Israel Matzav: Iran building missile bases in Venezuela

Iran building missile bases in Venezuela

Five months ago, Germany's Die Welt reported that Iran was installing ballistic missiles in Venezuela that could reach the United States. Now, the same newspaper reports that Iran is building medium range missile launch pads on an area known as Paraguana Peninsula. The missiles will be based in underground silos.

Iran is building intermediate- range missile launch pads on the Paraguaná Peninsula, and engineers from a construction firm – Khatam al-Anbia – owned by the Revolutionary Guards visited Paraguaná in February. Amir al-Hadschisadeh, the head of the Guard’s Air Force, participated in the visit, according to the report. Die Welt cited information from “Western security insiders.”

The rocket bases are to include measures to prevent air attacks on Venezuela as well as commando and control stations.

The Iranian military involvement in the project extends to bunker, barracks and watch tower construction. Twenty-meter deep rocket silos are planned. The cost of the Venezuelan military project is being paid for with Iranian oil revenue. The Iranians paid in cash for the preliminary phase of the project and, the total cost is expected to amount to “dozens of millions” of dollars, Die Welt wrote.

The Paraguaná Peninsula is on the coast of Venezuela and is roughly 120 kilometers from America’s main South American partner, Columbia.

According to Die Welt, the clandestine agreement between Venezuela and Iran would mean the Chavez government would fire rocket at Iran’s enemies should the Islamic Republic face military strikes.

What could go wrong?
Israel Matzav: Iran building missile bases in Venezuela

Love of the Land: Iranian Nukes: A Boxer Doesn't Need a Gun If His Opponent Is Too Afraid To Punch Back

Iranian Nukes: A Boxer Doesn't Need a Gun If His Opponent Is Too Afraid To Punch Back

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
08 May '10

Would the Iranian government hand nuclear weapons to a terrorist group or fire off nuclear-tipped missiles itself?

It is easy for many experts and “experts” to answer this question ”No.” Their reasoning is that Iran has proven itself cautious historically and knows it would be held responsible and punished for doing so. The responder could add that the Islamic regime has not been adventurous or crazy in its actual policy (as opposed to its words) during the last thirty years.

I’d agree with that response as far as it goes. But it misses some very key points that might end up getting a huge number of people killed.

Iran has not been adventurous or crazy in the manner that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in 1979 and 1990, that is, Iran has not sent its military forces across the border to invade another country. Instead, Tehran has used subversion as its technique, backing and helping groups undermining other countries with terrorist attacks and a longer-term attempt to build a popular base in order to seize state power.

Thus, to say that Iran has not attacked a neighbor with conventional military forces is quite true, yet this may not tell us how Iran will behave regarding terrorist groups. Moreover, a nuclear-armed Iran may feel a little more confident than the pre-nuclear version.

Having said that I would correct the original response to be this: Iran will probably neither give nuclear weapons to terrorist groups nor fire them at Israel or anyone else.

Probably means that the odds are higher—let’s say far higher—than 50 percent that they won’t do so. The problem here is that even if there is a 10, 20. pr 30 percent chance of that happening, that’s not the kind of risk one wants to take.

But there are other, even more likely, scenarios that are never discussed but are quite important. Here are the two I think most important:

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Iranian Nukes: A Boxer Doesn't Need a Gun If His Opponent Is Too Afraid To Punch Back

Love of the Land: Iran, Hezbollah, and the Bomb

Iran, Hezbollah, and the Bomb

William Harris
The Weekly Standard
07 May '10

When Iran gets the bomb, the nuclear club will have a crucial new feature. Without an Iranian bomb and barring regime change in Pakistan, we know that no nuclear power will transfer a device to a private army of the religious elect like Hezbollah in Lebanon. With an Iranian bomb, such assurance instantly ends. This is a looming, tangible state of affairs--in contrast to the hype about loose nuclear materials at the April 2010 Washington nuclear security summit.

Proponents of containing a nuclear Iran in and around the Obama administration conceive of deterring Iran in standard realist style. The Islamic Republic of Iran, however, has become a hybrid of the government of God and ruthless militarized mafias. It is well practiced in long-range subversion, intimidation, and weapons smuggling. It may be confidently expected to shred so-called containment, especially when equipped with a nuclear aura and facing the quivering potentates of Arabia.

