Mideast Dispatch Archive: July 2015 Archives

“And yet, no one seems to know who’s running it” (Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman N. Africa...)

July 27, 2015

This is one of an ongoing series of dispatches concerning ISIS -- Tom Gross

* Ex-government official: Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough – even in hindsight – to have predicted the movement’s rise.

* Today, thirty countries, from Nigeria to Libya to the Philippines, have groups that claim to be part of the Islamic State movement, with fighters from over 120 countries.

* We hide this phenomena from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. There have been no satisfactory explanations of what draws over 20,000 foreign fighters who have joined the movement. At first, the large number who came from Britain were blamed on the British government having made insufficient effort to assimilate immigrant communities; then France’s were blamed on the government pushing too hard for assimilation. But in truth, these new foreign fighters seemed to sprout from every conceivable political or economic system. They came from very poor countries (Yemen and Afghanistan) and from the wealthiest countries in the world (Norway and Qatar).

* They come from the social democracies (Sweden) and from monarchies (Morocco), military states (Egypt), authoritarian democracies (Turkey) and liberal democracies (Canada). It didn’t seem to matter whether a government had freed thousands of Islamists (Iraq), or locked them up (Egypt), whether it refused to allow an Islamist party to win an election (Algeria), or allowed an Islamist party to be elected (Tunisia).

* Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student – he received a B grade in junior high – but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.

Who then could have imagined that a movement founded by a man from a video store in provincial Jordan would tear off a third of the territory of Syria and Iraq, shatter historical institutions, and – defeating the combined militaries of a dozen of the wealthiest countries on earth – create a mini empire [with growing outposts around the world]?

The story is relatively easy to narrate, but much more difficult to understand. It begins in 1989, when Fadhil [later known as Zarqawi], inspired by his Islamic self-help class, traveled from Jordan to “do jihad” in Afghanistan. Over the next decade he fought in the Afghan civil war, organized terrorist attacks in Jordan, spent years in a Jordanian jail, and returned – with al-Qaeda help – to set up a training camp in Herat in western Afghanistan…

There is no evidence that ISIS initially received more cash or guns than other Jihadi groups. The al-Qaeda cash that launched the first variation of ISIS by Zarqawi in 1999 was, in his words, “a pittance compared to what al-Qaeda was financially capable of disbursing.” The fact that it didn’t give him more reflected bin Laden’s horror at Zarqawi’s killing of Shias (bin Laden’s mother was Shia) and his distaste for Zarqawi’s tattoos.

Yet the Shia Iranian regime gave Zarqawi medical aid and safe haven when he was a fugitive in 2002.

* Israeli military intelligence: “Sinai’s ISIS offshoot is most effective in Mideast -- And yet, no one seems to know who’s running it.”

For example, on July 1 they successfully coordinated attacks on 15 outposts and checkpoints simultaneously, spanning an area 12 kilometers (7.5 miles), killing dozens of Egyptian soldiers. These attacks demonstrate a high level of coordination, command and control, involving more than 100 fighters and a wide range of weaponry, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.

Since transferring its allegiance from Al-Qaeda to Islamic State in late 2014, the group has on average perpetrated attacks every two or three days. This indicates an ability to regroup rapidly, as well as a steady supply of arms from Libya and Sudan. Rocket attacks by ISIS in the Sinai have also scored direct hits on Egyptian Navy vessels.

* Top U.S. national security officials at a mountain summit this past weekend described Islamic State militants as a fast-moving and confounding enemy, immune to some of the counterterrorism methods that appeared to work more effectively against al Qaeda.

Some suggested that efforts to counter Islamic State advances were yielding success, but others painted a picture of a militant group that operates with stealth and speed that the U.S. government wasn’t prepared to match. The Obama administration was criticized for having no clear strategy.

* The Islamic State group used chemical weapons in attacks against Kurdish civilians and fighters in late June in both Syria and Iraq, reports Reuters, the Daily Telegraph and other sources.

Victims “experienced burning of the throat, eyes and nose, combined with severe headaches, muscle pain and impaired concentration and mobility, and vomiting.” (More here from the Daily Telegraph.)

* The Assad regime (increasingly taking orders from Iranian generals on the ground) also continues to store and use chemical weapons against civilians and against more moderate Sunni opposition groups.

* British extremist “Jihadi John’ (the former Westminster University business management student Mohammed Emwazi) is said to have fled the Islamic State to other parts of Syria, fearing his usefulness is over, reports British media.

“Jihadi John” was responsible for the beheading of several western journalists and aid workers last year. (See here for my interview with a French journalist held with the executed British and American journalists.)

* More than 30 people were detained in a suburb of Moscow on suspicion of recruiting for the Islamic State. Russian Interior Ministry officials have confirmed that they made arrests on Friday at a mosque in Balashikha, about 20 km east of Moscow.

Russian intelligence services have recently recorded a rise in the number of Russian citizens who have gone to fight for ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Up to five thousand Russian Muslims and Muslim converts are now fighting for the jihadists, according to the head of the Anti-terrorist Center of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Andrey Novikov.

* Over 70 Christian churches in Niger are facing a lack of resources and difficult conditions in rebuilding, six months after a wave of Islamist attacks destroyed the churches in revenge for secular French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s drawings of the prophet Muhammad.

Islamists also destroyed several Christian schools and an orphanage, which have not yet been rebuilt. Niger is one of several African countries being target by IS affiliate groups, attacks on which are all but ignored by western media.

***

I attach three articles below.

For various reasons, the author of the first article needs to remain anonymous. He has worked for the government of a NATO member state.

-- Tom Gross

Among previous recent dispatches that had items on ISIS:

* The abandoned freelance journalists trying to report the world’s worst war, Syria (September 3, 2014)

* “Good to meet you, bro”: A poetic tribute to James Foley (September 3, 2014)

* Why ISIS murders (& Pushed to his death for being gay) (February 5, 2015)

* No hope of escape: the most repulsive video ever shot in a swimming pool (& NYT act out mass killings at work) (June 24, 2015)

* You can’t get married if you’re dead. (& Now they are beheading Al-Qaeda) (June 28, 2015)

* Please “like” these dispatches on Facebook here www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia, where you can also find other items that are not in these dispatches.

CONTENTS

1. “The Mystery of ISIS” (New York Review of Books, August 13, 2015)
2. “Sinai’s ISIS offshoot is most effective in Mideast” (By Amos Harel, Haaretz, July 27, 2015)
3. “U.S. security conference reveals Islamic State as confounding foe” (By Damian Paletta, Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2015)

ARTICLES

THE MYSTERY OF ISIS

The Mystery of ISIS
By Anonymous
The New York Review of Books
August 13, 2015 Issue

Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student – he received a B grade in junior high – but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.

The rise of Ahmad Fadhil – or as he was later known in the jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – and ISIS, the movement of which he was the founder, remains almost inexplicable. The year 2003, in which he began his operations in Iraq, seemed to many part of a mundane and unheroic age of Internet start-ups and a slowly expanding system of global trade. Despite the US-led invasion of Iraq that year, the borders of Syria and Iraq were stable. Secular Arab nationalism appeared to have triumphed over the older forces of tribe and religion. Different religious communities – Yezidis, Shabaks, Christians, Kaka’is, Shias, and Sunnis – continued to live alongside one another, as they had for a millennium or more. Iraqis and Syrians had better incomes, education, health systems, and infrastructure, and an apparently more positive future, than most citizens of the developing world. Who then could have imagined that a movement founded by a man from a video store in provincial Jordan would tear off a third of the territory of Syria and Iraq, shatter all these historical institutions, and – defeating the combined militaries of a dozen of the wealthiest countries on earth – create a mini empire?

