Even Ban calls flotilla 'not helpful'
Even UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called the flotilla of fools currently heading for Gaza '
not helpful.'
“[Secretary General Ban Ki-moon] continues to
believe that a flotilla will not help to address the dire situation in
Gaza and reiterates his calls on the government of Israel to lift all
closures, with due consideration of Israel’s legitimate security
concerns,” Undersecretary General Jeffrey Feltman said at a Security
Council briefing.
The statement comes days after Israeli Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor called on Ban to condemn the so-called “Freedom Flotilla,” amid preparations by the Israeli Navy to block its three boats from reaching Gaza.
“The international community must send an
unambiguous message to the organizers and participants of these
provocations that such initiatives only serve to raise tensions in our
region,” Prosor wrote. “This attempt to challenge Israel’s naval
blockade of Gaza holds the potential for dangerous consequences The
flotilla’s sole purpose is to create provocations that pose security
risks, and constitute a breach of international law.”
Feltman said Ban was “closely following media reports” about the flotilla.
Ban is also 'deeply concerned' with the health of terrorists.
Feltman also said Ban was “deeply concerned”
about Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel, naming Islamic Jihad
detainee Khader Adnan, who has been on hunger strike for nearly two
months to protest his detainment under administrative detention, which
allows Israel to hold prisoners without charging them.
The Red Cross on Tuesday said Adnan faced “immediate risk of death.”
He wouldn't be facing an immediate threat of death if he weren't starving himself. Maybe he should consider breaking his fast.... /Just sayin'....
In any event, it is truly amazing how much time Ban has to devote to Gaza given the true suffering going on in Syria, Iran, Iraq and many other countries that are living under truly repressive regimes. Oh wait... Gaza is also living under a truly repressive regime... Hamas... It would be nice to see Ban criticize them once in a while too.
By the way, if the name "Jeffrey Feltman" rings a bill, it's because
it should. He's a former State Department diplomat....
Labels: Ban Ki-Moon, flotilla of fools, Gaza plenty, hunger strike, Jeffrey Feltman
Feltman: 'Peace talks' to include Syria and Lebanon; Hezbullah's explosive response
US Assistant Secretary of State for Middle East Affairs Jeffrey Feltman said on Friday that the US wants the 'peace talks' to
include Syria and Lebanon.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffery Feltman stated Friday that the United States wants peace in the region to include Lebanon and Syria, but added that there are great problems and challenges thwarting this aim.
Addressing the launch of direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, he told Al-Arabiya that the success of the negotiations is not guaranteed, but the U.S. will try all it can to ensure their success.
He stressed that it is in the U.S.' interest to achieve peace, noting that both the Palestinians and Israelis agreed to reach a comprehensive peace agreement within a year.
One of the 'great problems and challenges' is Hezbullah's
explosive response to Feltman's statement.
Several explosions caused a large fire at a building in the southern town of Shehabiyeh on Friday amid reports that the blasts went off at a Hizbullah weapons depot.
"Three explosions went off in a house in Shehabiyeh" near the southern coastal city of Tyre, an army spokesman told Agence France Presse.
"The nature and cause of the explosions are not yet clear," he added.
The army cordoned off the area and was awaiting bomb disposal experts, he said.
Beirut media said, however, that the blasts went off at a weapons cache belonging to Hizbullah.
The media reports also said that firefighters and ambulances rushed to the scene of the explosions which continued to be heard well after the first sounds reverberated across the area around 1:00 pm.
Al-Arabiya satellite TV network said one person was injured in the explosions, adding that Hizbullah threw a security dragnet around the three-storey building.
According to Voice of Lebanon radio, the building is owned by a man from the Salloum family. A man living near the building told AFP that it had been rented out by Hizbullah.
UNIFIL spokesman Neeraj Singh said U.N. peacekeepers were coordinating with the Lebanese army, adding that they have sent patrols to the location of the explosion in Shehabiyeh.
Shehabiyeh is south of the Litani River, an area patrolled by U.N. peacekeepers and Lebanese soldiers that is supposed to be free of weapons.
UNIFIL is real effective, isn't it? Heh.
Obama blowing off Syria
On Sunday, I reported that the United States may be '
disengaging' from Syria. Now, top US diplomat Jeffrey Feltman has made some blunt comments that make it seem that President Obama's attempts to
romance Bashar al-Assad are over.
Jeffrey D. Feltman, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told the Washington Post Tuesday, “Syria has said that it wishes to have its territorial expectations met through a peace agreement with Israel and that Syria recognizes the essential role that we can play in achieving that… But our interest in a comprehensive peace doesn't mean that we are going to start trading our other interests in Iraq or Lebanon in order to get Damascus to like us better."
...
His statements to the Washington Post made it clear that the Obama administration is holding the Golan Heights, which Syria occupied until the Six-Day War in 1967, as a bargaining card. The area includes vast water resources and the Hermon Mountains, a key observation post and military assets. It overlooks Israeli communities around the Sea of Galilee and before the 1967 war, children in the area slept in shelters as there was constant Syrian shelling of their homes from the Heights.
Feltman said that ‘Syria’s friends are undermining stability in Lebanon….There is a cost to the potential in our bilateral relationship to what Syria's friends are doing in Lebanon."
Bye bye Bashar. It's long overdue.
Labels: Bashar al-Assad, Golan Heights, Jeffrey Feltman, Syria
The 'big game' with Syria
What's the US up to with Syria? Why is Obama so determined to 'engage' the Assad regime? It's not just that the pompous President is convinced that he can talk anyone into anything. It's the same tired narrative that all roads to peace in the World lead through Jerusalem -
and the Golan Heights.
Although the basic components of US policy had been hinted at earlier, this was the first time that an official openly laid out what the administration’s end game is. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, who was the official testifying before the subcommittee, outlined the administration’s conceptual framework as follows: The US is working to mitigate Iran’s regional influence, which Syria facilitates. But Syria is not Iran, and there’s a basic policy difference between them: Unlike Iran, Syria has an interest in negotiating a peace agreement with Israel. Therefore, the peace process is, in Feltman’s words, the “big game”. The administration believes that a peace deal between Damascus and Jerusalem would cure the Syria problem.
If this sounds like a familiar tune from the 1990s, that’s because in the end it's nothing but a reprise of the view that holds the conflict with Israel as the engine driving all regional dynamics and regime behavior. It’s the politics of grievance.
This line of thinking plays right into the Syrians’ hands, affording them a pass for their actions and duplicity pending the conclusion of a peace deal that may not materialize for years, if ever.
Witness, for example, this statement by Feltman: “Syria's relationship with Hezbollah and the Palestinian terrorist groups is unlikely to change absent a Middle East peace agreement.” The logic of this statement is but one step removed from justifying the arming of Hezbollah. It’s the logic that holds Syrian policy to be reactive and grievance-based. But the Obama administration’s “big game” is nothing if not a cocktail of this grievance logic and the infamous concept of “linkage”.
