weapon would take perhaps one to two years, instead of the four to seven years needed if they were not.
While we know a lot more about Iran than we did about Iraq (before the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars), we still lack answers to the most important questions, including:
If Iran has decided or decides to acquire nuclear weapons, how long will it take to do so and how many could it produce per year?
How much foreign assistance has Iran received, and from whom did it receive it?
Does Iran have unknown clandestine nuclear facilities and, if so, how many? Doing what?
What are the real capabilities of Iran's various weapons-delivery options, particularly its missiles?
What are the command-and-control arrangements for Iran's nuclear program? Where is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in this mix?
This dirty-laundry list is one reason efforts to provide net assessments about where the program is have proved so contentious. The last U.S. attempt to produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, in December, led to a comedy remarkable even by Washington standards. Yet we are talking about a country with known nuclear ambitions and a track record of violating international obligations in pursuit of that goal.
Despite the unanswered questions, we have some pretty frightening knowledge about Iran's nuclear capabilities. Less clear are its intentions.
Tehran often claims to want only to pursue a civilian nuclear program. But it also says it wants to wipe Israel off the map. And Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with Ahmadinejad, sees nuclear "power" as a symbol of national pride. It's difficult to know what to believe.
What truly raises tensions, though, is Iran's worldview. Iranians have learned to fear the power of others and to believe that they must ultimately organize their world in a way that lessens the power of the states that pose the greatest threat to them. And Iran's essential national security threat has never been Israel. It is the United States.
My humble best guess is that Iran is pushing toward a nuclear-weapons capability as rapidly as it can. But if Tehran were to believe that American -- not Israeli -- military action is imminent, it might slow work on the elements of its program that it thinks the world can observe. Yet such temporizing would only be tactical. Its strategic goal is to acquire nuclear weapons to counter what it views as a real U.S. threat. Iran appears to believe that the United States is not willing to accept the validity and survival of the Iranian revolutionary state.
Of course, Iran does not exist in a vacuum. How Israel and the United States perceive the threat, based on their own historical memories and strategic priorities, figures significantly in just how messy this may get.
The context within which these national strategies and decisions are interacting is being reshaped by two factors. First, oil prices have exploded, greatly enriching Iran and making clear to the West the economic and political pain and destruction that could come from a serious disruption in the flow of oil. Second is Iran's belief that it has gained a strategic advantage against the United States as a result of its being tied down in Iraq, and against Israel, because of the tactical blunting, if not defeat, of its military in Lebanon.
Strategic objectives
The United States must figure out and articulate its strategic objectives regarding Iran's nuclear program. At present, its actions and rhetoric are often as conflicted as those of the Islamic Republic.
And while not all would agree with Sen. John McCain's assessment that the only thing worse than a U.S. or Israeli military attack on Iran would be Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, few in the mainstream of American politics seem ready to go on the record with a plan for "the day after" that does not involve military action.
Two concerns seem to be most absent from discussion of Iran's "nuclear future," whatever it is: First, what policies would limit any advantage, political or military, that Iran might gain from such weapons? Second, how do we begin to craft, with all the states of the region -- including Israel and Iran -- political, economic and security arrangements that recognize their varied interests and concerns and their often very different perspectives on what these are? In the end, we need to decide how we can perform damage control and create arrangements that take into account states' varied interests.
Figuring this out is not rocket science. But we must begin the process of discussion, consultation, planning and acting that will lay the groundwork for a future far different from either the conflicts of the past or the current path toward a regional conflagration that may well involve nuclear weapons.
The United States, along with all of the states in the Middle East, has to create security policies that guarantee that acts of aggression will not be allowed to threaten any state's survival while also beginning to build the economic institutions and policies that can create a future where war seems impossible. While Iran's economy suffers, engagement is more feasible.
What is hard is the actual act of stepping off the (probably sinking) ship we stand on to construct a very different vessel. This is one of those times in history when will is more important than brilliance and when determination to shape a different future is more vital than experience in rituals of the past.
The writer led the U.N. inspections after the Persian Gulf War that uncovered the Iraqi nuclear program. He later led the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, which determined there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at the time of the 2003 invasion. This article was adapted from a longer on in the current issue the National Interest.
"If all of these activities are real, it would mean that Iran is moving faster and is closer to obtaining a nuclear-weapons capability than the hard facts suggest. .... [I]f Tehran were to believe that American -- not Israeli -- military action is imminent, it might slow work on the elements of its program that it thinks the world can observe." -- David Kay, Washington Post, September 14, 2008 Op Ed
OPED / David Kay
What's missing from Iran debateBuilding a security framework for a nuclear TehranBy David Kay • Special to The Washington Post • September 14, 2008
It would be impossible and foolish to predict what lies immediately ahead for Iran. Inflation runs rampant and domestic unrest is growing, but the leadership is banding together in support of the country's nuclear program. Threat assessment and war planning are (or should be) about best-guessing capabilities and intentions. When it comes to Iran, these calculations are difficult, but there are things we can -- and must -- figure out. Given what we know and what we can best-guess, it looks as if Iran is 80 percent of the way to a functioning nuclear weapon.
Every nuclear program needs raw materials, a way to refine them and, in the final stage, weaponization. Getting and enriching the materials is the hardest part; without this, a nuclear reaction is impossible. How does Iran's nuclear program measure up?
The situation is a bit murky, but we know, basically, that Tehran has a handle on the fissionable material. Iran imported significant amounts of raw uranium from China in 1991. It has also attempted to produce weapons-grade material, conducting secret enrichment efforts and acquiring designs, materials and samples of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment from the A.Q. Khan network. Plus, over the past 18 years, the Iranians have developed and tested state-of-the-art centrifuges and enrichment techniques. If Iran's 6,000 forthcoming new-design centrifuges were working for a year, the program could produce about five weapons. My best guess is that they are about two to four years away from accomplishing this.
Next comes weaponization. The fissionable material must be converted into metal and packaged. Here again, Iran has made substantial progress. What remains is to produce these elements in adequate numbers and amounts; combine them in an engineering design that ensures that they work and that fits on a missile; and gain confidence that the resulting weapons will get the job done.
All of this is public knowledge, but the answers to most of the important questions relating to intent and progress on crucial elements of weaponization are unknown. It's the only partially understood and suspected activities of Iran that are most alarming. Signs of these activities include detection by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors of samples of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium; more extensive plutonium separation than Iran has admitted; weapons design work; construction of a heavy-water reactor and its associated heavy-water production facility; design work on missile re-entry vehicles that seem to be for a nuclear weapon; and reports of yet-undiscovered programs and facilities.
If all of these activities are real, it would mean that Iran is moving faster and is closer to obtaining a nuclear-weapons capability than the hard facts suggest. Obtaining that last 20 percent of the elements needed to make a nuclear weapon would take perhaps one to two years, instead of the four to seven years needed if they were not.
While we know a lot more about Iran than we did about Iraq (before the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars), we still lack answers to the most important questions, including:
If Iran has decided or decides to acquire nuclear weapons, how long will it take to do so and how many could it produce per year?
How much foreign assistance has Iran received, and from whom did it receive it?
Does Iran have unknown clandestine nuclear facilities and, if so, how many? Doing what?