The story is relatively easy to narrate, but much more difficult to understand. It begins in 1989, when Zarqawi, inspired by his Islamic self-help class, traveled from Jordan to “do jihad” in Afghanistan. Over the next decade he fought in the Afghan civil war, organized terrorist attacks in Jordan, spent years in a Jordanian jail, and returned – with al-Qaeda help – to set up a training camp in Herat in western Afghanistan. He was driven out of Afghanistan by the US-led invasion of 2001, but helped back onto his feet by the Iranian government. Then, in 2003 – with the assistance of Saddam loyalists – he set up an insurgency network in Iraq. By targeting Shias and their most holy sites, he was able to turn an insurgency against US troops into a Shia–Sunni civil war.

Zarqawi was killed by a US air strike in 2006. But his movement improbably survived the full force of the 170,000-strong, $100 billion a year US troop surge. In 2011, after the US withdrawal, the new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, expanded into Syria and reestablished a presence in northwest Iraq. In June 2014 the movement took Mosul – Iraq’s second-largest city – and in May 2015 the Iraqi city of Ramadi and the Syrian city of Palmyra, and its affiliates took the airport in Sirte, Libya. Today, thirty countries, including Nigeria, Libya, and the Philippines, have groups that claim to be part of the movement.

Although the movement has changed its name seven times and has had four leaders, it continues to treat Zarqawi as its founder, and to propagate most of his original beliefs and techniques of terror. The New York Times refers to it as “the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.” Zarqawi also called it “Army of the Levant,” “Monotheism and Jihad,” “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and “Mujihadeen Shura Council.” (A movement known for its marketing has rarely cared about consistent branding.) I will simplify the many changes of name and leadership by referring to it throughout as “ISIS,” although it has of course evolved during its fifteen years of existence.

The problem, however, lies not in chronicling the successes of the movement, but in explaining how something so improbable became possible. The explanations so often given for its rise – the anger of Sunni communities, the logistical support provided by other states and groups, the movement’s social media campaigns, its leadership, its tactics, its governance, its revenue streams, and its ability to attract tens of thousands of foreign fighters – fall far short of a convincing theory of the movement’s success.

Emma Sky’s book The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, for example, a deft, nuanced, and often funny account of her years as a civilian official in Iraq between 2003 and 2010, illustrates the mounting Sunni anger in Iraq. She shows how US policies such as de-Baathification in 2003 began the alienation of Sunnis, and how this was exacerbated by the atrocities committed by Shia militias in 2006 (fifty bodies a day were left on the streets of Baghdad, killed by power drills inserted in their skulls). She explains the often imaginative steps that were taken to regain the trust of the Sunni communities during the surge of 2007, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s alienation of those communities again after the US withdrawal in 2011 through his imprisonment of Sunni leaders, his discrimination and brutality, and the disbanding of Sunni militias.

But many other insurgent groups, quite different from ISIS, often seemed to have been in a much stronger position to have become the dominant vehicles of “Sunni anger.” Sunnis in Iraq initially had minimal sympathy with Zarqawi’s death cult and with his movement’s imposition of early medieval social codes. Most were horrified when Zarqawi blew up the UN headquarters in Baghdad; when he released a film in which he personally sawed off the head of an American civilian; when he blew up the great Shia shrine at Samarra and killed hundreds of Iraqi children. After he mounted three simultaneous bomb attacks against Jordanian hotels – killing sixty civilians at a wedding party – the senior leaders of his Jordanian tribe and his own brother signed a public letter disowning him. The Guardian was only echoing the conventional wisdom when it concluded in Zarqawi’s obituary: “Ultimately, his brutality tarnished any aura, offered little but nihilism and repelled Muslims worldwide.”

Other insurgent groups also often seemed more effective. In 2003, for example, secular Baathists were more numerous, better equipped, better organized, and more experienced military commanders; in 2009, the militia of the “Sunni Awakening” had much better resources and its armed movement was more deeply rooted locally. In 2011, the Free Syrian Army, including former officers of the Assad regime, was a much more plausible leader of resistance in Syria; and so in 2013 was the more extremist militia Jabhat-al-Nusra. Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss show in ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, for example, that al-Nusra formed far closer links to tribal groups in East Syria – even marrying its fighters to tribal women.

Such groups have sometimes blamed their collapse and lack of success, and ISIS’s rise, on lack of resources. The Free Syrian Army, for example has long insisted that it would have been able to supplant ISIS if its leaders had received more money and weapons from foreign states. And the Sunni Awakening leaders in Iraq argue that they lost control of their communities only because the Baghdad government ceased to pay their salaries. But there is no evidence that ISIS initially received more cash or guns than these groups; rather the reverse.

Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss’s account suggests that much of the early support for the ISIS movement was limited because it was inspired by ideologues who themselves despised Zarqawi and his followers. The al-Qaeda cash that launched Zarqawi in 1999, for example, was, in their words, “a pittance compared to what al-Qaeda was financially capable of disbursing.” The fact that it didn’t give him more reflected bin Laden’s horror at Zarqawi’s killing of Shias (bin Laden’s mother was Shia) and his distaste for Zarqawi’s tattoos.

Although the Iranians gave Zarqawi medical aid and safe haven when he was a fugitive in 2002, he soon lost their sympathy by sending his own father-in-law in a suicide vest to kill Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, Iran’s senior political representative in Iraq, and by blowing up one of the most sacred Shia shrines. And although ISIS has relied for more than a decade on the technical skills of the Baathists and the Sufi Iraqi general Izzat al-Douri, who controlled an underground Baathist militia after the fall of Saddam, this relationship has been strained. (The movement makes no secret of its contempt for Sufism, its destruction of Sufi shrines, or its abhorrence of everything that Baathist secular Arab nationalists espouse.)

Nor has the leadership of ISIS been particularly attractive, high-minded, or competent – although some allowance should be made for the understandable revulsion of the biographers. Mary-Anne Weaver, in a 2006 Atlantic article, describes Zarqawi as “barely literate,” “a bully and a thug, a bootlegger and a heavy drinker, and even, allegedly, a pimp.” Weiss and Hassan call him an “intellectual lightweight.” Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger in ISIS: The State of Terror say this “thug-turned-terrorist” and “mediocre student…arrived in Afghanistan as a zero.” Weaver describes his “botched operation[s]” in Jordan and his use of a “hapless would-be bomber.” Stern and Berger explain that bin Laden and his followers did not like him because they “were mostly members of an intellectual educated elite, while Zarqawi was a barely educated ruffian with an attitude.”

If writers have much less to say about the current leader, al-Baghdadi, this is because his biography, as Weiss and Hassan concede, “still hovers not far above the level of rumor or speculation, some of it driven, in fact, by competing jihadist propagandists.”

Nor is ISIS’s distinctive approach to insurgency – from holding territory to fighting regular armies – an obvious advantage. Lawrence of Arabia advised that insurgents must be like a mist – everywhere and nowhere – never trying to hold ground or wasting lives in battles with regular armies. Chairman Mao insisted that guerrillas should be fish who swam in the sea of the local population. Such views are the logical corollaries of “asymmetric warfare” in which a smaller, apparently weaker group – like ISIS – confronts a powerful adversary such as the US and Iraqi militaries. This is confirmed by US Army studies of more than forty historical insurgencies, which suggest again and again that holding ground, fighting pitched battles, and alienating the cultural and religious sensibilities of the local population are fatal.

But such tactics are exactly part of ISIS’s explicit strategy. Zarqawi lost thousands of fighters trying to hold Fallujah in 2004. He wasted the lives of his suicide bombers in constant small attacks and – by imposing the most draconian punishments and obscurantist social codes – outraged the Sunni communities that he claimed to represent. ISIS fighters are now clearly attracted by the movement’s ability to control territory in such places as Mosul – as an interview in Yalda Hakim’s recent BBC documentary Mosul: Living with Islamic State confirms. But it is not clear that this tactic – although alluring, and at the moment associated with success – has become any less risky.