In any case, Iran has a strategic extension across the Middle East to the Mediterranean that puts it beyond containment. On February 25, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah met in Damascus to celebrate their alignment and its achievements. The Syrian-Iranian partnership has enabled the Syrian ruling clique to go from strength to strength in dealing with the West and the Arabs. Syria only looks forward to more gains from the partnership as Iran moves toward the bomb. At the tripartite summit, Assad mocked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's call for Syria to steer away from Iran.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Iran, Hezbollah, and the Bomb

Love of the Land: If the EU seems fragmented, take a look at the Arab world

If the EU seems fragmented, take a look at the Arab world

Michael Young
The National (UAE)
06 May '10
Posted before Shabbat

(It's good on occasion to take a look around the neighborhood. Y.)

The discussion over the future of the European Union offers a useful window through which to examine the destiny of the Arab world. European states are facing a major crisis of meaning as they decide what their intervention to save Greece from financial ruin says about EU solidarity in the future, where other shipwrecks lurk.

The platitudes of Arab unity have long jarred with the reality of Arab states driven apart by mistrust and competition. However, nationalist reflexes notwithstanding, the EU, even in an existential emergency, has not lost sight of what it was set up to achieve. Arab divisions, in contrast, threaten to undermine a unified response to the major existential challenge faced by Arab regimes today: a nuclear Iran.

Iranian hegemony and Greece’s debt are very different things. But they are both good tests as to whether it’s better for states to stand united, warts and all, or fall divided. Surveying the Arab world today, it is difficult to see who might become the engine of a cohesive Arab policy to contain Iran. And here, the EU experience becomes useful.

Arab unity, whether writ large or pertaining to specific events, has always coalesced around certain states. In the same way that EU policy must earn the acquiescence, above all, of Germany and France, traditionally Arabs have looked toward Saudi Arabia and Egypt to build a consensus, with Syria and Iraq having a greater or lesser say depending on the situation. Arab power has fluctuated, however, so that at times poles of influence were built around rivalries between Egypt and Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Egypt and Syria, and so on.

Today, the Arab state system is in disarray. Saudi Arabia and Egypt no longer lead as they once did. Both have seen less powerful states, for instance Syria and Qatar, seize the initiative. Last year the Saudis were forced to give Syria a green light to return to Lebanon politically in the hope that this would draw Damascus away from Tehran and facilitate Syrian co-operation with Riyadh over Iraq. Qatar has also punched above its weight by mediating in conflicts and playing on regional contradictions. The emirate has maintained good ties with Tehran while hosting the largest American military base in the Gulf.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: If the EU seems fragmented, take a look at the Arab world

RubinReports: Ahmadinejad Unveils His Grand Strategy: A Nuclear Defensive Umbrella for Aggression

Ahmadinejad Unveils His Grand Strategy: A Nuclear Defensive Umbrella for Aggression

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By Barry Rubin

Whatever you think of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad he is not a stupid man. And he's also not acting like an intimidated one. During the latest UN meeting on nuclear issues, when the new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)director-general urged Iran to "clarify" its activities, the camera showed Ahmadinejad laughing contemptuously.

Diplomatic engagement isn't going to win this guy over, nor are hollow threats. He knows the current U.S. government court-martials Navy Seals for giving a bloody lip to a terrorist who murdered American civilians in Iraq and mutilated their corpses (though the two tried have been cleared). What does he have to be scared about?

The main theme of Ahmadinejad’s speech at the 2010 Review Conference by countries that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is to outflank Obama’s calls for getting rid of nuclear weapons, trying to repeat Iran's success of last September in getting sanctions postponed. Back then, Iran proposed a plan for letting its nuclear materials be reprocessed abroad. But once the sanctions’ momentum had been derailed, Iran made clear that it had no intention of agreeing to anything like that.

Incidentally, it was Obama who added the issue of getting rid of all nuclear weapons in the world to the UN conference agenda.