This toxic viewpoint was echoed by National Security Advisor Jim Jones at a recent event at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: “One of the ways that Iran exerts influence in the Middle East is by exploiting the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict… Advancing this peace would... help prevent Iran from cynically shifting attention away from its failures to meet its obligations.”
Such an outlook, distilled in Feltman’s testimony, poses as a grand strategic concept that purports to help mitigate the challenge posed by Iran and the collapse of the Arab-Israeli peace process all at once. It proposes that by draining the swamps of grievance, Syria will be neutralized, and consequently so will Hamas and Hezbollah, leaving Iran “isolated”. This in turn sets the stage for uniting the Arabs and Israelis under the American umbrella facing Iran. While this does nothing to prevent Iran from going nuclear, it could be the blueprint for a future “containment” option, supposedly denying Iran the ability to project power by using the region’s open conflicts.
It’s the new domino theory. Only there’s nothing new about it. As some of us reasoned, Bashar al-Assad made his gamble with the Scuds calculating that this peace processing impulse would be the administration’s default position. If the US endgame is a comprehensive peace deal, one that by definition involves Syria, then Assad can buy immunity and even leverage, simply by declaring he wants peace.
Thus, Obama becomes trapped by his own “big game”. If Syria is deemed necessary for his regional peace/containment edifice, then the US will not be able to declare engagement a failure and suspend it, or else the entire edifice collapses. The result is the confused paralysis evident in the administration’s reaction to the Scud crisis: doubling down on engagement and the need to convince Assad that his “real” interests lay not with Iran but with the US.
And Assad is laughing all the way to the bank. What could go wrong?
BWAHAHAHAHA! UNRWA giving out negative Christmas bonus
UNRWA, the United Nations entity whose purpose in life is to ensure the perpetuation of 'Palestinian refugee' status, announced on Tuesday that it cannot pay salaries in December due to... wait for it... a '
budget crisis.'
On Tuesday the UN announced it will not pay wages next month to
thousands of workers in the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) due to a
growing financial crisis.
The cancellation of wages comes as UNRWA is in a $36 million deficit according to AFP.
...
Under secretary general Jeffrey Feltman said "UNRWA will be unable to
adequately fund its core services...and will be unable to pay
December salaries of its 30,000 teachers, medical personnel and social
workers."
And guess whom they're blaming....
While announcing its financial woes UNRWA criticized Israel's stance towards Hamas controlled Gaza.
Since Israel suspended building materials
to Gaza in October after discovering the materials were used in
building terror tunnels, 19 out of 20 UNRWA construction projects in
Gaza have been halted, putting "thousands of people out of work"
according to Feltman.
On Tuesday UNRWA chief Filippo Grandi said "the Israeli blockade -- which is illegal -- must be lifted." The same day Hamas spokeswoman Israa al-Mudallal said
the situation in Gaza is "on the verge of explosion," calling on the
international community to send materials, presumably building
materials.
Feltman is an old
State Department hack... But I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me why the cancellation of 19 out of 20 UNRWA construction projects (assuming that's true) would have precipitated a financial crisis. It should have lowered UNRWA's operating expenses. And while we're at it, it's worth noting that the blockade is not 'illegal' - it's a response to rocket fire from Gaza on Israeli civilians.
Labels: Gaza plenty, Jeffrey Feltman, UNRWA
Assad's chemical weapons: Nightmare scenario?
If Syria's Assad regime goes the same way as Libya's Gadhafi, there is deep concern here in Israel and in Washington over what would happen to Syria's chemical weapons supply. While most of Libya's chemical weapons consisted of World War I era mustard gas, most of Syria's chemical weapons consist of
highly concentrated Sarin, a nerve gas that can be deadly even if inhaled in small quantities.
Moreover, while Libya's chemical weapons were mostly in World War I era canisters, Syria's are in thousands highly transportable artillery shells and warheads. The fear here and in Washington is that if the Assad regime falls, terror organizations, many of whom are based in Syria, could get their hands on these lethal weapons. Although many analysts doubt that Assad would deliberately share chemical bombs with terrorists, it is not inconceivable that weapons could vanish amid the chaos of an uprising that destroys Syria’s vaunted security services, which safeguard the munitions.
“This is a scenario that’s on the radar screen if things go downhill,” said a U.S. security official who monitors events in Syria. “A lot of people are watching this closely.”
...
Many countries, including the United States and Russia, gradually eliminated their chemical-weapons arsenals, but Syria refused to sign the U.N. Chemical Weapons convention and proceeded to develop an ever larger and deadlier stockpile. The CIA has concluded that Syria possesses a large stockpile of sarin-based warheads and was working on developing VX, a deadlier nerve agent that resists breaking down in the environment.
By early in the last decade, some weapons experts ranked Syria’s chemical stockpile as probably the largest in the world, consisting of tens of tons of highly lethal chemical agents and hundreds of Scud missiles as well as lesser rockets, artillery rockets and bomblets for delivering the poisons.
Jeffrey Feltman, the State Department’s chief diplomat for the Middle East, last year cited Syria’s chemical weapons program as a primary reason for continuing U.S. economic sanctions against the Assad regime.
“We will continue pressing the Syrian government on its problematic policies,” Feltman said in testimony before a House committee.
Israel is also very concerned about the fate of
Assad's chemical weapons.
"We are very concerned about the status of Syria's WMD, including chemical weapons," Israel's ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, told the Wall Street Journal this week. "Together with the US administration, we are watching this situation very carefully."
Israeli officials have expressed concern over the instability that could follow the ouster of the Assad regime, which for four decades kept a quiet border on the Golan Heights even as it armed Lebanese and Palestinian terrorist groups. According to Oren, however, Israel is not necessarily opposed to seeing Assad leave the international stage. "We see a lot of opportunity emerging from the end of the Assad regime," he said.
Leonard Spector lays down some other scenarios in which
Assad's chemical weapons could be used.
Let's start with the possibility of civil war. According to researchers at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, open sources indicate that there are at least four, and potentially five, chemical weapons production facilities in Syria. One or two are located near Damascus, the other three situated in Hama, Latakia, and al-Safir village, near the city of Aleppo. Hama is one of the hotbeds of the Syrian revolt, which Assad's tanks attacked in early August and where, more recently, fighting has severely damaged the city's hospitals. Latakia is another center of unrest; it was shelled by the Syrian Navy in mid-August. Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city, has also seen significant demonstrations.
If anti-Assad insurgents take up arms, the chemical sites, as symbols of the regime's authority, could become strategic targets. And, if mass defections occur from the Syrian army, there may be no one left to defend the sites against seizure. This could lead to disastrous outcomes, including confiscation of the chemical weapons by a radical new national government or sale of the weapons as war booty to organized nonstate actors or criminal groups.
In such chaos, no one can predict who might control the weapons or where they might be taken. With these chemical weapons in the hands of those engaged in a possible civil war, the risks that they would be used would increase substantially. The problem would be worsened further if some possessors were not fully aware of the extent of the weapons' deadly effects.