What are the real capabilities of Iran's various weapons-delivery options, particularly its missiles?
What are the command-and-control arrangements for Iran's nuclear program? Where is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in this mix?
This dirty-laundry list is one reason efforts to provide net assessments about where the program is have proved so contentious. The last U.S. attempt to produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, in December, led to a comedy remarkable even by Washington standards. Yet we are talking about a country with known nuclear ambitions and a track record of violating international obligations in pursuit of that goal.
Despite the unanswered questions, we have some pretty frightening knowledge about Iran's nuclear capabilities. Less clear are its intentions.
Tehran often claims to want only to pursue a civilian nuclear program. But it also says it wants to wipe Israel off the map. And Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with Ahmadinejad, sees nuclear "power" as a symbol of national pride. It's difficult to know what to believe.
What truly raises tensions, though, is Iran's worldview. Iranians have learned to fear the power of others and to believe that they must ultimately organize their world in a way that lessens the power of the states that pose the greatest threat to them. And Iran's essential national security threat has never been Israel. It is the United States.
My humble best guess is that Iran is pushing toward a nuclear-weapons capability as rapidly as it can. But if Tehran were to believe that American -- not Israeli -- military action is imminent, it might slow work on the elements of its program that it thinks the world can observe. Yet such temporizing would only be tactical. Its strategic goal is to acquire nuclear weapons to counter what it views as a real U.S. threat. Iran appears to believe that the United States is not willing to accept the validity and survival of the Iranian revolutionary state.
Of course, Iran does not exist in a vacuum. How Israel and the United States perceive the threat, based on their own historical memories and strategic priorities, figures significantly in just how messy this may get.
The context within which these national strategies and decisions are interacting is being reshaped by two factors. First, oil prices have exploded, greatly enriching Iran and making clear to the West the economic and political pain and destruction that could come from a serious disruption in the flow of oil. Second is Iran's belief that it has gained a strategic advantage against the United States as a result of its being tied down in Iraq, and against Israel, because of the tactical blunting, if not defeat, of its military in Lebanon.
Strategic objectives
The United States must figure out and articulate its strategic objectives regarding Iran's nuclear program. At present, its actions and rhetoric are often as conflicted as those of the Islamic Republic.
And while not all would agree with Sen. John McCain's assessment that the only thing worse than a U.S. or Israeli military attack on Iran would be Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, few in the mainstream of American politics seem ready to go on the record with a plan for "the day after" that does not involve military action.
Two concerns seem to be most absent from discussion of Iran's "nuclear future," whatever it is: First, what policies would limit any advantage, political or military, that Iran might gain from such weapons? Second, how do we begin to craft, with all the states of the region -- including Israel and Iran -- political, economic and security arrangements that recognize their varied interests and concerns and their often very different perspectives on what these are? In the end, we need to decide how we can perform damage control and create arrangements that take into account states' varied interests.
Figuring this out is not rocket science. But we must begin the process of discussion, consultation, planning and acting that will lay the groundwork for a future far different from either the conflicts of the past or the current path toward a regional conflagration that may well involve nuclear weapons.
The United States, along with all of the states in the Middle East, has to create security policies that guarantee that acts of aggression will not be allowed to threaten any state's survival while also beginning to build the economic institutions and policies that can create a future where war seems impossible. While Iran's economy suffers, engagement is more feasible.
What is hard is the actual act of stepping off the (probably sinking) ship we stand on to construct a very different vessel. This is one of those times in history when will is more important than brilliance and when determination to shape a different future is more vital than experience in rituals of the past.
The writer led the U.N. inspections after the Persian Gulf War that uncovered the Iraqi nuclear program. He later led the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, which determined there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at the time of the 2003 invasion. This article was adapted from a longer on in the current issue the National Interest.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Broad-Based Coalition Seeks To Prevent a Nuclear Iran
By Marc Perelman
Thu. Sep 11, 2008 The Forward
In an effort to raise public awareness about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a new organization is being launched, with its own paid staff, to focus solely on the issue.
The promoters of the group, which is called United Against Nuclear Iran, hope to replicate the Save Darfur Coalition, which has brought together liberals and hawks as well as Jewish and Christian groups, to advocate in favor of the war-ravaged Sudanese region.
The group is being set up as a registered 501c3 charity that presents itself as “a non-partisan, broad-based coalition” that will comprise individuals and organizations from “diverse ethnicities, faith communities, political and social affiliations,” according to a mission statement posted on its Web site, which is under development.
The executive director of the new organization is Mark Wallace, a Republican lawyer who worked for the American mission to the United Nations until recently. Wallace will also have on staff a spokesman and an outreach director. The group’s spokesman, John Kildea, told the Forward that the coalition was not aimed at fomenting military action against Iran.
“To be clear, our aim is not to beat the drums of war,” he said. “On the contrary, we hope to play a key part in laying the groundwork for effective U.S. policies in coordination with our allies, the U.N. and others by a strong showing of unified support from the American people to alter the current course of the Iranian regime.”
The mission statement on the group’s Web site advocates stepped-up diplomatic pressure on Tehran. Kildea also pointed to the diversity of the co-chairs, who include former CIA director James Woolsey, America’s former ambassador to the U.N. and Democratic Party foreign policy heavyweight Richard Holbrooke and Dennis Ross, formerly America’s chief Middle East peace negotiator.
Kildea declined to disclose details of the funding of the group, and said that United Against Nuclear Iran was just beginning to seek out coalition members and was aiming to create local chapters.
The government in Tehran claims that its nuclear program is aimed solely at producing electricity, but Western countries and Israel suspect that Iran is looking to produce nuclear weapons. The issue has faded somewhat in the United States, where attention is focused mostly on the White House race and on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supporters of the Israeli government are concerned that the vacuum, coupled with the lack of progress of the diplomatic negotiations between Europe and Iran, will enable the regime in Tehran to continue making progress on its nuclear program.
Jewish groups, while aggressively pushing for more pressure on Iran, have been eager not to appear as the only ones driving a hawkish agenda against Tehran. Although one source privy to the discussions said that some Jewish communal officials have been involved in the discussions, and several Jewish communal sources are aware of the effort, it appears that major Jewish groups will support it from the outside. They are coordinating their own advocacy efforts through an Iran task force set up by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
The Presidents Conference is planning to hold simultaneous rallies in New York and Washington on September 22 to protest the presence of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the annual U.N. General Assembly.
The Israel Project will broadcast ads on the main cable news networks in New York during the U.N. parley, and in Washington during the presidential debates. Last spring, the Anti-Defamation League placed ads in Swiss newspapers, denouncing a natural-gas deal between a Swiss government-owned corporation and Iran. A Vienna-based coalition called Stop the Bomb has organized demonstrations and events denouncing a similar business deal.
It appears that Wallace and the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran will supplement the Jewish groups’ activity by reaching out to a more diverse public.
Wallace began his political carreer working as an assistant to then Florida governor Jeb Bush and then served on the Republican legal team during the 2000 Florida presidential vote recount. After working in the Department of Homeland Security under President Bush, he was recruited in early 2006 to the United States Mission to the United Nations by its then ambassador, John Bolton, to be in charge of management and reform. During his tenure, Wallace, who was given the rank of ambassador, ruffled the feathers of U.N. officials by aggressively pushing corruption investigations into U.N. programs. He left his position in April, amid reports that he had fallen out of favor with the new and more conciliatory ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad.