Afer running his own international nuclear summit under the slogan, "Nuclear Power for All, Nuclear Weapons for None," Ahmadinejad gave a UN speech sounding word for word what an idealistic pacifist would say: nuclear weapons are bad; ban them now.

Nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad explained, don’t bring real security and producing or possessing them, “under whatever pretext..is a very dangerous act which first and foremost makes the country” having them worse off. He even stated:

“The possession of nuclear bombs is not a source of pride; it is rather disgusting and shameful. And even more shameful is the threat to use or to use such weapons.” The entire system of non-proliferation, said Ahmadinejad, is just an oppressive sham letting those who possess these weapons try to keep others from getting them in order to maintain their own supremacy. Those in control of the international system also, he continued, want to use nuclear arms as an excuse to get others from obtaining nuclear energy, “the cleanest and cheapest” source of power.

Ahmadinejad’s alternative is, “Immediate termination of all types of research, development, or improvement of nuclear weapons and their related facilities” and dismantling all U.S. nuclear weapons everywhere.

Oh, yes, and he calls for reforming the UN Security Council to get rid of a veto or permanent membership for the United States and others. And--no stranger to chutzpah--Ahmadinejad called for kicking the United States off the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

At the end, Ahmadinejad invited Obama “to join this humane movement, if he is still committed to his motto of `change.’”

What is all this about? Why is the leader most determined to pay a high price for getting nuclear weapons bad-mouthing them. Is this just camouflage to buy more time for Iran to get nukes? Yes but that's not all.

First, Ahmadinejad is calling Obama’s bluff. You want to eliminate nuclear weapons? Make my day, let's do it! Obviously, this isn’t going to work at this stage on Obama. But Ahmadinejad is not trying to persuade the United States but rather a range of Third World countries that might well oppose sanctions, including Lebanon, which is on the Security Council, Turkey, and Brazil.

What's most important of all, however, is the second motive, an Iranian strategy I call creating a defensive umbrella for aggression. This might become the centerpiece of Middle East politics in the future. Let me explain.

Most discussion in the West has focused on Iran using nuclear weapons or threatening to do so. Yet, instead, Iran could genuinely be developing these arms in order to defend itself. The problem is that this defense is coupled with an aggressive policy.

In this framework, Iran would continue and escalate its subversive efforts against neighbors; consolidate and increase its influence in Lebanon and Iraq; support Hamas and client forces in Afghanistan; press regional states toward appeasement; recruit millions into revolutionary Islamist groups; and try to make Iran the hegemonic power in the region.

But when anyone tries to oppose Iran, Tehran need merely give a gentle reminder that it has nuclear arms and so they better shut up. To be fully intimidated by this tactic, Arabs don’t have to believe that Iran would win a nuclear exchange with the United States. After all, even if Tehran lost they know their own countries would be devastated. Better to avoid any chance of a nuclear war than to offend Iran. Syria and Turkey, under its neo-Islamist regime; Hamas and Hizballah; Yemeni rebels and Iraqi insurgents would smirk and stick out their tongues from under Iran's protective umbrella.

The other element—as so often in the Middle East—is who the local rulers most fear. How can the Obama Administration, which has criticized past U.S. use of force and decisive leadership, persuade Iran to tremble in fear and convince moderate Arabs to stand tall feeling securely protected? Of course, these Arabs will accept American security guarantees but they would then be far more likely to bow to Iranian demands than to U.S. requests.

And there's still another trick up Ahmadinejad's sleeve. Under the current administration concept of containing Iran, the United States would have to do precisely what Ahmadinejad proposes to outlaw: threaten Iran with nuclear retaliation. So how will a U.S. threat that keeps nuclear Iran from flexing its muscles be worded, how scary will it be for Tehran, and how encouraging will it be for that regime's intended victims?

Ahmadinejad's apparently pacifist-style, peacenik stance at the UN conference fits into his strategy. Nuclear weapons may well provide the umbrella for him to seek regional hegemony with weapons of mass destruction unused but highly visible in his back pocket.

For a detailed analysis of what's going on regarding current non-proliferation issues, read Josh Pollack, a serious expert on these issues who actually makes them comprehensible, go HERE.