And let's imagine that Assad is eventually removed: What leaders would gain control of these weapons after he departed? Saudi-backed Sunni groups? Iranian-backed Shiite organizations? Whoever they might be, it is unclear that the newcomers would follow the Assads' cautious-use doctrine and refusal to share chemical weapons with nonstate groups, or that the new leaders would be able to maintain strict security measures at the chemical sites.
Meanwhile, it's possible that an existential threat will cause the Assad regime to abandon its previous policy of restraint regarding chemical weapons. It is not a huge leap from attacking civilians with tank fire, machine guns, and naval artillery to deploying poison gas, and the shock effect and sense of dread engendered by even limited use could quash a citywide uprising within an hour.
The options available to the United States to minimize these risks are limited at best. Washington has certainly warned Assad against using the weapons domestically. But with Assad already at risk of indictment for crimes against humanity, and given his likely belief that the United States will not intervene militarily due to its commitments elsewhere -- including its politically unpopular and still opaque involvement in Libya -- U.S. warnings may have little deterrent effect.
A pre-emptive Israeli military strike to destroy the weapons does not appear technically feasible: Even if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were ready to change the status quo, Assad is believed to have stored bulk chemical agents and filled (or quickly filled) shells and bombs in underground bunkers at multiple sites throughout the country. Moreover, even if Israel used incendiary bombs in an attempt to incinerate the chemical agents, the risk of dispersing large quantities of poisonous liquids would remain, with the potential to cause large-scale casualties.
There's a precedent for Assad using chemical weapons: His father did it.
In Monday's JPost, Canadian Anthony Rusonik makes a case for what he calls
Israeli intervention in Syria. Curiously, he does not even mention the chemical weapons, choosing instead to urge our government to take in Syrian refugees, including 'Palestinians' (you can tell he doesn't live here), and to set up around Syria's nautical border.
Israel could yet end up with more urgent reasons for a more active intervention. But knowing how this country works, it is likely that the Mossad has 'assets' on the ground in Syria, and will let the government know if the chemical weapons situation necessitates an active Israeli role.
Labels: Bashar al-Assad, chemical weapons, Mossad, Syrian uprising
Obama tries to scrub Bush White House and State Department references to 'Jerusalem, Israel'
Our friends the Zivotofsky's (yes, of course Mrs. Carl and I know them) are sure making life miserable for the Obama administration.
You will recall that last week I reported that the White House had
scrubbed clean references on its own website to "Jerusalem, Israel," in preparation for the Supreme Court hearing in
Zivotofsky v.
Clinton. Now, Omri Ceren reports in
Commentary that the White House is trying to rewrite the Bush administration's relationship with Israel to claim - as usual - that Bush did the same thing.
Well, he didn't.
Sometimes Bush-era White House photos explicitly identified Jerusalem as being in Israel and sometimes they didn’t, just like sometimes they explicitly identified Tel Aviv as being in Israel and sometimes they didn’t. A naive “Jerusalem, Israel” Google search on the Bush White House archives is sufficient to turn up this 2002 photo of Vice President Cheney captioned as “a press briefing in Jerusalem, Israel.”
It also turns up this photo labeled “Mrs. Laura Bush visits the Western Wall Tunnels… in Jerusalem, Israel.” That’s from the exact, precise, identical tour that Kredo linked to in order to “hammer home the point” that the Bush administration “never explicitly labeled [Jerusalem] as part of Israel.”
Getting beyond photo captions, Bush-era documents show that the previous White House was indeed able to correctly identify the city of Jerusalem as being inside the state of Israel. The record shows that the President even acknowledged that the Jerusalem consulate – the same one that won’t issue passports referencing “Jerusalem, Israel” – was located in Jerusalem, Israel. Bush’s statement nominating Jeffrey Feltman to be ambassador to Lebanon, for instance, explicitly described Feltman’s previous position as “Deputy Principal Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem, Israel.”
It gets worse for Obama’s defenders, though, than merely being demonstrably wrong. It turns out that while they were insisting that the Bush administration consistently refused to reference “Jerusalem, Israel,” the Obama State Department was busy scrubbing documents in which Bush administration referenced “Jerusalem, Israel.” Straight down the memory hole. That’s kind of amazing when you pause and think about it, no?
The “Jerusalem, Israel” captions and statements from the Bush-era White House are digitally archived and frozen, and so beyond the administration’s reach. But Bush-era State Department reports are stored on the Obama State Department’s servers. Two old documents in particular – the State Department’s FY 2002 and FY 2003 Performance and Accountability Reports – come up quickly in searches. When they were originally written they both had appendices identifying the location of the Jerusalem consulate as “Jerusalem, Israel.” Some time in the last two weeks that location was changed to “Jerusalem.” Whoever made the changes even went back and scrubbed the old “hard copy” PDFs. You can do the compare and contrast yourself. Click on these links for scrubbed versions of FY 2002 HTML, FY 2003 HTML, FY 2002 PDF, FY 2003 PDF, and on these links for cached original versions of FY 2002 HTML, FY 2003 HTML, FY 2002 PDF, FY 2003 PDF.
I guess that the Obama administration has hired
Donald Segretti as a consultant.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, dirty tricks, Donald Segretti, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky, State Department obsession with Israel, White House website
US and EU protest the rule of law in Israel
Both the US and Sweden (the current President of the EU) summoned Israel's ambassadors on Tuesday to protest Israel's
adherence to the rule of law.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman summoned Michael Oren [pictured. CiJ], Israel's ambassador to Washington, to tell him that the United States views Sunday's eviction of two Palestinian families from homes in East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood as a "provocative" and "unacceptable" act that violates Israel's obligations under the road map peace plan.
Oren responded by saying that the buildings in question have been Jewish-owned since before Israel's founding, and that a court ordered the families' evictions because they had violated the terms of their leases.
...
Shortly before Oren was summoned by Feltman on Monday, Israeli Ambassador to Sweden Benny Dagan was summoned to that country's foreign ministry for a similar rebuke. Swedish officials told Dagan that they did not understand the timing of the evictions, nor do they accept the legal arguments behind the move. Sweden currently holds the European Union's rotating presidency.
Dagan counterattacked, saying that Israel was "extremely frustrated with Sweden's conduct" as president of the EU. Israel, he said, has taken steps to make life easier for West Bank Palestinians, while the Palestinians have merely entrenched themselves in their hard-line positions, and the EU has done nothing to help.
The Swedes rejected these claims, noting there is "no difference" between Sweden's positions on the peace process and Washington's.
Foreign Ministry Director General Rafi Barak responded by summoning the Swedish ambassador for talks, during which he told her that Jerusalem considers Stockholm's criticisms of Israel, since assuming the EU presidency, to be excessive.
Now some of you might be wondering why the vehement reaction to a court ruling that the Israeli government could argue was imposed upon it. I was wondering about that myself. The answer is contained in a statement made by the
British Consulate in Jerusalem condemning the court ruling.
“Israel’s claim that the imposition of extremist Jewish settlers into this ancient Arab neighbourhood is a matter for the courts or the municipality is entirely unacceptable,” the consulate said in a statement. “Their actions are incompatible with Israel’s desire for peace. We urge Israel not to allow extremists to set the agenda.”