Wallace's wife, Nicolle, was the communications director at the White House from 2005 until mid-2006, and then joined the McCain presidential campaign team May 1 as a senior adviser. Both Wallaces are briefing Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin for interviews and debates.
His spokesman, Kildea, stressed that the initiative was a truly bi-partisan effort.
By Marc Perelman
Thu. Sep 11, 2008 The Forward
In an effort to raise public awareness about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a new organization is being launched, with its own paid staff, to focus solely on the issue.
The promoters of the group, which is called United Against Nuclear Iran, hope to replicate the Save Darfur Coalition, which has brought together liberals and hawks as well as Jewish and Christian groups, to advocate in favor of the war-ravaged Sudanese region.
The group is being set up as a registered 501c3 charity that presents itself as “a non-partisan, broad-based coalition” that will comprise individuals and organizations from “diverse ethnicities, faith communities, political and social affiliations,” according to a mission statement posted on its Web site, which is under development.
The executive director of the new organization is Mark Wallace, a Republican lawyer who worked for the American mission to the United Nations until recently. Wallace will also have on staff a spokesman and an outreach director. The group’s spokesman, John Kildea, told the Forward that the coalition was not aimed at fomenting military action against Iran.
“To be clear, our aim is not to beat the drums of war,” he said. “On the contrary, we hope to play a key part in laying the groundwork for effective U.S. policies in coordination with our allies, the U.N. and others by a strong showing of unified support from the American people to alter the current course of the Iranian regime.”
The mission statement on the group’s Web site advocates stepped-up diplomatic pressure on Tehran. Kildea also pointed to the diversity of the co-chairs, who include former CIA director James Woolsey, America’s former ambassador to the U.N. and Democratic Party foreign policy heavyweight Richard Holbrooke and Dennis Ross, formerly America’s chief Middle East peace negotiator.
Kildea declined to disclose details of the funding of the group, and said that United Against Nuclear Iran was just beginning to seek out coalition members and was aiming to create local chapters.
The government in Tehran claims that its nuclear program is aimed solely at producing electricity, but Western countries and Israel suspect that Iran is looking to produce nuclear weapons. The issue has faded somewhat in the United States, where attention is focused mostly on the White House race and on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supporters of the Israeli government are concerned that the vacuum, coupled with the lack of progress of the diplomatic negotiations between Europe and Iran, will enable the regime in Tehran to continue making progress on its nuclear program.
Jewish groups, while aggressively pushing for more pressure on Iran, have been eager not to appear as the only ones driving a hawkish agenda against Tehran. Although one source privy to the discussions said that some Jewish communal officials have been involved in the discussions, and several Jewish communal sources are aware of the effort, it appears that major Jewish groups will support it from the outside. They are coordinating their own advocacy efforts through an Iran task force set up by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
The Presidents Conference is planning to hold simultaneous rallies in New York and Washington on September 22 to protest the presence of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the annual U.N. General Assembly.
The Israel Project will broadcast ads on the main cable news networks in New York during the U.N. parley, and in Washington during the presidential debates. Last spring, the Anti-Defamation League placed ads in Swiss newspapers, denouncing a natural-gas deal between a Swiss government-owned corporation and Iran. A Vienna-based coalition called Stop the Bomb has organized demonstrations and events denouncing a similar business deal.
It appears that Wallace and the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran will supplement the Jewish groups’ activity by reaching out to a more diverse public.
Wallace began his political carreer working as an assistant to then Florida governor Jeb Bush and then served on the Republican legal team during the 2000 Florida presidential vote recount. After working in the Department of Homeland Security under President Bush, he was recruited in early 2006 to the United States Mission to the United Nations by its then ambassador, John Bolton, to be in charge of management and reform. During his tenure, Wallace, who was given the rank of ambassador, ruffled the feathers of U.N. officials by aggressively pushing corruption investigations into U.N. programs. He left his position in April, amid reports that he had fallen out of favor with the new and more conciliatory ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad.
Wallace's wife, Nicolle, was the communications director at the White House from 2005 until mid-2006, and then joined the McCain presidential campaign team May 1 as a senior adviser. Both Wallaces are briefing Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin for interviews and debates.
His spokesman, Kildea, stressed that the initiative was a truly bi-partisan effort.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Editor's Notes: "The Secret War with Iran ," A losing battle, so far
Sep. 4, 2008
David Horovitz , THE JERUSALEM POST
In August 2007, because certain intelligence agencies were not convinced of Israeli claims that President Bashar Assad was engaged in the construction of a nuclear weapons facility, Israel sent sent 12 members of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit into Syria in two helicopters to collect soil samples outside the site in question.
Needless to say, this was a highly dangerous operation. And it very nearly went wrong. The commandos were almost exposed when a Syrian patrol drove past the landing site where the helicopters were parked.
But it was well worth it. The results provided "clear-cut proof" of the nuclear project," investigative journalist Ronen Bergman writes in his new book, The Secret War with Iran.
A month later, Israel bombed the site, and in so doing reemphasized the Begin Doctrine - Israel's insistence that, for the sake of its own survival, it will not allow the deployment by hostile neighbors of weapons that might be used to destroy it.
Bergman's book, which will be published next week in the United States, is an expanded, updated version of his Hebrew-language The Point of No Return, which was Israel's best-selling non-fiction work in 2007.
The new volume is anything but a mere translation. For one thing, the world has moved on, or more accurately, moved closer to confrontation, in the intervening period. For another, Bergman has added further revelatory content to the 2007 book's disclosures.
Plainly, the author has been allowed access to a range of material hitherto kept classified by various intelligence services. Plainly, too, what he is publishing is material that Israel is content to have widely disseminated and some of which cannot be independently verified. The book was submitted to censorship, and not all of its content was approved, he told me when he dropped off a copy a few days ago, though it did sometimes seem as though he had run into the censor on a relatively benign day.
Most notable, perhaps, in this context, is the fact that the guardians of Israel's military secrets have allowed Bergman to provide a fairly extensive account of that September 6, 2007, raid on Syria's nuclear facility - whose purpose he states unambiguously was "the production of plutonium for the manufacture of atomic bombs" and whose construction, he reports, was a tripartite endeavor: "At a series of secret meetings between representatives of the three sides, held mainly in Teheran, it was decided that Syria would supply the territory, Iran the money [$1 billion-$2b.], and North Korea the expertise..."
Last year's raid was the subject of some of the heaviest military censorship that I have encountered in the past 25 years: Israel was desperate to take no official responsibility for the attack, and in this way to allow Damascus plausible deniability, to avoid a deterioration into war. There was no official confirmation of the raid, and for a long time after it, all references in the Israeli media had to include conditioning phrases such as the "reported" Israeli strike.
Apparently such concerns no longer apply. Bergman has been freed to describe, without the censor's usual required attribution to "foreign sources," the entire process by which the Syrian facility was built - with details of the shipments of material from North Korea and the dispatch of Korean scientists. He sets out the circumstances of that high-risk August fact-finding mission by Sayeret Matkal. And he is allowed to note that "a number of North Koreans" were killed in the Israeli attack.