RubinReports: Ahmadinejad Unveils His Grand Strategy: A Nuclear Defensive Umbrella for Aggression

Love of the Land: The Trouble with Proxy Wars

The Trouble with Proxy Wars

Michael J. Totten
michaeltotten.com
02 May '10

My friend and colleague Lee Smith, author of the terrific new book The Strong Horse, is having a civil but important argument with our mutual acquaintance and colleague Andrew Exum at the Center for a New American Security. I've agreed to publish Lee's response here, not because I want to pick on Andrew—whom I like personally and whose work I appreciate even when we don't agree with each other—but because Lee presents a compelling and cogent argument in favor of fighting the Syrian and Iranian governments instead of their proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan. ....


Over at “Abu Muqawama,” Andrew Exum, whom Michael and I know from Beirut, has had some interesting things to say recently about my book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations. Andrew, as some readers will know, is an analyst and researcher at the Washington DC-based think-tank, Center for a New American Security, where he contributed to formulating the Obama administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. Andrew writes that I chose not to do a Q&A with him because I knew he “would not endorse the book whole-heartedly,” but the truth is that I wrote the book in the hopes of having many arguments over the issues I discuss in it. Accordingly, I wanted to use some of the issues Andrew raises with my book, and some of the differences I have with his position, to illuminate larger concerns regarding the US’s role in the region and the current state of US regional strategy.

In his critical appraisal of my book, Andrew writes that the strong horse is not a uniquely Arab phenomenon. I do not disagree with him. Indeed the strong horse is a feature common across cultures and historical periods. However, this is not the case in the contemporary United States where, as I write in my introduction, “we are among the very few people in history who have been able to live our daily lives free, relatively speaking, from violence and the fear of violence…[I]t is difficult for us to see that our form of political organization makes us not the norm but a privileged exception, the beneficiaries of a historical anomaly.” The point I was making is that it is not the Arabs who are the exception, but Americans. I had thought I had made that point clear enough, but perhaps the problem is that Andrew is just plain uncomfortable with the idea of the strong horse, especially insofar as it requires punishing one’s enemies and rewarding one’s friends.

For instance, Andrew writes of how he had once asked my opinion concerning what sort of advice he might give to US policymakers in the event they were to solicit his recommendations on Lebanon. I suggested he tell them that we should bomb Syrian targets, including the Presidential Palace in Damascus. To me, the prospect of the gilded, gaudy residence of a man responsible for so much death, suffering and repression in ruins was a cheery one indeed, a prospect that apparently left Andrew flummoxed.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: The Trouble with Proxy Wars

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: The Jews ARE to Blame for the Volcano, After All

The Jews ARE to Blame for the Volcano, After All

Don't say you didn't see this coming. Judeosphere has the story.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: The Jews ARE to Blame for the Volcano, After All

Love of the Land: Muddling the Iran Issue

Muddling the Iran Issue

Jonathan Schachter, Emily B Landau
and Ephraim Asculai
INSS
Insight No. 177
26 April '10

On April 17 the New York Times revealed that in January US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote a memo to National Security Adviser James Jones on the need to develop policy options regarding Iran’s drive to develop nuclear weapons. One senior White House official is quoted as describing the memo, which came after President Obama’s end of 2009 diplomatic deadline had come and gone, as “a wake-up call” testifying to the US's lack of a workable long term policy for confronting the Iranian nuclear challenge. The day after the Times’s publication, Gates acknowledged that he had indeed written the memo, but disputed the characterization of its content and intent, saying that his goal was “to contribute to an orderly and timely decision-making process.”

The absence of a clear American strategy to deal with an aggressively nuclearizing Iran has been apparent for some time, and thus this revelation comes as no surprise. In addition, Gates’s own description of the memo strongly suggests that “an orderly and timely decision-making process” was eminently lacking. The only real surprise, it seems, is the blunt assessment coming from within the administration.