The movement’s behavior, however, has not become less reckless or tactically bizarre since Zarqawi’s death. One US estimate by Larry Schweikart suggested that 40,000 insurgents had been killed, about 200,000 wounded, and 20,000 captured before the US even launched the surge in 2006. By June 2010, General Ray Odierno claimed that 80 percent of the movement’s top forty-two leaders had been killed or captured, with only eight remaining at large. But after the US left in 2011, instead of rebuilding its networks in Iraq, the battered remnants chose to launch an invasion of Syria, and took on not just the regime, but also the well-established Free Syrian Army. It attacked the movement’s Syrian branch – Jabhat-al-Nusra – when it broke away. It enraged al-Qaeda in 2014 by killing al-Qaeda’s senior emissary in the region. It deliberately provoked tens of thousands of Shia militiamen to join the fight on the side of the Syrian regime, and then challenged the Iranian Quds force by advancing on Baghdad.

Next, already struggling against these new enemies, the movement opened another front in August 2014 by attacking Kurdistan, driving the Kurdish forces – who had hitherto stayed out of the battle – to retaliate. It beheaded the American journalist James Foley and the British aid worker David Haines, thereby bringing in the US and UK. It enraged Japan by demanding hundreds of millions of dollars for a hostage who was already dead. It finished 2014 by mounting a suicidal attack on Kobane in Syria, in the face of over six hundred US air strikes, losing many thousands of ISIS fighters and gaining no ground. When, as recently as April, the movement lost Tikrit and seemed to be declining, the explanation appeared obvious. Analysts were on the verge of concluding that ISIS had lost because it was reckless, abhorrent, over-extended, fighting on too many fronts, with no real local support, unable to translate terrorism into a popular program, inevitably outmatched by regular armies.

Some analysts have, therefore, focused their explanations not on the movement’s often apparently self-defeating military strategy, but on its governance and revenue, its support from the population, and its reliance on tens of thousands of foreign fighters. Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow of the Middle East Forum, has explained in recent blog posts how in some occupied cities such as Raqqa in Syria, the movement has created complicated civil service structures, taking control even of municipal waste departments. He describes the revenue it derives from local income and property taxes, and by leasing out former Iraqi and Syrian state offices to businesses. He shows how this has given ISIS a broad and reliable income base, which is only supplemented by the oil smuggling and the antiquity looting so well described by Nicolas Pelham in these pages.

ISIS’s power is now reinforced by the staggering arsenal that the movement has taken from the fleeing Iraqi and Syrian army – including tanks, Humvees, and major artillery pieces. Reports from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Vice News over the last twelve months have shown that many Sunnis in Iraq and Syria now feel that ISIS is the only plausible guarantor of order and security in the civil war, and their only defense against brutal retribution from the Damascus and Baghdad governments.

But here too the evidence is confusing and contradictory. Yalda Hakim’s BBC documentary on Mosul makes rough brutality the secret of ISIS’s domination. In his book The Digital Caliphate, Abdel Bari Atwan, however, describes (in Malise Ruthven’s words) “a well-run organization that combines bureaucratic efficiency and military expertise with a sophisticated use of information technology.” Zaid Al-Ali, in his excellent account of Tikrit, talks about ISIS’s “incapacity to govern” and the total collapse of water supply, electricity, and schools, and ultimately population under its rule. “Explanations” that refer to resources and power are ultimately circular. The fact that the movement has been able to attract the apparent support, or acquiescence, of the local population, and control territory, local government revenue, oil, historical sites, and military bases, has been a result of the movement’s success and its monopoly of the insurgency. It is not a cause of it.

In ISIS: The State of Terror, Stern and Berger provide a fascinating analysis of the movement’s use of video and social media. They have tracked individual Twitter accounts, showing how users kept changing their Twitter handles, piggybacked on the World Cup by inserting images of beheadings into the soccer chat, and created new apps and automated bots to boost their numbers. Stern and Berger show that at least 45,000 pro-movement accounts were online in late 2014, and describe how their users attempted to circumvent Twitter administrators by changing their profile pictures from the movement’s flags to kittens. But this simply raises the more fundamental question of why the movement’s ideology and actions – however slickly produced and communicated – have had popular appeal in the first place.

Nor have there been any more satisfying explanations of what draws the 20,000 foreign fighters who have joined the movement. At first, the large number who came from Britain were blamed on the British government having made insufficient effort to assimilate immigrant communities; then France’s were blamed on the government pushing too hard for assimilation. But in truth, these new foreign fighters seemed to sprout from every conceivable political or economic system. They came from very poor countries (Yemen and Afghanistan) and from the wealthiest countries in the world (Norway and Qatar). Analysts who have argued that foreign fighters are created by social exclusion, poverty, or inequality should acknowledge that they emerge as much from the social democracies of Scandinavia as from monarchies (a thousand from Morocco), military states (Egypt), authoritarian democracies (Turkey), and liberal democracies (Canada). It didn’t seem to matter whether a government had freed thousands of Islamists (Iraq), or locked them up (Egypt), whether it refused to allow an Islamist party to win an election (Algeria) or allowed an Islamist party to be elected. Tunisia, which had the most successful transition from the Arab Spring to an elected Islamist government, nevertheless produced more foreign fighters than any other country.

Nor was the surge in foreign fighters driven by some recent change in domestic politics or in Islam. Nothing fundamental had shifted in the background of culture or religious belief between 2012, when there were almost none of these foreign fighters in Iraq, and 2014, when there were 20,000. The only change is that there was suddenly a territory available to attract and house them. If the movement had not seized Raqqa and Mosul, many of these men might well have simply continued to live out their lives with varying degrees of strain – as Normandy dairy farmers or council employees in Cardiff. We are left again with tautology – ISIS exists because it can exist – they are there because they’re there.

Finally, a year ago, it seemed plausible to attach much of the blame for the rise of the movement to former Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki’s disastrous administration of Iraq. No longer. Over the last year, a new, more constructive, moderate, and inclusive leader, Haider al-Abadi, has been appointed prime minister; the Iraqi army has been restructured under a new Sunni minister of defense; the old generals have been removed; and foreign governments have competed to provide equipment and training. Some three thousand US advisers and trainers have appeared in Iraq. Formidable air strikes and detailed surveillance have been provided by the United States, the United Kingdom, and others. The Iranian Quds force, the Gulf states, and the Kurdish Peshmerga have joined the fight on the ground.

For all these reasons the movement was expected to be driven back and lose Mosul in 2015. Instead, in May, it captured Palmyra in Syria and – almost simultaneously – Ramadi, three hundred miles away in Iraq. In Ramadi, three hundred ISIS fighters drove out thousands of trained and heavily equipped Iraqi soldiers. The US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter observed:

“The Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered. In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight.”

The movement now controls a “terrorist state” far more extensive and far more developed than anything that George W. Bush evoked at the height of the “Global War on Terror.” Then, the possibility of Sunni extremists taking over the Iraqi province of Anbar was used to justify a surge of 170,000 US troops and the expenditure of over $100 billion a year. Now, years after the surge, ISIS controls not only Anbar, but also Mosul and half of the territory of Syria. Its affiliates control large swaths of northern Nigeria and significant areas of Libya. Hundreds of thousands have now been killed and millions displaced; horrors unimaginable even to the Taliban – among them the reintroduction of forcible rape of minors and slavery – have been legitimized. And this catastrophe has not only dissolved the borders between Syria and Iraq, but provoked the forces that now fight the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen.