In other words, they are protesting the
application of Israeli civil law to the city of Jerusalem (and it may be assumed that the Americans and the Swedes would take the same position).
But that position is disingenuous. When the Supreme Court ruled that the IDF had to move the 'security fence' closer to the 1949 armistice line - at substantial risk to Israelis - these countries were more than happy to obey the ruling. There cannot be a legal vacuum in Judea and Samaria - let alone in Jerusalem. Our putative allies cannot wish for civil law some of the time and martial law at other times depending upon which ruling suits them.
At the end of the day, the dispute over the two homes was a private property dispute and the court handled it as a private property dispute just as an American or a British court would have handled it. (Sweden has a different legal system). The complaints about the results are out of place.
Assad sees no need to listen
The Washington Post
editorializes over Syrian President Assad's behavior:
"If these reports turn out to be true, we are going to have to review the full range of tools that are available to us in order to make Syria reverse what would be an incendiary, provocative action," Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, moments after making a strong pitch for the first U.S. ambassador in Damascus since 2005. Administration officials have suggested that the Scuds may not have reached Hezbollah in Lebanon; in that case the strong statements may be preventative. What is known for sure is that Syria has facilitated the transfer of thousands of rockets and missiles to Hezbollah since 2006 in blatant violation of the U.N. resolution that ended that summer's war in Lebanon. So why persist with the "engagement" policy? "President Assad is . . . making decisions that could send the region into war," was Mr. Feltman's answer. "He's listening to Ahmadinejad. He's listening to Hassan Nasrallah. He needs to listen to us, too."
That's a reasonable argument; we don't agree with Republicans who say the dispatch of Mr. Ford, a capable professional diplomat, would amount to a "reward" for Mr. Assad. Still, there has been no shortage of communication: Senior U.S. officials have summoned the senior Syrian envoy in Washington four times since Feb. 26 to talk about the weapons transfers to Hezbollah. What's been lacking are tangible steps by the administration to accompany more engagement with more pressure, such as more sanctions against Syrian officials and companies. The problem isn't that Mr. Assad is not getting the U.S. message. It's that he sees no need to listen.
Assad isn't going to listen any more to Robert Ford than he's listening to messages sent by the Obama administration now. Instead, he will embarrass Ford and the United States, while using Ford's presence in Damascus as a stepping stone to restoring his relations with Europe, all the while conceding nothing. The administration has no stronger tangible steps to take against Damascus short of war than keeping Ford home.
That's the one point the Washington Post didn't get: Ford should stay home.
More 'good news': Obama to force Israel down from the Golan
Israel Radio reports this morning that when Obama envoys Jeffrey Feltman and Daniel Shapiro visit Damascus for the second time in two months later today, they will be bearing a gift for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: Feltman and Shapiro will promise Assad that the US will bring Israel to the table to 'negotiate' over the Golan at the same time as it is 'negotiating' with the 'Palestinians' over Judea and Samaria.
Remember the Netanyahu government strategy of trying to play off the 'Syrian track' against the 'Palestinian track'? Fuggedaboutit.
What could go wrong?
UPDATE 9:07 AMIsrael Radio updates in its 9:00 am newscast to note that this report is based upon a report in an Arabic newspaper (whose name I didn't catch) in the Persian Gulf, and that if the Syrians answer favorably, Middle East envoy George Mitchell will visit Damascus within two weeks.
In other words, there will be yet another fait accomplis (why would the Syrians say no?) facing Mr. Netanyahu when he goes to Washington.
What could go wrong?
History abhors a vacuum
You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, President Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and whoever else happened to be listening to his open mic, that he would be
much more flexible about arms control if he is reelected. Jackson Diehl has a whole list of issues that Obama is similarly attempting to put off until after the election. These include North Korea, Iran, Syria and the 'Palestinians.' Diehl argues that if Obama tries to put issues off so as not to harm his reelection chances,
others will step into the vacuum (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
That brings us to the weakness with Obama’s strategy: It hands control over events to the likes of 28-year-old Kim Jong Eun. Sure enough, the reprieve Obama thought he had purchased in north Asia expired after only 16 days, when North Korea announced the long-range rocket launch that took place early Friday. The agreement turned out to be a trap. Now that the Obama administration has withdrawn the promised food aid, the regime will have a cue to carry out the nuclear weapons test that many experts are now expecting.
In Syria, too, delay may prove disastrous. As the senior State Department official for the Middle East, Jeffrey Feltman, told Congress on March 1, “it’s important that the tipping point for the regime be reached quickly, because the longer the regime assaults the Syrian people, the greater the chances of all-out war in a failed state.” Yet in the following six weeks Obama has been passive, delegating Syria to the feckless diplomatic hands of former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Some 1,000 more Syrians have been killed; last week’s “cease-fire” is crumbling. At this rate, the “all-out war” Feltman predicted will be underway long before November.
As for Iran, if Tehran accepts Obama’s bargain, the momentum the administration has managed to build up behind sanctions, and the resulting pressure on the Iranian economy, will be broken. If the regime then cheats, or refuses to negotiate a more lasting solution to its pursuit of nuclear technology, Obama will end his term with Iran closer to a an atomic bomb than it was in 2009.
And if Iran won’t agree, and the talks collapse? Then Obama’s effort to stop history until November will once again depend on a man who probably would like to see him lose the election: Netanyahu. That’s the problem with asking for “space”: It tends to get filled by others.
Obama would like some of these problems to go away, while he would rather push off others until he is better able to deal with them. In the former category, I would put North Korea, Iran and Syria, where I don't believe that Obama really cares about the outcome so long as it doesn't mess up his reelection chances. And in the latter category, I would put the Russians and the 'Palestinians,' both of whom stand to reap some serious benefits from - God forbid - a second Obama term.
But the place where Prime Minister Netanyahu can most harm Obama's reelection chances is not on the 'Palestinian' front. It's with Iran. So you can add to Netanyahu's
possible motivations to attack Iran between now and November, the possibility that it could harm Obama's reelection chances.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian nuclear threat, Israeli attack on Iran, North Korea, nuclear disarmament, Russia, Syrian uprising
The Left declares victory for the 'settlers'
Here's a fascinating piece from Geoffrey Aronson, which while being a bit overstated, acknowledges the reality that the
settlers revenants have won, and that
due to President Obama's incompetence, the 'Palestinians' are worse off than they were four years ago.
“[Israel’s] goal was to prevent the establishment of an Arab state
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea,” noted Israeli
columnist Nahum Barnea recently. “Today, with 300,000 settlers living in
Judea and Samaria, with a powerful lobby and compensation arrangements from Gush Katif
that would amount to hundreds of billions of shekels if they were to be
applied to the West Bank, you could say that the mission has been
accomplished.”
Washington’s commitment to a settlement freeze buckled in the face of
Israeli opposition. As a consequence, Obama left the United States’
vital interest in an agreement hostage to the pathologies that dominate
bilateral Israel-Palestinian relations.