It is possible that the memo was leaked in order to document Gates’s concerns about the increasing likelihood that Iran would achieve nuclear weapons capability before long and on his watch. It is also possible that as an appointee of President George W. Bush, Gates might be setting the stage for his own resignation. Alternatively, the memo might reflect simple disagreement or for that matter much more heated battles between the Pentagon’s civilian and military leadership. Whatever the true reason or reasons, the leak of the memo and the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and explanations are indicative of the real problem with US policy on Iran: mixed and confused messages.

(Read full report)

Love of the Land: Muddling the Iran Issue

Love of the Land: Israel will preempt

Israel will preempt

Fresnozionism.org
14 April '10

(Whether this will be the straw that breaks the camels back I would not venture to guess, however it's clear that this does up the ante. Y)

The recent disclosure that Syria has transferred Scud missiles to Hizballah marks a significant turning point. If war on Israel’s northern border could have been avoided — and perhaps it was already a forgone conclusion — that is clearly not the case now.

With the addition of these missiles, which are capable of carrying chemical warheads, Hizballah changes from an irritant to an existential threat to Israel. It is now sufficiently dangerous that it cannot be permitted to strike first. Additional deliveries, such as advanced antitank and antiaircraft weapons — even intelligence that indicates that they will be delivered in the near future — may trigger a premptive response.

In my opinion, the US administration’s tilt away from Israel has caused Iran, Syria, etc. to think that they will be able to hit Israel hard enough to hurt her badly, while the US will step in immediately and prevent Israel from doing more than an acceptable amount of damage in return. And probably Israel’s decision-makers think so too. So this is another reason for Israel to choose to preempt.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Israel will preempt

Love of the Land: The Irony of “Never Again”

The Irony of “Never Again”

Rick Richman
Contentions/Commentary
13 April '10

In his important post on the necessity of doing more than simply saying “Never Again,” Jonathan noted that Iran “ironically denies the Holocaust while plotting a new one.” But it is not ironic — it is rather part of three contradictory propositions that nevertheless reinforce each other.

Iran simultaneously denies the Holocaust, threatens a new one, and accuses Israel of being a Nazi regime. It denies what the Nazis did, announces plans to do it again, and accuses the prospective victims of being Nazis. Those propositions are crazy, but the more important point is they are parts of an integrated plan.

The plan involves, first, denying the historical legitimacy of Israel. In the view of many Muslims, Israel is simply a Holocaust guilt offering imposed by the West on blameless Arabs. It is a view unfortunately given credence by President Obama’s Cairo address, which mentioned the “tragic history” of the Jewish people as the justification for Israel — not the 3,000-year connection to the land, nor its central place in Jewish ritual for millennia, nor the fact that modern Zionism began in the 19th century, long before the Holocaust. But Iran denies the Holocaust to challenge even the “tragic history” as a basis for a Jewish state.

The second part of the plan is to announce that the goal is not a Palestinian state, but the elimination of the Jewish one — and to demonstrate that the announcement produces no penalty. Indeed the goal gains legitimacy from its repeated proclamation and the repeated failure of the West to respond. There is no UN resolution condemning Iran for threatening another member of the UN, no refusal to deal with a regime that is openly advocating a new Holocaust — only an outstretched hand, endlessly outstretched. It confirms Iran’s belief (and its argument to its allies) that the West will ultimately abandon the Jewish state, just as it abandoned the Jews.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: The Irony of “Never Again”

Love of the Land: If You Shoot at a King You Must Kill Him

If You Shoot at a King You Must Kill Him

Michael J. Totten
Commentary Magazine
12 April '10

Last week I spoke with Reza Kahlili, a man who during the 1980s and 1990s worked for the CIA under the code name "Wally" inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. He wrote a terrific book about his experience as an American agent called A Time to Betray, and today he's issuing a serious warning about his former Iranian masters: they mean what they say, and the West had better start taking them seriously.

He thinks President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei fully intend to use nuclear weapons if they acquire them, either by exploding them in enemy cities or holding the Middle East and the world's energy resources hostage. It's hard, to be sure, for even a well-placed expert to know this for certain. Perhaps not even the leadership knows exactly what it will do with the bomb once it gets the chance. (Either way, a nuclear-armed Iran won't suddenly play well with others.) What happens in the region over the next couple of years may depend in large part on whether the Israelis are willing to chance it.