Although destroying the site was an Israeli operation, Bergman makes clear further that "the Israelis and the Americans decided to act," and that the two countries coordinated on the official silence policy after the raid was successfully completed. "Prime Minister Olmert and President Bush decided that both countries would maintain a policy of total nonreaction, without exceptions, and without winks or nods. If the Syrians had not been in a hurry to issue their own statements, the whole matter might not have been disclosed at all."
If the sanctioning of these details about last year's raid on Syria is interesting, given the immensely sensitive nature of Israeli-Syrian relations and the continued potential for both diplomatic breakthrough and bitter conflict, then the sanctioning of some of Bergman's disclosures about the Iranian nuclear project, and notably the Bush administration's attitude to it, seems potentially incendiary.
A few weeks ago, the White House took the unusual step of issuing a specific denial of a report on Army Radio, picked up by the Post, which claimed that a Bush official recently told his Israeli counterparts that the president is planning to strike Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office. Only this week, a newspaper in The Netherlands claimed that Dutch intelligence has abruptly halted an "extremely successful" ongoing operation to sabotage Iran's nuclear program because of an assessment that such an American strike is indeed just weeks away.
In his book, Israel's military censor has allowed Bergman to add two highly significant revelations in this context: The first is that after the American intelligence community issued its controversial National Intelligence Estimate late last year that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program, Vice President Richard Cheney sent a message to Olmert stating that despite this conclusion, "the possibility of an American military operation against Iranian nuclear targets and military infrastructure had not been discarded."
The second is that, as of May 2008, "the Mossad's estimate" is that Bush, "out of religious and ideological motives, will order a strike."
FOR ALL the behind-the-scenes Israeli access granted Bergman, and the censor's apparent generosity, his account of what he calls "the 30-year clandestine struggle against the world's most dangerous terrorist power" overflows with tales of incompetence and outright failure in the battle against Iran - some narrow and specific, some more fundamental - many of which reflect terribly on Israel.
He reminds readers who might prefer to forget the uncomfortable truth that Israel supplied arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's regime at the turn of the 1980s, in an operation codenamed "Seashell," which was critical in "turning the tide of the war" against Iraq in Iran's favor.
In one illustration of the disastrous consequences for the seller of misguided arms dealing, he points out that one of the machine guns sold by Israel to Iran at that time, a Browning, later transferred to Hizbullah's arsenal, was used to murderous effect in the July 12, 2006, attack on the IDF Humvees patrolling the Lebanon border in which three soldiers were killed and Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev fatally wounded and captured - the attack that sparked the Second Lebanon War. (A senior Iranian official who helped broker those arms deals, Bergman further reveals, later became a top Iranian representative in Lebanon and a Hizbullah founder, and pushed for the 2006 abduction-attack on Teheran's orders. Some of the Hizbullah gunmen who carried out that attack, he also writes, were trained in Iran.)
He reports how Israel has insistently failed to acknowledge that a November 1982 car bombing by the nascent Hizbullah at Israel's military government headquarters in Tyre, southern Lebanon, in which 75 Israeli security personnel and 27 Lebanese were killed, was an Iranian-sponsored suicide bombing. Indeed, it was the first such suicide attack - "the bomb that spawned a movement,' as he calls it.
More Israelis were killed in that blast, which reduced a seven-story building to rubble, than in any since. The car used in the attack, a Peugeot, was identified. The bomber's identity is known: Ahmad Qassir has a monument to his memory in his home village near Baalbek. Yet "to this day," Bergman notes, "Israeli intelligence claims that there was no intelligence failure; that there was not even a terror attack, just a problem with gas cylinders."
The refusal to grapple with the reality of the suicide-bomb challenge right away left Israel more vulnerable than it need have been to the relentless series of such bombings that have followed - beginning with another attack in the very same city a year later, in which 28 more Israelis were killed.
"This thing has been burning inside me for years," Bergman quotes Haifa Judge Yitzhak Dar as saying. Dar was on a team that investigated the blast for the IDF, concluded it was a car bombing, but saw its report buried. "Despite the conclusions we reached, everybody wanted to believe that it was negligence about gas cylinders, and not a terror attack," laments Dar. "Thus, they wasted a very valuable year of preparations for the next attack, one which could have been prevented with a little awareness of the potential for the use of car bombs."
Bergman reports that IDF Military Intelligence got wind in advance of Hizbullah plans to kidnap "a very senior American intelligence officer a week before the CIA station chief in Beirut, Col. William Buckley, was indeed seized (and tortured and killed) in March 1984 in an Imad Mughniyeh-led Hizbullah operation, but that the Mossad doubted the information and didn't bother to pass it on to the CIA.
He summarizes Israeli intelligence's grave, ongoing failure to penetrate Hizbullah by reporting that a Mossad man, who for years served in the unit that sought to recruit spies inside the organization, held up his hands, without all the fingers extended, to indicate the number of successes over 24 full years.
By contrast, he discusses Hizbullah's staggering penetration of Israeli security circles... and the sometimes ridiculous ease with which this is sometimes achieved. During the Second Lebanon War, for instance, he notes, "militiamen who had learned Hebrew at the so-called Cultural Center of the Iranian Embassy in Beirut listened in to IDF radio networks, using advanced communications equipment and codes supplied to them by IDF members who were working with them in drug trafficking." (My emphasis added.)
Hizbullah knew far, far more about Israel's military planning and capabilities for that war than Israel remotely conceived, in short, while Israel knew far, far less than it thought it did about Hizbullah. "In truth," says Bergman, "Israel had gone to war in almost total darkness."
One small, very specific illustration: The spacious bunker from which the attack on the Goldwasser-Regev patrol was planned, which had been established over many weeks right under Israel's nose across the border, and which was connected by a fiberoptic cable network to Hizbullah's command headquarters in Beirut, did not merely remain undiscovered before the attack, thus facilitating it. It remained undiscovered "throughout the entire war, even though Israeli soldiers controlled the area from the first day. It was a miracle that Hizbullah guerrillas never took advantage of it to strike at Israeli troops again after the abduction on July 12."
The debilitating underestimation of Hizbullah is mirrored, in Bergman's narrative, by other basic failures in trying to grapple with Hizbullah's state sponsor, Iran.
Most centrally, he charges, Israel, along with the US and the rest of the West, only recognized relatively recently how far Iran has progressed toward its nuclear goal because for years everybody was looking the wrong way: Most eyes were focused on Russia, which was deemed to be the main potential international maverick that might enable Teheran to attain the bomb. But the real threat - the player that gave Iran the vital resources to stride forward - was Pakistan, via its notorious nuclear salesman Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan.
THE SAGA Bergman recounts is not unremittingly bleak. The raid on Syria marked an important reassertion of Israeli military capability. The killing of Hizbullah terror chief Mughniyeh in the heart of the Syrian capital in February - for which no party has claimed responsibility - should also have sent a certain deterrent message. The defection to the CIA of top Iranian intelligence adviser Gen. Ali Reza Askari last year was another success.