This breakdown in Washington’s diplomatic effort to address the occupation is unprecedented. Jeffrey Feltman, UN undersecretary for political affairs, acknowledged this state of affairs at an Aug. 22 briefing
before the Security Council, where he noted that “in the short term the
international community may not be in a position to succeed in helping
the parties bridge their political differences.”
Obama’s singular achievement on this issue is therefore his most
dubious one. US interest in and leadership of the effort to end the
conflict has atrophied to a point not seen since the aborted Rogers Plan,
creating a policy vacuum that would lead to the October 1973 war.
Today, policy makers and the public alike have surrendered in the face
of the passions that drive the conflict. They are bored with its
grinding hopelessness, distracted by the more hopeful and dramatic
narratives of the Arab Spring, at once complacent about the price to be
paid for failure to end the occupation and settlement and resigned to
the victory of the settlers.
National Union chairman and MK Ya’akov Katz is representative of
settlers who smell victory. “Despite the freeze, settlement in Judea and
Samaria increased this past year,” he said. “With the current rate of
growth, we will be about 400,000 Jews before the next election campaign,
and within four years, we will be about half a million Jews in Judea
and Samaria. If you include East Jerusalem, we will number more than a
million Jews, at which point the revolution will have been completed.”
Read the whole thing.
Let's not jump for joy too much yet. The reality is that not a single new Jewish town has been established in Judea and Samaria, outside Jerusalem since 1993. Moreover, not a single new Jewish neighborhood has been established in any of the existing towns since that date, except such as were within the towns' previously established borders. As to the 'outposts,' the reality is that the government is still
expelling their
residents, albeit slowly.
What has changed has nothing to do with Obama: The reality of what happened in Gaza has made the overwhelming majority of Israelis resistant to the establishment of another 'Palestinian' reichlet in Judea and Samaria. While the Gaza envelope communities of Sderot, Netivot and Ofakim are
NotInMyBackYard,
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv very much are. Israelis aren't willing to give 'Palestinians' control of areas within rocket range of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport, particularly after our bitter experience in Gaza.
And while Aronson has correctly described the reality, he ignores the connection between it and Obama's policies. Obama's poor treatment of Israel even predates the appointment of George Mitchell as envoy (the point at which Aronson begins). You will recall, for example, that Obama insisted that Israel not finish off Hamas so as not to
spoil his inauguration party. And while many Israelis might have been open to territorial compromise before Obama took office, that openness was ended by Obama's disavowal of President Bush's 2004 letter acknowledging '
changed demographic realities,' by Obama's insistence on
using the 1949 armistice lines as the default border, and yes, by the attempt at a 'settlement freeze' ('including Jerusalem') to drive the previous two points home, all of which made it a lot easier for Israelis to find
something upon which most of us could agree.
Ironically, it is far more likely that there will be a two-state solution if Mitt Romney is elected than it is if Barack Hussein Obama is reelected.
Labels: 1949 armistice lines, Barack Hussein Obama, East Jerusalem, Hamas, Obama's obsession with Israel, Obama's obsession with Palestinians, revenants, settlement freeze, two-state solution
A green light in Lebanon?
I hope
this is true, but I find it hard to believe.
Hizbullah MP Kamel al-Rifai stated that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, and U.S. Senator John Kerry had informed Lebanese officials during their recent visits to Lebanon that Israel is serious in its threats against the country.
He told the daily Asharq al-Awsat Monday that the latest information indicates that the American administration gave Israel the green light to do as it pleases in Lebanon, adding that Kerry sent this message to the Syrian leadership.
The MP interpreted this as a sign of a U.S. agenda against the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine to be executed through Israel.
"The Resistance will not grant Israel an excuse to launch an offensive, even though it does not need justifications for its wars," Rifai added.
Dream on.
Labels: green light, Hezbullah, Lebanon
Hariri tribunal releases pro-Syrian generals; coast is clear for Obama - Assad rapprochment
On Wednesday, the UN-backed tribunal looking into allegations that members of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's inner circle ordered the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (pictured), ordered the release of four pro-Syrian Lebanese generals who had been accused of participating in the assassination. The reason given for the release was that a key witness had recanted his testimony.
Hariri was murdered on February 14, 2005 in a truck bombing in which 22 other people died.
With Assad effectively exonerated, the Obama administration announced that it is sending two 'high-level envoys' to Syria in the coming weeks, furthering Assad's emergence from the cold.
This is from the
New York Times:
The four — Jamil al-Sayyed, Ali Hajj, Raymond Azar and Mustafa Hamdan — directed the chief security and intelligence services and the presidential guard. They were widely seen as henchmen for Syria, which occupied Lebanon militarily for three decades. Widely believed to have ordered Rafik Hariri’s killing, Syria was forced out of Lebanon under local and international pressure a few months later.
Lebanon is preparing for a crucial parliamentary election in June in which Saad Hariri and his political allies, now in the majority, are facing an alliance led by Hezbollah. Many here believe that the tribunal’s decision could cut into Mr. Hariri’s votes by spreading the impression that Syria could escape being brought to account for the assassination of his father and be emboldened to rebuild its influence here.
Lebanese officials had lobbied to have the decision delayed until after the election, but tribunal judicial figures refused, saying they could not take political considerations into account, said a senior court official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the court’s inner workings.
...
The tribunal’s prosecutor, Daniel A. Bellemare, emphasized that the case was bigger than the four men, who could be called as witnesses or even arrested again if more evidence was found. Tribunal officials have said that indictments could be issued later this year.
But many Lebanese seemed to view the officers’ release as a sign that the tribunal might never bring Mr. Hariri’s killers to justice.
“It is a shock,” said Samir Frangieh, one of Saad Hariri’s parliamentary allies. “Everyone knows who these men were and what they did.”
The
Los Angeles Times adds:
A U.N. investigation team said shortly after the slaying that it had evidence that Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services were involved. Syria has denied any involvement. Subsequent U.N. reports refrained from making direct accusations.
Fransen's special U.N. tribunal began its inquiry last month, and a conclusion is expected to take years.
Noting the politically charged environment in Lebanon, Fransen urged that the generals "be kept under strict security measures to ensure their safety."
The tribunal gained jurisdiction over the four when it opened on March 1. The tribunal sits in the Hague (Netherlands) and not in Lebanon.
For those of you looking for the connection to President Obama's new envoys, the
Wall Street Journal supplies that.
The U.S. outreach comes as a United Nations court announced Wednesday the release in Beirut of four Lebanese generals detained in connection with the 2005 murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The generals' release is seen undercutting U.N. efforts to secure indictments for the murder, and a boon for Syria's political allies inside Lebanon.
You bet those two events are connected.
The two envoys are the same two as the last time: Jeffrey Feltman and Daniel Shapiro. As I pointed out yesterday, Shapiro is a protege of former Indiana congressman
Lee Hamilton, who is the architect of Obama's Middle East policy.
By the way, the hoops that the Obama administration expects the Syrians to jump through to reinstate diplomatic relations with the United States have also been significantly lowered according to the Journal.