We should not, Kahlili says, expect Iran's people to applaud an Israeli attack on the weapons facilities. "People in Iran do not sympathize with Israel the way they sympathize with the U.S.," he told me. "They're looking for help, right? But they're not looking for the same kind of help from Israel. So if Israel bombs the facilities in Iran, don't expect people to come out into the streets to celebrate or confront the government forces. That's not going to happen. They're just going to sit at home and pray this thing doesn't get out of hand."

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: If You Shoot at a King You Must Kill Him

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Has Obama Given Up?

Has Obama Given Up?

Greg Sheridan, in far-away Australia, reads the tea leaves and learns that Obama has reconciled himself to Iran's going nuclear; his wild over-reaction to Israeli building in East Jerusalem is a ploy to isolate Israel to such an extent it won't even dream of attacking Iran's nuclear facilities.

US President Barack Obama has decided to abandon any serious effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He is determined instead to live with a nuclear Iran, by containment and, if possible, negotiation.

This is the shifting tectonic plate in the Middle East.

This is the giant story of the past few weeks which the world has largely missed, distracted by the theatre of the absurd of Obama's contrived and mock confrontation with Israel over 1600 apartments to be built in three years' time in a Jewish suburb in East Jerusalem.

Iran is the only semi-intelligible explanation for Obama's bizarre over-reaction against the Israelis.

I don't know if this is true - how could I? Except the part about how Obama calculated his over-reaction to Israeli actions which his administration had previously agreed to: that part everyone could see without recourse to classified documents and secret discussions. Still, it's as likely as any other interpretation swirling around.

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations: Has Obama Given Up?

Love of the Land: Dershowitz Throws Down the Gauntlet to Obama

Dershowitz Throws Down the Gauntlet to Obama

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
23 March '10

Let’s give credit where it’s due. In the past, I’ve written about Alan Dershowitz’s defense of the Obama administration as well as about his recent attack on J Street.

Despite Dershowitz’s outstanding pro-Israel record, I’ve taken him to task for his loyalty to Obama and refusal to call the president out for his decision to downgrade the alliance with Israel. But it looks as if the Harvard Law professor is finally starting to lose patience with the man whose candidacy for the presidency he supported so enthusiastically. In today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Dershowitz stops short of condemning the administration, but he delivered as stark a challenge to the president as one could imagine regarding Iran.

Pulling no punches, Dershowitz instructs Obama that no one remembers that Neville Chamberlain was a successful reformer who not only helped restore Great Britain’s financial stability during the Depression but also passed landmark legislation on unemployment and retirement benefits. Instead, all history remembers is Chamberlain’s “failure to confront Hitler.” It is, he writes pointedly, “Chamberlain’s enduring legacy.” And if Obama does not act to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, anything he achieves on health care or the economy will count for nothing when compared to the impact of a failure on Iran.

“History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world’s first suicide nation,” Dershowitz writes. Like Chamberlain with Hitler, “Mr. Obama will come to symbolize the failure of the West if Iran acquires nuclear weapons on his watch.”

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Dershowitz Throws Down the Gauntlet to Obama

Love of the Land: Obama, Israel, and Iran

Obama, Israel, and Iran

Edward Olshaker
American Thinker
22 March '10

Last Saturday, while the nation's attention was focused on health care, President Obama sent New Year greetings to Iran that contained a promise our ally Israel would envy.

Although he condemned the Iranian regime's belligerence toward the international community and murderous crackdown on pro-democracy activists, Obama pledged that his administration "does not meddle in Iran's internal affairs." (This echoed the non-interference theme of his celebrated Cairo speech, when he assured the Muslim world, "America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.")

Not long ago, the concept of "evenhandedness" between our democratic allies and terror-sponsoring regimes was widely considered a betrayal of our most fundamental values. Yet, incredible as it sounds, evenhandedness now would be an improvement. Imagine Prime Minister Netanyahu requesting of Obama, in their Tuesday meeting, that the US apply its "Iran standard" of no internal meddling to Israel's housing decisions. Imagine Obama seeing the logic and basic decency of such a request, and agreeing to it.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Obama, Israel, and Iran

Love of the Land: Would Palestinian state stymie Iran's plans?