Bergman also lists a series of sabotage operations that have prevented Iran from being even closer still to the bomb: A leading expert on electromagnetics who worked at Iran's Isfahan enrichment facility found dead at his home last year, and reports of an explosion at his laboratory; three or four planes crashing inside Iran in 2006 and 2007 with personnel connected to the security of the nuclear project on board; insulation units for the centrifuge enrichment process discovered to be unusable; various explosions caused by faulty equipment at the main Natanz facility and at Isfahan, including the wrecking of 50 centrifuges when two transformers blew up at Natanz in 2006. In language presumably negotiated painstakingly with the censor, the last of these incidents is attributed to "efforts implemented jointly with the United States."
Overall, Bergman writes, "Since Meir Dagan became Mossad director in 2002, Israel has significantly improved its knowledge about goings-on inside Iran, and has even taken certain preemptive actions."
Nonetheless, it seems that Iran has essentially cleared its technical hurdles now, and is into the home stretch - racing against the clock to get the bomb before international pressure, of whatever kind, forces a halt.
The latest information, according to Bergman's Mossad sources, is that some 3,000 centrifuges, in 18 cascades, are now enriching uranium, "under great technical difficulties," at Natanz. Nearby, the Iranians are building a plant to hold another 30,000 to 50,000 centrifuges - and building it underground to ensure no repeat of Israel's successful raid on Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak. Already, Natanz is protected by no fewer than 26 anti-aircraft missile batteries, and this and other of its nuclear facilities, he writes (despite others' claims to the contrary), already have the advanced Russian-made S-300 missiles among their defenses.
Meanwhile, at the Parchin military complex, notwithstanding the complacent conclusion of the NIE last year, the Iranians are hard at work on the final phase of the journey to the bomb - having made "considerable progress" in mastering the process of emplacing enriched uranium into the device that starts the devastating chain reaction. They are also making headway, Bergman writes, "in acquiring the expertise required to manufacture nuclear warheads that can be fitted to their missiles."
Satellite images of Parchin, he notes, show the erection of structures that can be used for the assembly of explosives needed in nuclear warheads. "Identical structures had over the years been spotted close to the installations where the Soviet Union developed and manufactured its nuclear warheads."
Why, given all this, did the NIE draw the opposite conclusions about Iran's nuclear weapons program? In part, Bergman asserts, because Iran outfoxed the American intelligence services by means that included the calculated leaking of bogus material purporting to indicate that the effort had been frozen in 2003.
BERGMAN'S COMBINATION of overview and revelation makes for a horrifying read. Essentially, his book demonstrates an ongoing incapacity - by Israel, the US and the rest of the free world, but, critically, featuring Israel as the first potential casualty - to internalize the extent of the Iranian threat and act effectively to thwart it. The powers that are faced off against expansionist Islam have consistently underestimated the cunning, viciousness and determination of the chief state sponsor of that ideology, Iran, and its various offshoots, proxies and allies, notably including Hizbullah and Hamas.
Time and again, Western weakness, capitulation and inaction has emboldened Islamic extremism. Between 1980 and 1997, for instance, Iran assassinated close to 200 "dissidents" in attack after attack across Europe, and European nations, on the whole, barely lifted a finger to stop them. Why would Iran not be emboldened?
A relentless campaign of kidnappings, murders and suicide bombings forced the US out of Lebanon, forced the French out of Lebanon, forced Israel out of Lebanon, and ultimately led to Hizbullah's increasingly dominant status in Lebanon. (Among the often forgotten victims were 12 members of Lebanon's tiny lingering Jewish community, who were kidnapped and killed by the nascent Hizbullah from West Beirut, in 1985 and 1986.) Right now, Iran and Hizbullah are plotting to "avenge" Mughniyeh's death with kidnappings of Israeli businessmen, and they are free to act because they have operatives ready and waiting in countries all around the world. Why wouldn't it? The tactic has worked so well over the decades.
As Bergman writes in a sober concluding chapter, "Iran and Hizbullah are more sophisticated, effective and determined adversaries than Israel and the United States have previously encountered in the Middle East. These new enemies, the Shi'ites of Iran and Lebanon, have repeatedly outwitted Israel and the West, beating them across the board in politics, in intelligence gathering and in war."
Now Iran is on the brink of attaining the ultimate tool for expanding the Islamic Revolution, the nuclear bomb, and still the international community hesitates and bickers and even undermines its own ineffectual trade sanctions.
Ten years ago, Dr. Iftikhar Khan Chaudry, a former research officer in Pakistan's nuclear project, sought political asylum in the United States, claiming he would be killed if he returned home. In his affidavit, which was found to be credible and led to his being granted the refuge he sought, he detailed how A.Q. Khan had marketed Pakistan's nuclear expertise and materials to clients including Libya, Iraq and North Korea, exposing the clandestine network for the first time. Outrageously, it took the US until September 2003 to confront Pakistan about Khan's activities.
Chaudry also specified how Khan had set up Pakistan's nuclear channel to Iran, having himself been present when five Iranian scientists visited Pakistan at the start of the partnership. The Iranians were "introduced to the method in which uranium is processed for the purpose of creating a nuclear bomb," Chaudry told the Americans. And he added, "It is also apparent that Iran intends to utilize a nuclear weapon - in the future, when a nuclear weapon would be operational - against the State of Israel."
"The Secret War with Iran, as waged since the fall of the shah and the arrival of Khomeini, has been a tale of ruthless single-mindedness on their side and confused laxity on ours.
Read it and weep?
No. Read it and work - before it's too late.
("The Secret War with Iran" will be published in the US next week by Free Press.)
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1220526712951&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
"Read it and weep? No. Read it and work - before it's too late." -- David Horowitz
Sep. 4, 2008
David Horovitz , THE JERUSALEM POST
In August 2007, because certain intelligence agencies were not convinced of Israeli claims that President Bashar Assad was engaged in the construction of a nuclear weapons facility, Israel sent sent 12 members of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit into Syria in two helicopters to collect soil samples outside the site in question.
Needless to say, this was a highly dangerous operation. And it very nearly went wrong. The commandos were almost exposed when a Syrian patrol drove past the landing site where the helicopters were parked.
But it was well worth it. The results provided "clear-cut proof" of the nuclear project," investigative journalist Ronen Bergman writes in his new book, The Secret War with Iran.
A month later, Israel bombed the site, and in so doing reemphasized the Begin Doctrine - Israel's insistence that, for the sake of its own survival, it will not allow the deployment by hostile neighbors of weapons that might be used to destroy it.
Bergman's book, which will be published next week in the United States, is an expanded, updated version of his Hebrew-language The Point of No Return, which was Israel's best-selling non-fiction work in 2007.
The new volume is anything but a mere translation. For one thing, the world has moved on, or more accurately, moved closer to confrontation, in the intervening period. For another, Bergman has added further revelatory content to the 2007 book's disclosures.
Plainly, the author has been allowed access to a range of material hitherto kept classified by various intelligence services. Plainly, too, what he is publishing is material that Israel is content to have widely disseminated and some of which cannot be independently verified. The book was submitted to censorship, and not all of its content was approved, he told me when he dropped off a copy a few days ago, though it did sometimes seem as though he had run into the censor on a relatively benign day.