Washington also wants Syria to be a central player in President Obama's stated goal of achieving a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. President Assad entered into indirect peace talks with Israel last year aimed at ending their conflict over the disputed Golan Heights region. But Syria is also a principal financier of Hezbollah and hosts in Damascus the political leadership of Hamas, the militant Palestinian organization that Washington designates as a terrorist organization.
U.S. officials said they ultimately want Syria to shed its financial and military links to Hezbollah and Hamas. But initially they would like Syrian support for better monitoring and controlling the groups.
Mr. Moustapha said Syria views Hezbollah and Hamas as legitimate resistance movements fighting Israeli occupation. But he added that Syria could play a role in fostering a dialogue between Washington and the militant groups, something Mr. Obama's administration has declined to do.
"At some point, the U.S. will have to start talking to Hamas, either directly or indirectly," Mr. Moustapha said in an interview. He played down the idea of Syria distancing itself from Iran, as the U.S. and Israel want.
In other words, although Washington ostensibly still wants the Syrians to distance themselves from Iran and to stop supporting Hamas and Hezbullah, we won't let that hold up the talking. And maybe Obama will throw the Syrians a bone by not renewing sanctions against them even if they do maintain their Iran ties and Hamas and Hezbullah support.
Syrian officials said this week they hope the diplomatic thaw could lead to an easing of trade sanctions enacted by the Bush administration. The sanctions were aimed at curbing Damascus's support for militant groups operating in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.
"If the American president does not renew the sanctions, Syria would consider this the right way for better relations," Syrian Central Bank Gov. Adib Mayaleh said in an interview in Washington on Wednesday.
What could go wrong?
Wikileaks: Israel offered to stop Lebanon overflights in exchange for 'equivalent intelligence'
Yet another Wikileaks document dump discloses that in the aftermath of the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Israel offered to stop overflights of Lebanon in exchange for '
equivalent intelligence' from the United States.
A cable from 2006, seen by The Daily Star, detailed a meeting between former US Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman and the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Personal Representative to Lebanon Geir Pedersen and Special Middle East Adviser Michael Williams.
The dispatch suggested the UN officials met with Israeli representatives to discuss ways of better implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which states that Lebanon’s sovereign borders be respected. The issue of Israeli reconnaissance flights over Lebanese territory arose and UN officials appeared to condone an intelligence swap plan between Israel and the US, according to the cable.
“[Pedersen and Williams] claimed that Israeli officials, whom they had met earlier that week, had hinted at stopping overflights if the [US] could provide equivalent intelligence,” the cable said.
Last week, documents released by WikiLeaks exposed that the US had been operating regular surveillance flights over Lebanon, in what Britain’s The Guardian reported as a plan to provide information on “terrorist” locations.
Why was this never done? The article doesn't say, but I have my suspicions. The United States was deeply disappointed with Israel's performance in the Second Lebanon War. As a result, there was a crisis of confidence between President Bush and Prime Minister Olmert that lasted from the war's end in August 2006
until the alleged Israeli bombing of Syria's al-Kibar reactor in September 2007. My hunch is that the apparent US refusal to share intelligence was part and parcel with that crisis of confidence. Bush saw Olmert (who had taken office in January 2006) as a weak leader, and so long as he did, Bush wasn't going to do anything to help Olmert out.
Labels: Ehud K. Olmert, George W. Bush, Lebanon overflights, Second Lebanon War, UN Security Council Resolution 1701
Ban Ki-Moon refuses pleas from US and Israel not to visit Iran
In the New York Post, Benny Avni reports that public pleas from Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and private pleas from several US diplomats Susan Rice and Jeffrey Feltman have
failed to dissuade UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon from attending a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran.
So here’s the big question that underlines Netanyahu’s public plea to Ban: If the West’s top diplomats can’t use their tact and talent to convince even the most pro-Western UN chief in memory to keep Iran off his itinerary, how will they ever manage to isolate Iran so completely that the mullahs will quit their most prized pet project?
But the secretary-general still wants to attend this month’s meeting of a strong UN voting bloc, the Non-Allied Movement. Founded during the Cold War, this group remains more “non-aligned” with America than with its adversaries. This year, its 120 members elected Iran to the rotating chairmanship.
...
More important, they let the Ayatollahs subtly show to their own oppressed citizens that, far from being isolated, they’re a major global player. Thus the “scoop” on Ban’s coming visit first ran in one of the regime’s favorite newspapers, Fars.
...
For decades, Israel has acted to prevent hostile neighbors from getting atomic weapons. Attacks on nuclear facilities in Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007) were universally condemned, but proved more successful at actually ending nuclear threats than diplomatic treaties, inspection regimes or coordinated sanctions. Now Israel is consumed by a very public debate about whether to similarly treat Iran’s facilities.
That Ban would even consider gracing Tehran with his presence while the regime continues to scoff at its obligations under signed international treaties tells us how likely “diplomatic isolation” is to derail the mullahs’ atomic ambitions.
Obviously, Ban should not be going to Iran. But even if he were to stay home, how isolated is Iran if a conference of 120 of the UN's 193 members is being held in Tehran? How many NAM members are not going to show up to that conference? (Answer: None, but 'only'
31 heads of state and 10 foreign ministers are showing up). How many NAM members voted in favor of making Iran the group's chairman?
And will Ban at least have the decency to walk out when
keynote speaker Ayatollah Ali Khameni calls for Israel's destruction?
Labels: Ayatollah Ali Khameni, Ban Ki-Moon, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Non-Aligned Movement
Obama offends Jews and Israel again
On Friday, I reported on
Hannah Rosenthal's remarks in an interview with Haaretz in which she lambasted Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, for his shunning of the
pro-Israel pro-'peace' J Street lobby. As I reported in that article, Rosenthal has turned into yet another major blunder for the Obama administration with the Jewish community and with Israel. Unsurprisingly, she was blasted by
Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard:
An official with a leading Jewish organization in Washington emails to say that "this is a matter of deep concern and raises real questions about her ability to do the job. There is no precendent that I can recall for a US official -- let alone a diplomat -- to so recklessly criticize another nation's ambassador from any country, ever, like this. While it seems obvious she was not reading from a State Department speech, it begs the question -- is she expressing offical American policy? If not, one would certainly hope the administration would say so. How would one know otherwise? People are outraged and they are telling the White House that, I am sure."
Are there not enough anti-Semites to keep Rosenthal busy even for a month before she starts attacking the Jews? It's as if Melanne Verveer had attacked Ayaan Hirsi Ali during her first month on the job, or if Carol Browner had gone after the head of Greenpeace. Still, I'm less interested in whether Rosenthal was acting in an official capacity when she attacked the Israeli Ambassador, but whether she was carrying out her official duties to combat and monitor anti-Semitism while she attended the J Street conference -- and when can we expect her report.
Even the
State Department felt the need to disavow her.
[T]he Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, has repudiated Ms. Rosenthal with the following statement:
"The Department of State values its close relationship with Ambassador Michael Oren and his staff at the Embassy of Israel in Washington. The United States and Israel enjoy extraordinarily close ties based on shared values, interests, and history, as well as the deep bonds between the Israeli people and the American people. Ambassador Oren plays an indispensable role in maintaining and strengthening our relationship through his day to day interaction with the Administration and Congress on issues of vital importance to both countries and his vigorous outreach to Americans of all origins and points of view."