Would Palestinian state stymie Iran's plans?

Ephraim Kam
Haaretz/INSS
23 March '10

The writer is deputy director of the Institute for National Security Studies.

David Petraeus is an American general with an impressive record and a great deal of influence in Washington. He can be credited with reducing violence and terror in Iraq, as well as with the blows dealt to Al-Qaida since 2007. He has been the head of U.S. Central Command, responsible for the Middle East, since 2008. People who have met him say he is friendly to Israel.

Last week, testifying before the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Petraeus came up with a significant insight. The hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors, he said, pose a challenge to U.S. interests in the region. This conflict enflames Arab anti-American feelings because the United States is perceived as supporting Israel. Arab rage springing from the Palestinian problem limits the depth of the partnership with governments in the region, weakens the legitimacy of moderate Arab regimes and helps Al-Qaida mobilize support. Therefore, a credible American effort to solve the Arab-Israeli dispute would undermine Iran's militant policies, and progress on the Israeli-Syrian track would disrupt Iranian support for Hezbollah and Hamas.

Petraeus made his remarks during a long presentation on the threats and challenges to the United States in this part of the world. He did not blame Israel for the situation but simply discussed the problem and its repercussions. Petraeus painted a similar picture last year in front of the same panel, without attracting attention. But this time his analysis was seen as part of the pressure that the Obama administration is putting on Israel, as a continuation of the linkage it is trying to create between progress in the peace process and its handling of the Iranian issue.

Basically, it's hard to see how such progress would help block the Iranian nuclear threat. Iran would certainly not give up its goal of achieving a nuclear weapons capability, something that has nothing to do with the Palestinian question.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Would Palestinian state stymie Iran's plans?

Love of the Land: The "galaxy quest" president

The "galaxy quest" president

Soccer Dad
22 March '10

Why did the administration escalate a political mistake into a diplomatic crisis?

According to Secretary of State Clinton it helped move talks forward. A less kind way of putting it, would be that she boasted of putting PM Netanyahu in his place.

But Elder of Ziyon in an op-ed quality post makes a fascinating observation:

Obama believes that a president, the leader of the free world, must act strong. But the problem is he cannot act that way when he cannot predict how the other parties will react to his show of strength. As in the movie Galaxy Quest, he may be acting but the other side is dead serious, and in such circumstances he is over his head. Upsetting a billion people or another nuclear power is something to be avoided at all costs.

So he acts like a parody of a strong leader - against his friends. He knows they won't start a war or a terror spree against American interests. He calculates that by acting tough with his friends, there is little downside while he builds up his street cred as a resolute but fair leader. He hopes that Iran and Syria (and Russia and China) will interpret his actions as a message for them, avoiding actually making decisions that could set a course from which the US cannot go back.

But what he cannot do is actually make any real foreign policy decisions. If he did, he would be burning a bridge and opening himself up to the chance that he is making a mistake. Worse yet, he would be revealing to the world that he doesn't have a clue.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: The "galaxy quest" president

Love of the Land: The bunker-buster story

The bunker-buster story

Fresnozionism.org
21 March '10

British newspapers have been credibly reporting for about of week that the US has shipped 387 bunker-buster bombs to a US base on the British possession of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean.

There are at least two possible interpretations. One is that the US is planning to attack Iran (some Brits are very upset about this possibility), or at least to make a strategic move designed to show the Iranians that they mean business. Some air attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan have originated on Diego Garcia. That’s the good interpretation.

The other one is that the bombs were intended to be sent to Israel, but were diverted to Diego Garcia to prevent Israel from using them against Iran, or, worse, to punish Israel for its insouciance in building apartments in Jerusalem:

In 2008, the United States approved an Israeli request for bunker-busters capable of destroying underground facilities, including Iranian nuclear weapons sites. Officials said delivery of the weapons was held up by the administration of President Barack Obama, Middle East Newsline reported.