Most notable, perhaps, in this context, is the fact that the guardians of Israel's military secrets have allowed Bergman to provide a fairly extensive account of that September 6, 2007, raid on Syria's nuclear facility - whose purpose he states unambiguously was "the production of plutonium for the manufacture of atomic bombs" and whose construction, he reports, was a tripartite endeavor: "At a series of secret meetings between representatives of the three sides, held mainly in Teheran, it was decided that Syria would supply the territory, Iran the money [$1 billion-$2b.], and North Korea the expertise..."
Last year's raid was the subject of some of the heaviest military censorship that I have encountered in the past 25 years: Israel was desperate to take no official responsibility for the attack, and in this way to allow Damascus plausible deniability, to avoid a deterioration into war. There was no official confirmation of the raid, and for a long time after it, all references in the Israeli media had to include conditioning phrases such as the "reported" Israeli strike.
Apparently such concerns no longer apply. Bergman has been freed to describe, without the censor's usual required attribution to "foreign sources," the entire process by which the Syrian facility was built - with details of the shipments of material from North Korea and the dispatch of Korean scientists. He sets out the circumstances of that high-risk August fact-finding mission by Sayeret Matkal. And he is allowed to note that "a number of North Koreans" were killed in the Israeli attack.
Although destroying the site was an Israeli operation, Bergman makes clear further that "the Israelis and the Americans decided to act," and that the two countries coordinated on the official silence policy after the raid was successfully completed. "Prime Minister Olmert and President Bush decided that both countries would maintain a policy of total nonreaction, without exceptions, and without winks or nods. If the Syrians had not been in a hurry to issue their own statements, the whole matter might not have been disclosed at all."
If the sanctioning of these details about last year's raid on Syria is interesting, given the immensely sensitive nature of Israeli-Syrian relations and the continued potential for both diplomatic breakthrough and bitter conflict, then the sanctioning of some of Bergman's disclosures about the Iranian nuclear project, and notably the Bush administration's attitude to it, seems potentially incendiary.
A few weeks ago, the White House took the unusual step of issuing a specific denial of a report on Army Radio, picked up by the Post, which claimed that a Bush official recently told his Israeli counterparts that the president is planning to strike Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office. Only this week, a newspaper in The Netherlands claimed that Dutch intelligence has abruptly halted an "extremely successful" ongoing operation to sabotage Iran's nuclear program because of an assessment that such an American strike is indeed just weeks away.
In his book, Israel's military censor has allowed Bergman to add two highly significant revelations in this context: The first is that after the American intelligence community issued its controversial National Intelligence Estimate late last year that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program, Vice President Richard Cheney sent a message to Olmert stating that despite this conclusion, "the possibility of an American military operation against Iranian nuclear targets and military infrastructure had not been discarded."
The second is that, as of May 2008, "the Mossad's estimate" is that Bush, "out of religious and ideological motives, will order a strike."
FOR ALL the behind-the-scenes Israeli access granted Bergman, and the censor's apparent generosity, his account of what he calls "the 30-year clandestine struggle against the world's most dangerous terrorist power" overflows with tales of incompetence and outright failure in the battle against Iran - some narrow and specific, some more fundamental - many of which reflect terribly on Israel.
He reminds readers who might prefer to forget the uncomfortable truth that Israel supplied arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's regime at the turn of the 1980s, in an operation codenamed "Seashell," which was critical in "turning the tide of the war" against Iraq in Iran's favor.
In one illustration of the disastrous consequences for the seller of misguided arms dealing, he points out that one of the machine guns sold by Israel to Iran at that time, a Browning, later transferred to Hizbullah's arsenal, was used to murderous effect in the July 12, 2006, attack on the IDF Humvees patrolling the Lebanon border in which three soldiers were killed and Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev fatally wounded and captured - the attack that sparked the Second Lebanon War. (A senior Iranian official who helped broker those arms deals, Bergman further reveals, later became a top Iranian representative in Lebanon and a Hizbullah founder, and pushed for the 2006 abduction-attack on Teheran's orders. Some of the Hizbullah gunmen who carried out that attack, he also writes, were trained in Iran.)
He reports how Israel has insistently failed to acknowledge that a November 1982 car bombing by the nascent Hizbullah at Israel's military government headquarters in Tyre, southern Lebanon, in which 75 Israeli security personnel and 27 Lebanese were killed, was an Iranian-sponsored suicide bombing. Indeed, it was the first such suicide attack - "the bomb that spawned a movement,' as he calls it.
More Israelis were killed in that blast, which reduced a seven-story building to rubble, than in any since. The car used in the attack, a Peugeot, was identified. The bomber's identity is known: Ahmad Qassir has a monument to his memory in his home village near Baalbek. Yet "to this day," Bergman notes, "Israeli intelligence claims that there was no intelligence failure; that there was not even a terror attack, just a problem with gas cylinders."
The refusal to grapple with the reality of the suicide-bomb challenge right away left Israel more vulnerable than it need have been to the relentless series of such bombings that have followed - beginning with another attack in the very same city a year later, in which 28 more Israelis were killed.
"This thing has been burning inside me for years," Bergman quotes Haifa Judge Yitzhak Dar as saying. Dar was on a team that investigated the blast for the IDF, concluded it was a car bombing, but saw its report buried. "Despite the conclusions we reached, everybody wanted to believe that it was negligence about gas cylinders, and not a terror attack," laments Dar. "Thus, they wasted a very valuable year of preparations for the next attack, one which could have been prevented with a little awareness of the potential for the use of car bombs."
Bergman reports that IDF Military Intelligence got wind in advance of Hizbullah plans to kidnap "a very senior American intelligence officer a week before the CIA station chief in Beirut, Col. William Buckley, was indeed seized (and tortured and killed) in March 1984 in an Imad Mughniyeh-led Hizbullah operation, but that the Mossad doubted the information and didn't bother to pass it on to the CIA.
He summarizes Israeli intelligence's grave, ongoing failure to penetrate Hizbullah by reporting that a Mossad man, who for years served in the unit that sought to recruit spies inside the organization, held up his hands, without all the fingers extended, to indicate the number of successes over 24 full years.
By contrast, he discusses Hizbullah's staggering penetration of Israeli security circles... and the sometimes ridiculous ease with which this is sometimes achieved. During the Second Lebanon War, for instance, he notes, "militiamen who had learned Hebrew at the so-called Cultural Center of the Iranian Embassy in Beirut listened in to IDF radio networks, using advanced communications equipment and codes supplied to them by IDF members who were working with them in drug trafficking." (My emphasis added.)
Hizbullah knew far, far more about Israel's military planning and capabilities for that war than Israel remotely conceived, in short, while Israel knew far, far less than it thought it did about Hizbullah. "In truth," says Bergman, "Israel had gone to war in almost total darkness."
One small, very specific illustration: The spacious bunker from which the attack on the Goldwasser-Regev patrol was planned, which had been established over many weeks right under Israel's nose across the border, and which was connected by a fiberoptic cable network to Hizbullah's command headquarters in Beirut, did not merely remain undiscovered before the attack, thus facilitating it. It remained undiscovered "throughout the entire war, even though Israeli soldiers controlled the area from the first day. It was a miracle that Hizbullah guerrillas never took advantage of it to strike at Israeli troops again after the abduction on July 12."