The clearest evidence that we do not understand this phenomenon is our consistent inability to predict – still less control – these developments. Who predicted that Zarqawi would grow in strength after the US destroyed his training camps in 2001? It seemed unlikely to almost everyone that the movement would regroup so quickly after his death in 2006, or again after the surge in 2007. We now know more and more facts about the movement and its members, but this did not prevent most analysts from believing as recently as two months ago that the defeats in Kobane and Tikrit had tipped the scales against the movement, and that it was unlikely to take Ramadi. We are missing something.

Part of the problem may be that commentators still prefer to focus on political, financial, and physical explanations, such as anti-Sunni discrimination, corruption, lack of government services in captured territories, and ISIS’s use of violence. Western audiences are, therefore, rarely forced to focus on ISIS’s bewildering ideological appeal. I was surprised when I saw that even a Syrian opponent of ISIS was deeply moved by a video showing how ISIS destroyed the “Sykes-Picot border” between Iraq and Syria, established since 1916, and how it went on to reunite divided tribes. I was intrigued by the condemnation issued by Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of al-Azhar – one of the most revered Sunni clerics in the world: “This group is Satanic – they should have their limbs amputated or they should be crucified.” I was taken aback by bin Laden’s elegy for Zarqawi: his “story will live forever with the stories of the nobles…. Even if we lost one of our greatest knights and princes, we are happy that we have found a symbol….”

But the “ideology” of ISIS is also an insufficient explanation. Al-Qaeda understood better than anyone the peculiar blend of Koranic verses, Arab nationalism, crusader history, poetic reference, sentimentalism, and horror that can animate and sustain such movements. But even its leaders thought that Zarqawi’s particular approach was irrational, culturally inappropriate, and unappealing. In 2005, for example, al-Qaeda leaders sent messages advising Zarqawi to stop publicizing his horrors. They used modern strategy jargon – “more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media” – and told him that the “lesson” of Afghanistan was that the Taliban had lost because they had relied – like Zarqawi – on too narrow a sectarian base. And the al-Qaeda leaders were not the only Salafi jihadists who assumed that their core supporters preferred serious religious teachings to snuff videos (just as al-Tayeb apparently assumed that an Islamist movement would not burn a Sunni Arab pilot alive in a cage).

Much of what ISIS has done clearly contradicts the moral intuitions and principles of many of its supporters. And we sense – through Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss’s careful interviews – that its supporters are at least partially aware of this contradiction. Again, we can list the different external groups that have provided funding and support to ISIS. But there are no logical connections of ideology, identity, or interests that should link Iran, the Taliban, and the Baathists to one another or to ISIS. Rather, each case suggests that institutions that are starkly divided in theology, politics, and culture perpetually improvise lethal and even self-defeating partnerships of convenience.

The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast.

I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough – even in hindsight – to have predicted the movement’s rise.

We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.

(Books reviewed: ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan; ISIS: The State of Terror, by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger)

NO ONE SEEMS TO KNOW WHO’S RUNNING IT

Sinai’s ISIS offshoot is most effective in Mideast, senior IDF official say
And yet, no one seems to know who’s running it.
By Amos Harel
Haaretz
July 27, 2015

Wilayat Sinai is a well organized and highly skilled terrorist organization. That’s the impression senior Israel Defense Forces officers have gotten from the Islamic State-affiliated group after its string of attacks on Egyptian security forces in Sinai, culminating in a major attack near the town of Sheikh Zuweid on July 1.

A senior officer in the IDF’s Southern Command told Haaretz that an analysis of the latter incident, including the footage Wilayat Sinai itself shot and posted on YouTube, clearly shows that the attack was planned by professionals. The militants attacked 15 outposts and checkpoints simultaneously, spanning an area 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) wide. “Every Egyptian outpost in this sector took fire,” he said.

How many casualties the attack caused remains in dispute, though: Wilayat Sinai said it killed more than 60 soldiers; the Egyptian army said it lost only 23 soldiers, and killed dozens of terrorists.

The IDF officer said the attack demonstrated a high level of coordination, command and control. It involved more than 100 fighters and a wide range of weaponry, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.

The organization’s combat capabilities are steadily increasing over time, he added, and many of its fighters are willing to sacrifice their lives in frontal assaults on Egyptian outposts or in suicide bombings. Wilayat Sinai has also become increasingly skilled in deploying explosives, including booby-trapped cars. In recent attacks, it has used a tactic familiar from other parts of the Middle East, including Iraq and Lebanon: sending a booby-trapped car to blow up the gate to an army compound, followed by fighters who storm the compound’s interior.

On average, the group has perpetrated attacks on Egyptian forces every two or three days over the past six months. That indicates an ability to regroup rapidly, as well as a steady supply of arms. Wilayat Sinai apparently has a large stockpile of weaponry, and also smuggles in more from Libya and Sudan. Since transferring its allegiance from Al-Qaida to Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) in late 2014, the group has benefited from a clear increase in outside financial assistance.

For the past two years, Wilayat Sinai has refrained from attacking Israel, aside from sporadic rocket fire at the south; its top priority is its war against the military regime in Cairo. But the IDF is preparing for the possibility that it might step up its efforts to attack Israel in the future.

In the first half of this year, more than 100 members of the Egyptian security services were killed in terror attacks. Given Wilayat Sinai’s small size – it apparently commands no more than a few hundred fighters – this makes it the most effective Islamic State franchise in the Middle East in terms of the ratio between the number of fighters it deploys and the number of casualties it inflicts.

But despite the group’s steadily improving capabilities, it seems that both Egyptian and Israeli intelligence are still in the dark about the identities of the people running it. The IDF admits it doesn’t know who Wilayat Sinai’s military commander is. And given the extremely close security cooperation between Israel and Egypt in Sinai, this presumably means the Egyptians don’t know, either.

To enable Egypt to fight Wilayat Sinai and other radical Islamist groups in the peninsula more effectively, Israel has gradually allowed Cairo to move far more forces – both infantry and armor – into northern Sinai than are authorized under their peace treaty, and also to deploy weaponry forbidden by the treaty. Among other things, the Egyptians are now using Apache helicopters and F-16 fighters to conduct aerial assaults on these groups.

“ISIS OPERATES WITH STEALTH AND SPEED THAT THE U.S. GOVERNMENT ISN’T PREPARED TO MATCH”

U.S. Security Conference Reveals Islamic State as Confounding Foe
By Damian Paletta
Wall Street Journal
July 27, 2015

ASPEN, Colo. – Top U.S. national security officials at a multiday mountain summit described Islamic State militants as a fast-moving and confounding enemy, immune to some of the counterterrorism methods that appeared to work more effectively against al Qaeda.

Some suggested that efforts to counter Islamic State advances were yielding success, but others painted a picture of a militant group that – particularly on social media – operates with stealth and speed that the U.S. government wasn’t prepared to match.

“We didn’t perfect the process of sharing information and sharing intelligence until this emergency really exploded in our faces,” said retired Marine Gen. John Allen, now a top State Department official who leads the government’s effort to combat Islamic State.

The three days of panels at the Aspen Security Forum demonstrated the extent of the challenge facing Gen. Allen and other law enforcement, security, intelligence, military, and foreign policy leaders as they continue to re-evaluate their approach to the militant group.

U.S. officials described two glaring challenges. First, the places where Islamic State thrives-northern Iraq, Syria, and Libya – are major U.S. intelligence blind spots. The U.S. government has no military or diplomatic presence in these areas and it is difficult to monitor activity.

Second is the challenge posed by Islamic State’s use of social media to recruit supporters and inspire followers to carry out attacks in the U.S. Against al Qaeda, U.S. officials had successfully tracked and disrupted networks often made up of trusted allies with long-standing relationships. Islamic State militants, however, often have much looser bonds, and have motivated attacks with people who militants never meet in person.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said these militants connect with possible sympathizers by using the social media network Twitter, then they hold conversations by using encrypted technology that the U.S. government has a hard time monitoring.