At Pajamas Media, Ron Radosh views Rosenthal as part of Obama's effort to sneak socialists into '
under the radar' positions.
This past, I think, explains Obama’s propensity to keep appointing rather low-level officials who can operate under the radar and who come from a similar radical or left-wing past. The latest appointment, perhaps not as low level, is that of Hannah Rosenthal, who started her new job last week in the State Department as the special envoy to monitor and report on anti-Semitism. With the growth of anti-Semitism in countries like Britain and France, the job sounds important and necessary. But what was Ms. Rosenthal’s first salvo aimed at?
...
What the article does not go on to note,(as Aaron Klein points out on his blog) however, is that Rosenthal’s husband, Richard Phelps, was a three-term Madison, Wisconsin, executive who worked closely with Joel Rogers, one of the founders of The New Party. Clearly, she met Obama in 1996 when he was gaining the support of The New Party for his campaign.
So once again- as with the appointment of Van Jones- Obama has put in a major position of influence a person from the left-wing of the political spectrum who, as an official whose office monitors anti-Semitism, is using her position to support J-Street, on whose Board she previously sat. Conflict of interest, anyone? Are the statements she gave to Haaretz, uttered in her official capacity, likely to help or harm the ability of Israel to defend itself against its enemies, or once again work instead to cast doubt among Israelis about the view of Israel really held by the Obama administration?
Ms. Rosenthal notes, parenthetically, that criticism of her appointment comes “from a very few people who blog a lot.” Add this blogger to that list!
Radosh goes on to describe how he was attacked for this post by the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan.
Read the whole thing.
Obama administration making nookie nookie with al-Jazeera
When al-Jazeera opened its English-language network in 2006, it was
all but banned from the United States. This likely pleased the Bush administration (which never actively opposed al-Jazeera's entry into the US), but it distresses the Obama administration. And now, the Obama administration is
trying to do something about it.
The new policy of engagement has been apparent in recent weeks as a State Department media outreach office in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has sought to place Arabic-speaking diplomats on Al Jazeera to lay out Washington's talking points about the protests roiling the region.
State Department officials, including chief spokesman Philip J. Crowley and Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, have gone on Al Jazeera more than a dozen times in the last month. Another recent guest was Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Al Jazeera is crucial because so many households in the Middle East turn to it in times of turmoil, said Dana Shell Smith, deputy assistant secretary for international media engagement, an office created last summer to reach out to such outlets.
"If we are not in the conversation, people will be speaking for us or about us," said Shell Smith, who speaks Arabic. "We need to make sure we are out there speaking for ourselves."
And you thought that's why the US government
maintains Alhurra. How silly of you.
A State Department policy review completed in December has resulted in more diplomats and administration officials appearing on Al Jazeera, which reaches about 60 million viewers across the world.
The State Department has assigned staff in media hubs such as London, Dubai and Brussels to field requests from Al Jazeera and other Arabic-language media.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all have appeared on the network's Arabic and English channels in the last year.
But 60 million people is small change for a television network. How many watch CNN? The BBC? Fox (which the Obama administration has boycotted)?
And why does the US have such bad relations with al-Jazeera?
The U.S. government has a tense history with Al Jazeera. Many U.S. citizens got their first exposure to it after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when it broadcast a taped message from Osama bin Laden, its logo emblazoned in the corner of the screen.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld once accused it of spreading "vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable" reports about U.S. actions in Iraq.
I guess those things don't bother Obama. I guess al-Jazeera's role in Palileaks -which has put the last nail in the coffin of the 'peace process' - doesn't bother him either.
Read the whole thing. This is yet another instance of the Obama administration coddling up to America's enemies while
boycotting its friends.
Labels: al-Jazeera, Barack Obama, Fox News, Palileaks
Arabs to Obama: 'We like the Saudi plan just fine as it is'
On Wednesday, I blogged a report from al-Quds al-Arabi that claimed that Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be making some changes to the 'Saudi plan' to vitiate the existence of the Jewish state to make it
more palatable to the potential victims. This was to be done in response to an entreaty from the Obama administration.
But the two entities that the Americans would like to have sign treaties with Israel - Syria and the 'Palestinian Authority' - said later on Wednesday and Thursday that they are just peachy keen on the 'Saudi plan' as it is, and that they are
not willing to see any changes to it. Here is the Syrian reaction.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said Thursday there was no justification for amending a 2002 Saudi peace offer to Israel after reports earlier in the week that Arab states were revising the initiative.
...
Moallem also told reporters before meeting two U.S. envoys that Damascus was still testing American intentions toward his country.
The top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East, Jeffrey Feltman, and National Security Council member Daniel Shapiro were in Damascus for the second time since March, signaling the Obama administration's efforts to explore ways to improve relations with a country Washington has criticized as a state sponsor of terrorism.
And here's the 'Palestinian' reaction:
On Wednesday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that he and his Egyptian counterpart planned to present the Obama administration with a complete formula for resolving the Middle East conflict.
The Palestinian Authority and several Arab states are developing a plan to be submitted to U.S. President Barack Obama that would provide for gestures to Israel in return for Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. The plan is designed to show Arab flexibility in the face of what they view as anticipated intransigence on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
No, there's
no real flexibility there either:
Elaborating, Abbas noted that he and Mubarak also discussed aligned positions vis-à-vis the Isralei government and an approach to any further peace talks. ”We discussed what we are going to say to the Israeli government especially about the road map and both efforts done by the Israeli and Palestinian side,” he said.
He affirmed that the Arab side would be submitting the Arab Peace Initiative to Washington when he met with them, and that all sides were in agreement over its soundness. “We will not be bringing a new document,” he said.
Change? What change?
Syria building biological and chemical weapons at destroyed al-Kibar nuclear plant?; UPDATE: Confirmed
On
September 6, 2007,
Israeli jets destroyed what was alleged to be a nuclear reactor located in rural al-Kibar near the Turkish border. In what was widely believed to be a bid to cover up the site, the Syrians flattened it and then
built another building on top of it. Now, according to an Israel Radio report that I heard once (and only once) on Monday morning, and an article from Yediot Aharonoth's Hebrew edition that seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth, that building may be in use to construct biological and chemical weapons to be used against Israel. Please allow me to explain.
On Thursday, President Obama surprised a lot of people by
extending President Bush's sanctions against Syria for another year.
Section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), provides for the automatic termination of a national emergency, unless, prior to the anniversary date of its declaration, the President publishes in the Federal Register and transmits to the Congress a notice stating that the emergency is to continue in effect beyond the anniversary date. In accordance with this provision, I have sent to the Federal Register for publication the enclosed notice stating that the national emergency with respect to the actions of the Government of Syria declared in Executive Order 13338 of May 11, 2004, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13399 of April 25, 2006, and Executive Order 13460 of February 13, 2008, is to continue in effect beyond May 11, 2009.