The debilitating underestimation of Hizbullah is mirrored, in Bergman's narrative, by other basic failures in trying to grapple with Hizbullah's state sponsor, Iran.
Most centrally, he charges, Israel, along with the US and the rest of the West, only recognized relatively recently how far Iran has progressed toward its nuclear goal because for years everybody was looking the wrong way: Most eyes were focused on Russia, which was deemed to be the main potential international maverick that might enable Teheran to attain the bomb. But the real threat - the player that gave Iran the vital resources to stride forward - was Pakistan, via its notorious nuclear salesman Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan.
THE SAGA Bergman recounts is not unremittingly bleak. The raid on Syria marked an important reassertion of Israeli military capability. The killing of Hizbullah terror chief Mughniyeh in the heart of the Syrian capital in February - for which no party has claimed responsibility - should also have sent a certain deterrent message. The defection to the CIA of top Iranian intelligence adviser Gen. Ali Reza Askari last year was another success.
Bergman also lists a series of sabotage operations that have prevented Iran from being even closer still to the bomb: A leading expert on electromagnetics who worked at Iran's Isfahan enrichment facility found dead at his home last year, and reports of an explosion at his laboratory; three or four planes crashing inside Iran in 2006 and 2007 with personnel connected to the security of the nuclear project on board; insulation units for the centrifuge enrichment process discovered to be unusable; various explosions caused by faulty equipment at the main Natanz facility and at Isfahan, including the wrecking of 50 centrifuges when two transformers blew up at Natanz in 2006. In language presumably negotiated painstakingly with the censor, the last of these incidents is attributed to "efforts implemented jointly with the United States."
Overall, Bergman writes, "Since Meir Dagan became Mossad director in 2002, Israel has significantly improved its knowledge about goings-on inside Iran, and has even taken certain preemptive actions."
Nonetheless, it seems that Iran has essentially cleared its technical hurdles now, and is into the home stretch - racing against the clock to get the bomb before international pressure, of whatever kind, forces a halt.
The latest information, according to Bergman's Mossad sources, is that some 3,000 centrifuges, in 18 cascades, are now enriching uranium, "under great technical difficulties," at Natanz. Nearby, the Iranians are building a plant to hold another 30,000 to 50,000 centrifuges - and building it underground to ensure no repeat of Israel's successful raid on Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak. Already, Natanz is protected by no fewer than 26 anti-aircraft missile batteries, and this and other of its nuclear facilities, he writes (despite others' claims to the contrary), already have the advanced Russian-made S-300 missiles among their defenses.
Meanwhile, at the Parchin military complex, notwithstanding the complacent conclusion of the NIE last year, the Iranians are hard at work on the final phase of the journey to the bomb - having made "considerable progress" in mastering the process of emplacing enriched uranium into the device that starts the devastating chain reaction. They are also making headway, Bergman writes, "in acquiring the expertise required to manufacture nuclear warheads that can be fitted to their missiles."
Satellite images of Parchin, he notes, show the erection of structures that can be used for the assembly of explosives needed in nuclear warheads. "Identical structures had over the years been spotted close to the installations where the Soviet Union developed and manufactured its nuclear warheads."
Why, given all this, did the NIE draw the opposite conclusions about Iran's nuclear weapons program? In part, Bergman asserts, because Iran outfoxed the American intelligence services by means that included the calculated leaking of bogus material purporting to indicate that the effort had been frozen in 2003.
BERGMAN'S COMBINATION of overview and revelation makes for a horrifying read. Essentially, his book demonstrates an ongoing incapacity - by Israel, the US and the rest of the free world, but, critically, featuring Israel as the first potential casualty - to internalize the extent of the Iranian threat and act effectively to thwart it. The powers that are faced off against expansionist Islam have consistently underestimated the cunning, viciousness and determination of the chief state sponsor of that ideology, Iran, and its various offshoots, proxies and allies, notably including Hizbullah and Hamas.
Time and again, Western weakness, capitulation and inaction has emboldened Islamic extremism. Between 1980 and 1997, for instance, Iran assassinated close to 200 "dissidents" in attack after attack across Europe, and European nations, on the whole, barely lifted a finger to stop them. Why would Iran not be emboldened?
A relentless campaign of kidnappings, murders and suicide bombings forced the US out of Lebanon, forced the French out of Lebanon, forced Israel out of Lebanon, and ultimately led to Hizbullah's increasingly dominant status in Lebanon. (Among the often forgotten victims were 12 members of Lebanon's tiny lingering Jewish community, who were kidnapped and killed by the nascent Hizbullah from West Beirut, in 1985 and 1986.) Right now, Iran and Hizbullah are plotting to "avenge" Mughniyeh's death with kidnappings of Israeli businessmen, and they are free to act because they have operatives ready and waiting in countries all around the world. Why wouldn't it? The tactic has worked so well over the decades.
As Bergman writes in a sober concluding chapter, "Iran and Hizbullah are more sophisticated, effective and determined adversaries than Israel and the United States have previously encountered in the Middle East. These new enemies, the Shi'ites of Iran and Lebanon, have repeatedly outwitted Israel and the West, beating them across the board in politics, in intelligence gathering and in war."
Now Iran is on the brink of attaining the ultimate tool for expanding the Islamic Revolution, the nuclear bomb, and still the international community hesitates and bickers and even undermines its own ineffectual trade sanctions.
Ten years ago, Dr. Iftikhar Khan Chaudry, a former research officer in Pakistan's nuclear project, sought political asylum in the United States, claiming he would be killed if he returned home. In his affidavit, which was found to be credible and led to his being granted the refuge he sought, he detailed how A.Q. Khan had marketed Pakistan's nuclear expertise and materials to clients including Libya, Iraq and North Korea, exposing the clandestine network for the first time. Outrageously, it took the US until September 2003 to confront Pakistan about Khan's activities.
Chaudry also specified how Khan had set up Pakistan's nuclear channel to Iran, having himself been present when five Iranian scientists visited Pakistan at the start of the partnership. The Iranians were "introduced to the method in which uranium is processed for the purpose of creating a nuclear bomb," Chaudry told the Americans. And he added, "It is also apparent that Iran intends to utilize a nuclear weapon - in the future, when a nuclear weapon would be operational - against the State of Israel."
"The Secret War with Iran, as waged since the fall of the shah and the arrival of Khomeini, has been a tale of ruthless single-mindedness on their side and confused laxity on ours.
Read it and weep?
No. Read it and work - before it's too late.
("The Secret War with Iran" will be published in the US next week by Free Press.)
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1220526712951&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Friday, September 5, 2008
1. President [Ahmadinejad]: Resistance is only path to victory over occupiers
2. Peres: Iran threat should be resolved politically
---------------------------------------------------------------
President[Ahmadinejad]: Resistance is only path to victory over occupiers
TEHRAN (IRNA) [via Tehran Times] -- President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said here Tuesday that resistance is the only way to victory against occupiers and aggressors.
""There is no way but resistance and intellectual and political assault on the Zionist regime. This is the only way of victory,"" said President Ahmadinejad in a meeting with former Lebanese prime minister Omar Karami here on Tuesday.