After this point, its difficult to know who of the estimated 20,000 people following Islamic State’s messages on Twitter might carry out an attack, he said. The length of time between initial contact with militants and an attempted domestic terrorist attack can be very quick, or can have a longer fuse.

“The flash-to-bang’ is both short and unpredictable with ISIL,” Mr. Comey said, using an acronym for the group.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John McCain (R., Ariz.) appeared at the conference over the weekend and unloaded on the Obama administration’s approach to combating Islamic State, saying, “We have no strategy” – a criticism he repeated four times.

The Aspen conference is styled as a relaxed setting for top U.S. government officials to meet with academics, business leaders, and others to discuss security concerns. Neck ties are frowned upon, and some attendees – though not military leaders – wear jeans and sport coats. The retreat center is on a bluff above the Roaring Fork River. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said three bears had congregated outside his lodge one night.

In 2014, leaders met at the summit just weeks after Islamic State shocked U.S. and Iraqi officials by invading and capturing Mosul, a major city in northern Iraq. Many were unsure how long Islamic State militants would be able to gain or hold footholds in Iraq and Syria.

But this week, U.S. officials offered no timeline for defeating the group or even a concise strategy for its ouster. Islamic State militants still hold Mosul and they have expanded their grip into other parts of the country, notably the Anbar province and the key city of Ramadi. They have also gained footholds in Africa, sending operatives to Libya and forming a loose alliance with Boko Haram militants in Nigeria.

The U.S. this week secured agreements with Turkey to step up the tempo of a military-led effort. But illustrating the depth of U.S. concern, Mr. Comey said the FBI also has active investigations into terrorist groups in all 50 U.S. states. Mr. Johnson said he is meeting around the country with Muslim groups to try to address what he described as “violent extremism” among many young men.

Despite months of efforts to disrupt Islamic State’s revenue supply, Daniel Glaser, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing, said, “They have a lot of money.”

Gen. Allen said U.S. officials are re-evaluating their approach for counting Islamic State’s message on social media, suggesting that efforts by the State Department and other agencies so far have borne little fruit. He suggested a more effective communications strategy might require “an Arab face and a Muslim voice.”

Gen. Joseph Votel, Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, said that many military successes against Islamic State in the Middle East had only served to push the militants to regroup somewhere else. Victories can appear short-lived, he said.

“What we’ve seen is, you apply pressure and then the bulge comes out somewhere else,” he said.

Despite the rhetorical hand-wringing, there were some bright spots. A number of U.S. officials said that efforts to combat al Qaeda had proven extremely successful and they said the group’s reach had been greatly diminished.

Nick Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said many of the terror groups U.S. officials are currently tracking lack the “scale” that al Qaeda used to embrace, and he said the likelihood of a large terrorist event like the 2001 attacks had been greatly reduced.

“Scale matters in my mind and none of the terrorist actors that we are confronting… at present have at their ready disposal right now the ability to carry out attacks of that size and scale,” he said.

The gathering didn’t focus exclusively on terrorist attacks. National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers said for the first time that in the past nine months, his surveillance had detected “huge spearphishing campaigns,” a reference to a type of cyberattack that tries to trick unwitting email recipients to download malware. He also said he had recently issued a high-level directive toward one of his teams to mobilize to protect a computer network against an attack, though he wouldn’t provide more details.

While the officials also discussed concerns involving China, North Korea, Iran, Russia and drug cartels, the discussion rarely strayed far from Islamic State.

In a steady drizzle Friday night, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper addressed the summit in a large outdoor tent. He said efforts against the terror network were ongoing, but he made an ominous prediction about terror attacks on U.S. soil carried out or inspired by the group.

“I personally think it’s a question of time before we have more of these than we’ve had already,” he said. “It’s a very daunting challenge for us.”

Above a children’s store called Mummy & Me (& Jon Stewart: “Sounds like a good partner for peace”)

July 22, 2015

DEPUTY FM: IRAN TO CONTINUE SUPPLYING FRIENDS WITH ARMS

From Iran’s Fars news agency:

Deputy FM: Iran to Continue Supplying Friends with Arms if Necessary
Tue Jul 21, 2015 12:59

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araqchi underlined that the nuclear agreement inked by Tehran and the world powers doesn’t include any contents related to Iran’s weapons and missile power, adding that the country will continue arms assistance to its regional allies.

“We have told them (the Group 5+1 - the US, Russia, China, Britain and France plus Germany) in the negotiations that we will supply arms to anyone and anywhere necessary and will import weapons from anywhere we want and we have clarified this during the negotiations,” Araqchi told the state TV on Monday night.

The rest of the text is here:

http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940430000312

JAFARI: “WE WILL NEVER ACCEPT” SECTIONS OF THE UNSC RESOLUTION

Raja News:

http://www.rajanews.com/news/217425

Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commander Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari discussed the nuclear deal and the draft of the UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution. He stated:

On the UNSC resolution: “Some of the things that were contained in the draft were particularly contrary to and in violation of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s red lines, especially regarding armament capabilities, and we will never accept them.”

… “Fundamentally, the Americans’ arrogant and brutal nature tells us that if they had believed a little bit in their own military capability against Iran, they would not have sat at the negotiating table.”

“Not once, but several times, the Americans and their domesticated dogs – meaning the Zionist regime – have had their snouts rubbed in the dirt against such groups as Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance, which are considered a small part of the massive ability of the global Islamic revolution; therefore, a knowledgeable person not only does not take such ridiculous claims and threats from the Americans seriously, but also understands that it is clearer proof of their frustration and misery.”

BBC MONITORING: IRAN CAN DENY ACCESS TO NUCLEAR, MILITARY SITES UNDER DEAL

From BBC Monitoring Trans Caucasus Unit (which has very different content than the mainstream BBC English)
Tuesday July 21, 2015

Source: Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran - Radio Farhang, Tehran, in Persian 0440gmt 21 Jul 15

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said that Iran has secured its right to deny access to its sites for nuclear inspection and to ballistic missiles as part of a deal concluded with six world powers on 14 July. Zarif said this in an open Majlis session to brief MPs on the content of the nuclear deal on 21 July. The session was aired live by state-run Radio Farhang.

“Through severe resistance of the [Iranian] negotiating team, the opposite party fully abandoned its previous request of the inspection and verification of the missile programme and tests,” he added.

Zarif said that restriction on Iran’s missile programme has been removed from Chapter 7 of UN Resolution 1929 and “has turned into a non-binding restriction”. He said that all the inspections that the opposite party had been insisting upon a day before concluding the deal have been dropped.

BASIJ COMMANDER: VIENNA AGREEMENT INCREASES HATRED FOR U.S. IN IRAN

From Iran’s Fars news agency:

Basij Commander: Vienna Agreement Increases Hatred for US in Iran
July 22, 2015

TEHRAN (FNA) - Commander of Iran’s Basij (volunteer) Force Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi warned of Washington’s continued animosity towards the Islamic Republic, and said the contents of the last Tuesday nuclear agreement between Tehran and the world powers in Vienna boosts Iranians’ hatred for the US.

“Any Iranian who reads the Vienna documents will hate the US 100 times more (than the past),” Naqdi said on Tuesday.

He also referred to the UN Security Council’s Resolution 2231 approved on Monday, and said, “All paragraphs of the resolution that the US proposed to the UNSC are full of enmity towards Iran and show the US deep grudge against the Iranian nation.” …

He said that Islamic Iran will never yield to excessive demands of the enemies while safeguarding its defensive and security capabilities.