Since taking office, Obama has refused to approve any major Israeli requests for U.S. weapons platforms or advanced systems. Officials said this included proposed Israeli procurement of AH-64D Apache attack helicopters, refueling systems, advanced munitions and data on a stealth variant of the F-15E.

“All signs indicate that this will continue in 2010,” a congressional source familiar with the Israeli military requests said. “This is really an embargo, but nobody talks about it publicly.”

Under the plan, the U.S. military was to have stored 195 BLU-110 and 192 BLU-117 munitions in unspecified air force bases in Israel. The U.S. military uses four Israeli bases for the storage of about $400 million worth of pre-positioned equipment meant for use by either Washington or Jerusalem in any regional war…

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: The bunker-buster story

Love of the Land: Behind Obama's Dangerous Overreaction on Israel

Behind Obama's Dangerous Overreaction on Israel

Anne Bayefsky
Eye on the U.N.
Special to nydailynews.com
15 March '10

Bayefsky is a Professor at Touro College and a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute.

The Obama administration's hysterical response to Israel's announcement that it will continue to build new homes for its expanding population in disputed territory ought to evoke one response: Methinks thou doth protest too much.

Given that the United States is supposed to be committed to the parties determining ultimate legal ownership of the land in final status negotiations, what is going on?

The Palestinian Authority is the only side refusing to sit across the table from its interlocutor without preconditions. Recent reports indicate that Mamhoud Abbas and company are still inculcating the next generation of budding terrorists in the abc's of antisemitism, refusing to put Israel on the map in their authorized school books and fanning the flames of Islamic extremists at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem - all of which is incitement and a gross violation of the Roadmap. As for Hamas, the other Palestinian authority running Gaza, it is just openly dedicated to Israel's annihilation.

None of that is preventing the Obama administration from insisting that Israel negotiate with one half of the Palestinian split personality.

In fact, the words of Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton, and top advisor David Axelrod in the last few days suggest, instead, that what really concerns the human rights gurus in the White House is preserving the option of apartheid Palestine. After all, the purpose of denying the ability of a Jew to build a house on land that theoretically may one day change hands, is to ensure that a Jew-free Palestinian state can come into existence unimpeded.

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Love of the Land: Behind Obama's Dangerous Overreaction on Israel

Love of the Land: Who is leading on US Mideast policy?

Who is leading on US Mideast policy?

Senator John Kerry goes out of his way to

make excuses for Bashar al-Assad (AFP photo)

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
09 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

In the past week, a new element was introduced into the unfolding and cacophonous saga of the Obama administration’s new Syria policy, namely the appearance of Senator John Kerry.

During a trip to the Middle East, Kerry spoke by telephone with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and later commented on the recent Damascus summit between Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at which the United States, and specifically Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was openly ridiculed. Kerry went out of his way to make excuses for Assad, downplayed the significance of the summit, and blamed Syria’s alliance with Iran on the Bush administration.

Kerry’s actions beg the question: Who exactly, if anyone, is taking the lead on Washington’s Middle East policy and defining its parameters and objectives? The absence of a clear answer only reflects, at a practical level, the incoherence that exists at the conceptual level in American strategy. The danger is that Syria will play multiple US interlocutors off against one another while cultivating more sympathetic advocates, in that way shaping the Obama administration’s engagement process to its advantage.

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Love of the Land: Who is leading on US Mideast policy?~

Love of the Land: Biden in Public and Private

Biden in Public and Private

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
11 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

Joe Biden delivered his much-anticipated (and we are told, tweaked) speech in Israel today. It was the usual mix of what we have come to expect from the Obami — broad declarations of support for Israel mixed with an obsessive desire to move forward on the “peace process” and a fixation on building activity. On Iran, Biden pronounced, “The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, period.” But how, and what options remain? He didn’t say. As for East Jerusalem, the vice president harped on what he deemed the “hardest truth.” That is parlance for the Obami’s insistence that it is building in Israel’s capital, not the persistence of terrorism or the refusal to recognize the Jewish state, that serves to “undermine trust.” As skewed and as unwelcome as much of that public message was to many onlookers here and in Israel, what went on in private was jaw-dropping. We are told:

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Love of the Land: Biden in Public and Private