President Ahmadinejad said that the Zionist regime was established to rule over the world of Islam and the regime had the mission of threatening, occupation, aggression, assassinating and undermining Muslim states. He said that resistance to the Zionist Regime and the bullying powers is a national and Islamic duty of all Muslims.
""Resistance against the Zionist regime is a big lesson taught to mankind by the late Imam Khomeini.""
He said that unity and resistance were the key to victory against the Zionist regime and by God's grace the era of Zionist regime and its supporters has come to an end and signs of their collapse are evident.
He noted that the Zionist regime has not the least base among nations in the region and the world.
""Today, even the U.S. and European governments have come to the conclusion that support for the (Zionist) regime is not to their country's benefit,"" he said.
Enemies are too weak to launch any propagation, said Ahmadinejad, adding that victory of the Lebanese people showed that the Zionist regime is weaker than it seems.
A preliminary unity of the Lebanese people forced Zionists to retreat and if the unity is formed in the region, the Zionists will collapse much sooner than expected, he said.
""Victory belongs to the faithful and we will be with you to the end,"" he declared. Karami said for his part, ""We believe as you do that the Zionist regime was formed in the region to fight Islam and implement the projects that will meet US interests and it is collapsing.""
He said stances of people in certain Arab countries differ with those of their systems.
""Muslim Arab people consider the Zionist regime as their enemy. Lebanon is the smallest Arab country in terms of area and population but through reliance on God and in light of power of faith and will they managed to inflict heaviest damage on the Zionist regime's army,"" he concluded.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peres: Iran threat should be resolved politically
Peres says he does not support military strike on Iran, adds Tehran's nuclear threat should be addressed through political, economic moves
Ronen Medzini and AP Published: 09.05.08, Ynetnews.com
Saying 'no' to Iran strike? The Iranian nuclear threat should be resolved politically, rather than militarily, President Shimon Peres said Friday.
Peres, who is currently in Italy, told reporters that the Iran problem will not be resolved militarily, but rather, through political and economic moves. The president added that it is better to act politically or economically as long as such option exists.
"I do not support a military strike against Iran," Peres told a conference in Italy, while urging the world to join forces and impose severe economic sanctions on Tehran. He said Iran was no longer representing its distinguished history, but rather, radicalism and religious fanaticism.
Today, Tehran constitutes a real and existential threat for the entire Middle East and the whole world, Peres added, noting that the vast majority of Arab countries object to the prospect of a nuclear Iran.
2. Peres: Iran threat should be resolved politically
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President[Ahmadinejad]: Resistance is only path to victory over occupiers
TEHRAN (IRNA) [via Tehran Times] -- President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said here Tuesday that resistance is the only way to victory against occupiers and aggressors.
""There is no way but resistance and intellectual and political assault on the Zionist regime. This is the only way of victory,"" said President Ahmadinejad in a meeting with former Lebanese prime minister Omar Karami here on Tuesday.
President Ahmadinejad said that the Zionist regime was established to rule over the world of Islam and the regime had the mission of threatening, occupation, aggression, assassinating and undermining Muslim states. He said that resistance to the Zionist Regime and the bullying powers is a national and Islamic duty of all Muslims.
""Resistance against the Zionist regime is a big lesson taught to mankind by the late Imam Khomeini.""
He said that unity and resistance were the key to victory against the Zionist regime and by God's grace the era of Zionist regime and its supporters has come to an end and signs of their collapse are evident.
He noted that the Zionist regime has not the least base among nations in the region and the world.
""Today, even the U.S. and European governments have come to the conclusion that support for the (Zionist) regime is not to their country's benefit,"" he said.
Enemies are too weak to launch any propagation, said Ahmadinejad, adding that victory of the Lebanese people showed that the Zionist regime is weaker than it seems.
A preliminary unity of the Lebanese people forced Zionists to retreat and if the unity is formed in the region, the Zionists will collapse much sooner than expected, he said.
""Victory belongs to the faithful and we will be with you to the end,"" he declared. Karami said for his part, ""We believe as you do that the Zionist regime was formed in the region to fight Islam and implement the projects that will meet US interests and it is collapsing.""
He said stances of people in certain Arab countries differ with those of their systems.
""Muslim Arab people consider the Zionist regime as their enemy. Lebanon is the smallest Arab country in terms of area and population but through reliance on God and in light of power of faith and will they managed to inflict heaviest damage on the Zionist regime's army,"" he concluded.
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Peres: Iran threat should be resolved politically
Peres says he does not support military strike on Iran, adds Tehran's nuclear threat should be addressed through political, economic moves
Ronen Medzini and AP Published: 09.05.08, Ynetnews.com
Saying 'no' to Iran strike? The Iranian nuclear threat should be resolved politically, rather than militarily, President Shimon Peres said Friday.
Peres, who is currently in Italy, told reporters that the Iran problem will not be resolved militarily, but rather, through political and economic moves. The president added that it is better to act politically or economically as long as such option exists.
"I do not support a military strike against Iran," Peres told a conference in Italy, while urging the world to join forces and impose severe economic sanctions on Tehran. He said Iran was no longer representing its distinguished history, but rather, radicalism and religious fanaticism.
Today, Tehran constitutes a real and existential threat for the entire Middle East and the whole world, Peres added, noting that the vast majority of Arab countries object to the prospect of a nuclear Iran.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Attack on Israeli aircrew in Canada thwarted: report
Wed Sep 3, 2:30 pm ET
JERUSALEM (AFP) – Plans by an unknown group to attack staff of Israel's national carrier El Al in Canada have been thwarted, Israel's private Channel Two television reported on Wednesday.
Without giving the nationalities of the alleged attackers, it said they had monitored the comings and goings of El Al aircrew at a Toronto hotel.
Security procedures for crews overnighting at the hotel between flights have now been changed, it added.
On Tuesday, Israeli newspapers reported that at least five attempts by the Lebanese Hezbollah militia to abduct Israeli businessmen in Africa, Asia, and South America had been foiled.
Each time, Hezbollah -- which fought a bloody war against Israel in the summer of 2006 -- tried to use "sleeper cells" embedded in far-flung Shiite Muslim communities, the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot reported.
It and other newspapers cited unnamed Israeli security officials and said further details about the plots remain under official censorship.
Wed Sep 3, 2:30 pm ET
JERUSALEM (AFP) – Plans by an unknown group to attack staff of Israel's national carrier El Al in Canada have been thwarted, Israel's private Channel Two television reported on Wednesday.
Without giving the nationalities of the alleged attackers, it said they had monitored the comings and goings of El Al aircrew at a Toronto hotel.
Security procedures for crews overnighting at the hotel between flights have now been changed, it added.
On Tuesday, Israeli newspapers reported that at least five attempts by the Lebanese Hezbollah militia to abduct Israeli businessmen in Africa, Asia, and South America had been foiled.
Each time, Hezbollah -- which fought a bloody war against Israel in the summer of 2006 -- tried to use "sleeper cells" embedded in far-flung Shiite Muslim communities, the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot reported.
It and other newspapers cited unnamed Israeli security officials and said further details about the plots remain under official censorship.
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