The rest of the text is here:

http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940430000738

IRANIAN FOREIGN MINISTRY: BALLISTIC MISSILES ARE “OUTSIDE THE DOMAIN” OF THE UNSC

Official Statement from Iranian foreign ministry

In an announcement released after the UN Security Council (UNSC) adopted the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on July 20, the Foreign Ministry stated:

“Iran’s military capabilities, including ballistic missiles, are exclusively for self-defense; this equipment [will not] carry nuclear weapons; therefore, it is outside the domain of the UNSC and its attachments.” (MFA)

http://mfa.ir/index.aspx?siteid=1&fkeyid=&siteid=1&fkeyid=&siteid=1&pageid=176&newsview=349928

See also:

http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940430000489

LEADER’S AIDE: INSPECTION OF IRAN’S MILITARY SITES IMPOSSIBLE

From Iran’s Fars news agency:

Leader’s Aide: Inspection of Iran’s Military Sites Impossible
Tue Jul 21, 2015 4:15

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Supreme Leader’s top adviser for international affairs Ali Akbar Velayati stressed that Iran will never allow any outsider to inspect its military sites.

“They (the westerners) have made some comments about defensive and missile issues, but Iran will not allow them to visit our military centers and interfere in decisions about the type of Iran’s defensive weapons,” Velayati said on Tuesday.

The rest of the text is here:

http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940430000961

DEFENSE MINISTER: IRAN TO KEEP MISSILE PROGRAM ALIVE

DM: Iran to keep missile program alive
News ID: 2862322 - Mon 20 July 2015 - 18:00

http://en.mehrnews.com/news/108677/Iran-to-keep-missile-program-alive

TEHRAN, Jul. 20 (MNA) – Iran’s defense minister has said no access to military and security confidential data and centers would be granted to any authority.

Hossein Dehqan who was addressing a meeting of the ministry on Monday, emphasized that Iran’s missile program had been not a subject for nuclear negotiations and would continue stronger than ever.

***

See also:

DM: Iran Not to Allow Access to Military Sites
Mon Jul 20, 2015 7:22
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940429001105

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan underlined that Tehran will not allow any foreigner to discover Iran’s defensive and missile capabilities by inspecting the country’s military sites…

The Iranian Defense Minister reiterated that the time has come now for the Americans to realize that they are not the world’s super power and no one recognizes them as such any longer…

***

See also:

Dehghan: Iran is moving forward with “its missile programs.”

Speaking at a meeting of Defense Ministry officials regarding the nuclear agreement, Defense Minister IRGC Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan stated:

“Issues related to missiles have never been on the agenda of the talks, and the system [of the Islamic Republic] will implement its programs in this field [of missiles] with determination.”

“This agreement was the result of the resistance and courage of the country of Iran, and a measure of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution’s wisdom and the nuclear negotiating team’s intelligence and strength, which led to the major world powers’ acceptance of the dignified stance of the Islamic Republic; it is the first step on the path to resolve…Iran’s nuclear issue, that its implementation requires complete respect for…Iran’s red lines by the P5+1 and [gaining] the trust of the nation of Iran by the P5+1 and international organizations.” …

http://www.sepahnews.com/shownews.Aspx?ID=8a7f08e1-f3bc-4aa3-aafd-f3e80f0289c9

***

See also:

Iranian DM Rules Out Any Access to Military Sites
July 20, 2015 - 18:12
http://www.tasnimnews.com/english/Home/Single/805144

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan reiterated Tehran’s red line on any access to military sites under the pretext of nuclear inspection, saying that the Islamic Republic will not give any international authority access to its military secrets…

SENIOR MP: NO ONE CAN IMPOSE RESTRICTIONS ON IRAN’S DEFENSIVE CAPABILITIES

Senior MP: No One Can Impose Restrictions on Iran’s Defensive Capabilities
Mon Jul 20, 2015 1:29
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13940429000522

TEHRAN (FNA)- Vice-Chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mansour Haqiqatpour underlined the parliament’s strong opposition to any restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missiles program under a final nuclear deal…

THE IRAN DEAL WILL HELP RUSSIA’S ARMS INDUSTRY

http://www.business2community.com/world-news/the-iran-deal-will-help-russia-have-a-stealth-air-force-01277064

The Iran deal will boost Russia’s arms industry and make it possible for Russia to replace Iran’s older aircraft with newer stealth models.

Thanks to the deal approved by the U.S., the allies and by Russia, the arms embargo on Iran will “officially” be lifted in 5 years. But the rush to sell arms to Iran has been on for some time and defense companies from Europe along with the Russians, Chinese and North Koreans have been flocking to Tehran offering their wares.

The biggest single need for Iran is fighter and bomber aircraft. There have been many reports that iran has already made deals with China and Russia, but the big deals are still ahead of us. That’s because until now Iran did not have the cash. The nuclear deal is pouring cash into Iran most of which will be spent on arms…

EXCERPT FROM NETANYAHU’S REMARKS AT THE KNESSET

The following is an excerpt from remarks Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made on Monday, 20 July 2015, at the Knesset:

“On the day on which the ruler of Iran has reiterated his intention to destroy the State of Israel, the UN Security Council is giving its approval to that same country, which has systematically violated the UNSC’s decisions and which calls for the destruction of Israel, a member of the UN. The hypocrisy knows no bounds. The best way to fight this hypocrisy is to tell the truth in a strong and unified manner. Here is the truth:

They say that this agreement makes war more distant. This is not true; this agreement brings war closer. First, because Iran will receive hundreds of billions of dollars and it is already openly declaring that it will use this money to finance and arm its terrorist movements and its aggression in the region and around the world. Second, there will be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

They also say that a UN decision is the end of the story. This is not true, because as long as US Congressional sanctions are in place – and I remind you that the American economy is 40 times as large as the Iranian economy – Iran will be compelled in the end to make concessions, and not just receive them.

They say that ‘It cannot be that the whole world is wrong’ and from this they conclude that the agreement is good; this is not true. First, the entire world is not wrong and many in the Middle East see eye-to-eye with Israel and concur that this agreement is dangerous, dangerous to them, dangerous to the region and dangerous to the world. Second, history has already proven that when the world is united it is not necessarily right.

Just a few years ago there was broad international agreement on a nuclear agreement with North Korea and today North Korea has approximately a dozen nuclear bombs and it is on the way to attaining many more. This truth must be said loud and clear because the truth serves the interests of Israel.”

ARTICLES

THE RISK IN LIFTING SANCTIONS, AND PRESSURE, ON IRAN’S WEAPONS ACTIVITIES

(For space reasons, I include extracts only -- TG)

The risk in lifting sanctions, and pressure, on Iran’s weapons activities
By Michael Singh
Wall Street Journal
July 21, 2015

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/07/21/the-risk-in-lifting-sanctions-and-pressure-on-iran-weapons-activities/tab/print/

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee this month that “we should under no circumstances relieve pressure on Iran relative to ballistic missile capabilities and arms trafficking.” Yet under the Iran nuclear agreement announced last week and endorsed Monday by the U.N. Security Council, sanctions on conventional arms are to be lifted in five years and missile sanctions in eight years (possibly sooner under certain conditions). And Iran appears to be making no promises to limit its activities in either area…

Iranian arms trafficking to Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and others threatens stability in the Middle East. Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel in 2006 were carried out using Iranian rockets and missiles. Conflicts in Yemen, Gaza, and Syria are fueled by Iranian arms, and such Iranian intervention feeds Sunni grievances that benefit the likes of the Islamic State.

As Iran develops more advanced missiles and more sensitive nuclear technology, these capabilities, too, could be shared. The U.S. does have other authorities to interdict arms shipments to terrorist groups, as President Obama has noted. But interdiction requires having intelligence and opportunity, and the latter often involves depending on the will and capacity of Iran’s neighbors to assist. These tasks would be far easier if the arms are prohibited from reaching Iran in the first place….