The actions of the Government of Syria in supporting terrorism, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, and undermining U.S. and international efforts with respect to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq pose a continuing unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. For these reasons, I have determined that it is necessary to continue in effect the national emergency declared with respect to this threat and to maintain in force the sanctions to address this national emergency.
Please keep the highlighted language close; I've highlighted it for a reason.
Similarly, in a
statement issued by the White House, it was reported that
"The president took these actions to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States constituted by the actions of the government of Syria in supporting terrorism, maintaining its then-existing occupation of Lebanon, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, and undermining U.S. and international efforts with respect to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq."
The mention of Lebanon is because there are two different laws under which the President has the power to impose sanctions and one of them deals with the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. But I agree that this quote is not as conclusive as the previous one, because it cites the language of the statute and may not be specific to this renewal of sanctions. This post hangs on the first quote, which came directly from the White House web site.
The renewal of the sanctions was a surprise and a hard slap in the face to Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, because it came on the same day on which Assad met with Obama envoys
Jeffrey Feltman and Dan Shapiro to discuss normalization of American relations with Syria and removal of the US boycott against the Assad regime.
With President Obama's zeal to 'engage' with both the Assad and Ahmadinejad regimes, one would think that for the sanctions to be reimposed there would have to be an awfully good reason. On Monday, the Washington Post reported that it was because the Syrians have resumed their functioning as a
transit point for terrorists entering Iraq.
Last October, as the Bush administration was touting a dramatic drop in the number of suicide bombings in Iraq, four young Tunisian men left their homes for Libya and then headed to Syria. There, they were met at the Damascus airport and taken to a safe house.
Six tedious months passed until their handlers felt that it was safe to move the men again. In April, they were smuggled across the Iraqi border; within days, two were dead, among the suicide bombers who have killed at least 370 Iraqis in a wave of attacks over the past several weeks.
The third Tunisian disappeared. The fourth was captured and, according to a senior U.S. military official, provided interrogators with this account of their travels.
His statement, combined with what other sources had previously indicated to U.S. and Iraqi intelligence, confirmed what American officials had suspected: After a long hiatus, the Syrian pipeline operated by the organization al-Qaeda in Iraq is back in business.
But if that were the only reason for renewing the sanctions, Obama's White House statement (the first one cited above, which is straight from the source, as opposed to the second one I cited which is less reliable and may have just been quoting the law) would not have mentioned the
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. After all, no one has accused Syria of pursuing weapons of mass destruction since that day in September of 2007 when Israel destroyed the al-Kibar plant. Or have they?
Recall that there were three other facilities in Syria that the IAEA wanted to inspect to which they were denied access. Could those have been the facilities to which Obama was referring? Sure. But we've known about those since
at least May 2008, and if those were going to hold up a normalization of relations with Syria, they should have come up a long time ago. It's doubtful that Obama would have taken what was clearly a last-minute decision to renew sanctions based on those facilities.
And I don't buy that the terrorists transiting into Iraq through Syria were the reason that the sanctions were renewed. According to US military and intelligence officials cited by the Washington Post, they're not even sure Assad is behind that:
The Bush administration frequently criticized Syria for the transit of foreign fighters, suggesting that the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad was involved in the traffic. But U.S. military and intelligence officials remained less certain.
"What we think right now is that we just don't know how much their senior leaders know about the foreign fighter network," said the senior U.S. military official, who discussed intelligence matters last week on the condition of anonymity. "As you can imagine . . . if they knew, it's not something they would be talking about."
"But we do think that the knowledge of these networks exists at least within the Syrian intelligence community," he said. "What level, if it's low or high up, we just don't have a good gauge on."
Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, told Congress late last month that the al-Qaeda in Iraq pipeline through Syria had been "reactivated." Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, confirmed Friday that "some elements of foreign fighters continue to traffic through Syria." But officials have been careful not to directly accuse Damascus of supporting the traffic.
In February 2009, the Syrians let it be known that the al-Kibar facility was being used as a
missile base. They didn't say what kind of missile base. But apparently the missiles being developed there will carry biological and chemical weapons. And the Obama administration may have just discovered that recently.
On Monday, Israel Radio's 5:00 am news magazine (which reads the headlines from nearly every Israeli newspaper) carried a report that said that the Syrians were building biological weapons (if they said chemical, I missed it) at al-Kibar. I have not heard the report before or since. My Hebrew is good, but at that hour of the morning, I had to take into account that maybe I didn't hear correctly. Then I got a daily news digest (which will likely no longer be on line when many of you see this, so I won't link it), which contained the following summary:
See also Biological Weapons Facility Replaces Syrian Nuclear Reactor - Orly Azulai
Syria has rebuilt the structure that housed the nuclear reactor that Israel destroyed and turned the place into a facility for the production of chemical and biological weapons, CBS News reported Sunday, quoting U.S. intelligence sources. The two American envoys who visited Syria last week were aware of the report and presented satellite photos to the Syrians, who denied it.
As a result, Obama decided that Syria had done nothing to justify the removal of sanctions. The revelation of Syria's plan to develop biological and chemical weapons joins a series of disagreements that has brought the Syrians and Americans to a stalemate at this point. The chief disagreement involves Israeli-Syrian negotiations: The Syrians insist that Israel must first agree to the return of the Golan Heights prior to the start of negotiations. (Yediot Ahronot-Hebrew, 11May09)
As is frequently the case when this digest cites Hebrew articles there was no link. I've been all over Yediot's site (the Hebrew version of YNet) and this article has disappeared down the memory hole. I had one of my regular readers whose Hebrew is fluent try it and he couldn't find it either. It's nowhere to be found on CBS News' site either.
If any of you find either story, please email me the links. I sent the story to one of the top intelligence analysts in the mainstream media, and he has not responded yet, but I wanted to get my speculation on the table before he does.
Something is going on at al-Kibar. I'd bet on biological and/or chemical weapons. President Obama would not have thrown out the reference to "weapons of mass destruction" in his sanctions renewal notice without a reason. And if he was going to hold it up because of the three mysterious facilities that the Syrians wouldn't let the IAEA inspect last June, he would not have sent Feltman and Shapiro there the same day, giving the impression that the sanctions were going to be lifted. There's something going on at al-Kibar and someone doesn't want you to know about it yet.
UPDATE WEDNESDAY 7:28 AMDavid Bedein confirms my report and adds the
following details (Hat Tip:
Gershon D).
Syria’s relationship with Iran, arming of Hezbollah and hosting of Hamas and other terror groups greatly troubles the Obama administration.
As a result, Mr. Obama announced a change in his Syria policy after his two envoys returned to Washington on Sunday.
The envoys went to Syria with the new intelligence showing the site that formerly housed the nuclear reactor had been restored and had become a structure housing an expanded chemical and biological weapons program.
Syria, however, denied the existence of the new program at the facility despite being shown the satellite footage, which was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
After Mr. Obama consulted with his advisers, he reached the conclusion that Syria had not done anything to justify removing the sanctions.
“The concerns we had about Syria’s actions have not changed, so renewing the sanctions was the right thing to do,” a senior White House source told the Voice of Israel Radio.
Hmmm.