HIZBULLAH’S GROWING DOMESTIC WOES

(For space reasons, I include extracts only -- TG)

Hizbullah’s growing domestic woes
By David Schenker
National Interest
July 21, 2015

The nuclear agreement with Iran may represent a dramatic shift in geopolitics in favor of the Shiite theocracy, but for Lebanese Shiites, domestic concerns prevail. Lebanon’s 1.6 million Shiites are worried about the Islamic State and Jebhat al Nusra. And for good reason. Over the past four years, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah has been fighting in Syria, helping the Assad regime kill nearly 300,000 mostly Sunni Muslims. In response, these Sunni jihadis are targeting Shiites in Lebanon. Yet according to recent polling conducted by the Lebanese NGO Hayya Bina, 80 percent of Lebanese Shiites believe Hezbollah’s deployment in Syria is making the community safer. Indeed, the “Party of God’s” mission in Syria is regarded as so critical that 47 percent of Lebanese Shiites now believe that “liberating” Israeli occupied Shebaa Farms should no longer be the militia’s priority.

To date, the evolving raison d’etre of Hezbollah -- from “resisting” Israel to conducting military campaigns in support of Iran from Yemen to Iraq to Syria -- has not diminished the militia’s support among its domestic constituency. But Hezbollah’s new role as Iran’s regional Praetorian Guard as well as its missteps at home are clearly raising concerns for many Lebanese Shiites.

Hezbollah’s deployment in Syria has already taken a heavy toll on Lebanon’s tight knit Shiite community. Since 2011, an estimated 1,000 Hezbollah fighters have been killed or wounded in action in Syria alone, so many that over 50 percent of Shiites polled said they knew someone “martyred” in the war. Almost every day, there are reports of burials in Lebanon; just this month four Hezbollah militiamen returned home from Syria in body-bags. Still other Hezbollah agents have died carrying out their “jihadist duties” elsewhere…

HIZBULLAH CONTINUES TO PLOT ATTACKS AROUND THE WORLD, WITH A PARTICULAR FOCUS ON EUROPE

Inside Hezbollah’s European Plots
The Lebanese terrorist group continues to operate in Europe despite warnings from the EU
By Matthew Levitt
Daily Beast
July 20, 2015

Three years ago this month, Hezbollah blew up a bus of tourists in Bulgaria. The European Union then banned the military wing of Hezbollah. But despite both being blacklisted by Brussels and being heavily invested in the Syrian war, Hezbollah continues to plot attacks around the world, with a particular focus on Europe.

Recent Hezbollah plots were exposed as far afield as Peru and Thailand, but the latest plot was thwarted in Cyprus, where Hussein Bassam Abdallah, a dual Lebanese-Canadian citizen, stockpiled 8.2 tons of ammonium nitrate, a popular chemical explosive. Last week, Abdallah pled guilty to all eight charges against him -- including participation in a terrorist group (read: Hezbollah), possessing explosives, and conspiracy to commit a crime. It was the second time in three years that a Cypriot court has sentenced a Hezbollah operative to prison for plotting an attack in Cyprus. But this latest plot is different, in part because it reveals that the EU’s warnings to Hezbollah not to operate on European soil have not dissuaded the group at all.

Back in July 2012, Cypriot authorities watched Hussam Yaacoub, a dual Lebanese-Swedish Hezbollah operative, conduct surveillance of Israeli tourists and arrested him in his hotel room a few hours later (he was ultimately convicted and jailed). A few days later, a group of Hezbollah operatives -- one of them a French citizen -- blew up a bus of Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria. Brussels was faced with the reality that Hezbollah was dispatching European operatives to carry out operations on European soil.

After months of often acrimonious deliberations, senior European officials gathered in Brussels in July 2013 to announce that all 28 EU member states agreed to add Hezbollah’s military wing -- not the organization itself -- to the EU’s list of banned terrorist groups. At the time, European officials pointed to the blacklisting as a shot across the bow. “This is a signal to terrorist organizations,” German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle warned. “If you attack one of our European countries, you get an answer from all of them.”

Fast forward two years. New evidence reveals that Hezbollah’s military wing is still plotting attacks across Europe. We now know that the explosive material recently found in Cyprus was stored in the basement of a house in a residential Larnaca neighborhood sometime in 2011. In other words, these two Cyprus plots were not consecutive, but overlapping and possibly connected. By the time the EU banned Hezbollah’s military wing, the recently seized explosives had already been in the country for over a year, maybe two. Hussein Abdallah made around ten trips to Cyprus to check on the explosives stockpile starting in 2012. He was paid handsomely to serve as guardian of chemicals: he was arrested carrying 9,400 euros, which he conceded was his latest payment from Hezbollah.

Abdallah admitted that Hezbollah planned to mount attacks in Cyprus targeting Israeli or Jewish interests there, but that was hardly the full scope of the operation. Indeed, the amount of explosives Hezbollah stockpiled would have facilitated many attacks. According to Israeli investigators, Hezbollah was using Cyprus as a “point of export” from which to funnel explosives elsewhere for a series of attacks in Europe. Indeed, the plot was already in motion: investigators believe the explosives used in the 2012 Burgas bus bombing may have come from the batch of chemicals stored in Cyprus.

The threat to Europe was real. Not only did Hezbollah actively maintain an explosives stockpile in Cyprus, the group retained the operatives, infrastructure and reach to engage in operations across Europe. Over the course of time Abdallah maintained this explosives stockpile, Hezbollah remained active across Europe, from a 2012 bombing thwarted in Greece to the arrest and deportation of a Hezbollah operative in Denmark in 2013 who arrived on a commercial ship for purposes still unknown. Four months after the EU ban, in late 2013, two Lebanese passengers at a Brussels airport were caught with nearly 770,000 euros in their possession. At least some of this cash was suspected to be intended for Hezbollah’s coffers, Europol reported. A few months later, Germany raided the offices of the Orphan Children Project Lebanon in Essen, accusing the group of serving as a Hezbollah fundraising front organization. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency recently reported that Hezbollah maintains some 950 active operatives in the country.

Hezbollah weapons and technology procurement operations continued in Europe as well. In July 2014, the US Treasury blacklisted a Lebanese consumer electronics business, Stars Group Holding, along with its owners, subsidiaries, and “certain managers and individuals who support their illicit activities.” Together, they functioned as a “key Hezbollah procurement network” that purchased technology around the world -- including in Europe -- to develop the drones Hezbollah deploys over Israel and Syria.

Abdallah’s last assignment was to find a storage facility where the explosives stockpile could be stored, suggesting the plan to move small batches of the material to multiple locations across Europe may have been moving forward. While Abdallah traveled on his authentic Canadian passport, Hezbollah provided him a forged British identity card to use locally in Cyprus to rent the facility. This may have been his undoing, since traveling on authentic documents and using forgeries to conduct local, non-governmental business has become a preferred modus operandi for Hezbollah. Otherwise, authorities may not have picked up on the shipments themselves: Hezbollah reportedly is using commercial front companies under deep cover -- some as far away as China and Dubai -- to ship the dual-use chemicals it uses to manufacture explosives.

When the EU banned Hezbollah’s military wing, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius pledged, “there’s no question of accepting terrorist organizations in Europe.” Now, as Europe marked the third anniversary of the July 18 Hezbollah bus bombing in Bulgaria, there is abundant evidence that Hezbollah is doing just that: engaging in terrorist activities in Europe.

In other words, the EU banned part of Hezbollah and warned it to cease activities in Europe, and Hezbollah promptly called Brussels’ bluff. Which leaves us with Mr. Fabius’ question: will the EU accept a terrorist organization operating in Europe?

ABOVE A CHILDREN’S STORE CALLED MUMMY & ME

(For space reasons, I include extracts only -- TG)

The Deal
By Steve Coll
The New Yorker
July 27, 2015 Issue

In the late nineteen-eighties, in Switzerland, Iranian officials met with collaborators of A. Q. Khan, the scientist who fathered Pakistan’s nuclear-bomb program. The parties may also have met in Dubai, where Khan maintained a secret office above a children’s store called Mummy & Me. In 1987, the Iranians received a one-page document that included the offer of a disassembled centrifuge, along with diagrams of the machine. They reportedly ended up paying as much as ten million dollars for information and materials that helped Iran advance its nuclear program during the nineteen-nineties. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a scientist sometimes described as the closest thing to an Iranian Robert Oppenheimer, oversaw the Orchid Office, working secretly on detonators and on the challenge of fitting something like a nuke on a missile. In 2003, the agency confronted Iran with evidence that it maintained a clandestine nuclear program. Tehran denied any wrongdoing and parried inspectors, then built a centrifuge facility under a mountain near Qom, whose existence was revealed by the United States, Britain, and France in 2009.

This record of deception is one reason that the nuclear accord that Secretary of State John Kerry brought back to President Obama last week runs to a hundred and fifty-nine pages of text and annexes…

Inevitably, some uncertainty about Iran’s past weapons experiments – and, therefore, its present bomb-making capacity – will remain.

THE DANGERS OF THE IRAN NUCLEAR ACCORD

(For space reasons, I include extracts only -- TG)

The dangers of the Iran nuclear accord
By Abraham H. Foxman
Haaretz (JTA)
July 20, 2015

Today is the last day of my long tenure as national director of the Anti-Defamation League. It has been a highly satisfactory and meaningful 28 years as director and 50 years as a professional at this prestigious organization.

So why am I choosing to write an article on my last day? It is the same imperative that has motivated me all these years: If I see something troubling to the Jewish people, I cannot be still.

And I am deeply troubled at this time by the agreement between the P5+1 nations and Iran regarding Iran’s nuclear program…

I do not believe Congress will be able to fix this deal. But even if it cannot, a congressional ‘no’ and override of a presidential veto would send a number of clear messages…

I hope this critical debate over the next 60 days is conducted in a civil manner. Those who oppose the deal should not criticize the administration’s motives in reaching an agreement. On the other hand, the administration should desist from the kinds of demagogic accusations and insinuations claiming that opponents of the deal are warmongers.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.667002

IRAN INSPECTIONS IN 24 DAYS? NOT EVEN CLOSE

(For space reasons, I include extracts only -- TG)

Iran Inspections in 24 Days? Not Even Close
Iran can easily stretch out the inspection of suspect nuclear sites for three months or more.
By Hillel Fradkin and Lewis Libby
Wall Street Journal
July 22, 2015

The Obama administration assures Americans that the Iran deal grants access within 24 days to undeclared but suspected Iranian nuclear sites. But that’s hardly how a recalcitrant Iran is likely to interpret the deal. A close examination of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action released by the Obama administration reveals that its terms permit Iran to hold inspectors at bay for months, likely three or more…

Opportunities for delay abound. Iran will presumably want to know what prompted the IAEA’s concern. The suspect site identified by the IAEA is likely to be remote, and Iran will no doubt say that it must gather skilled people and equipment to responsibly allay IAEA concerns. Iran may offer explanations in stages, seeking IAEA clarifications before “completing” its response. That could take a while…

Only if Iran’s “explanations do not resolve the IAEA’s concerns” may the IAEA then “request access” to the suspect site. Oddly, the agreement doesn’t specify who judges whether the explanations resolve concerns. If Iran claims that it has a say in the matter, the process may stall here. Assuming Iran grants that the IAEA can be the judge, might Iran claim that the “great Satan” improperly influenced IAEA conclusions? Let’s assume that Tehran won’t do that…

Now the IAEA must provide written reasons for the request and “make available relevant information.” Let’s assume that even though the IAEA may resist revealing the secret sources or technical means that prompted its suspicions, Iran acknowledges that a proper request has been supplied.

Only then do the supposed 24 days begin to run. First, Iran may propose, and the IAEA must consider, alternative means of resolving concerns. This may take 14 days. Absent satisfactory “arrangements,” a new period begins…

http://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-inspections-in-24-days-not-even-close-1437521911

“PRESIDENT OBAMA IS BOASTING THAT HIS DEAL IS REAGANESQUE. BUT REAGAN DID NOT ABANDON LATIN AMERICA TO ENEMIES OF LIBERTY”

A Richer Iran Will Target the Americas
Last October police in Lima found detonators and TNT in the home of a Hezbollah operative.
By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
Wall Street Journal
July 20, 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-richer-iran-will-target-the-americas-1437342912?

In the foreword to the 2014 book “Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America,” former Colombian Defense Minister Marta Lucía Ramírez wrote that Venezuela’s “ ‘axis of unity’ with Iran embodies Latin America’s growing distance” from the U.S. “This is not to distract from the many conflicts the U.S. is engaging in the Middle East or elsewhere,” she noted. But she wanted “to remind our northern neighbors of the kind of disengagement in Latin America that led to a nuclear standoff in 1962.”

Now the Obama administration has agreed to phase out many economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for its promises to disable parts of its nuclear program. The deal provides for winding down international restrictions on trade and investment with Iran. It is also expected to gradually liberate more than $100 billion in Iranian assets frozen by the U.S. and other countries.

This means that even if the agreement prevents Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, it will make the world less safe. National Security Adviser Susan Rice admitted as much last Wednesday when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked if “support [for] international terrorism” might be one use for the liberated assets. “In fact,” Ms. Rice said, “we should expect that some portion of that money would go to the Iranian military and could potentially be used for the kinds of bad behavior that we have seen in the region up until now.”

And not only in the Mideast. One likely destination for some of that money will be the Islamic Republic’s military, ideological and terrorist activities in the U.S. backyard. As Joseph Humire, executive director of the Washington-based Center for a Secure Free Society, put it to me last week, “if Iran gets access to the global financial system, they’re going to double down in Latin America.”

Iran has targeted Latin America since the mid-1980s by establishing mosques and cultural centers to spread the revolution. An arm of Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist proxy, took responsibility for the 1992 terrorist attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires. Argentine prosecutors named Iran as the mastermind behind the 1994 terrorist attack on the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) in the same city.

Iran has “observer” status in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, a coalition of pro-Castro governments in the hemisphere launched during the Venezuelan presidency of Hugo Chávez. ALBA’s members include Cuba, six other Caribbean countries, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. The alliance relationships with Iran mean Iranian and Hezbollah operatives now move about the Americas easily. A 2014 paper published by Mr. Humire’s center notes that intelligence officials in the region believe Tarek El Aissami, Venezuela’s interior minister from 2008-12, provided new identities to 173 Middle Easterners.

In 2013 Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor who was investigating the AMIA case, released a 500-page report about the extensive Iranian terrorism network in the hemisphere. One of his more chilling findings was that the foiled 2007 plot to blow up New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport was an Iranian operation, run by a Guyanese recruit. In January Nisman was found in his Buenos Aires apartment with a bullet through his head.

One argument for lifting the sanctions is that Iranians are suffering economically. But their hardships have done nothing to diminish the Islamic Republic’s Latin American adventures.

Iranian investment in the region is not about securing food or economic growth but rather about meeting strategic goals. There is solid evidence that since 2007 Iran has invested in uranium exploration – presumably tied to its nuclear interests – in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador. The Iranian military has at least one joint venture with Venezuela, located in the state of Aragua, where Mr. El Aissami is now governor.

Propaganda is an Iranian priority. HispanTV, launched in 2011, is a Spanish-language channel run by Iran. It has partnership agreements with state-run television in a number of ALBA countries. In his 2014 book, “Remote Control,” the respected Bolivian journalist Raúl Peñaranda alleged that Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad donated $3 million to President Evo Morales to finance and equip Bolivia’s state-owned television station Abya Yala.

Gen. Douglas Fraser , former head of the United States Southern Command, testified to Congress three years ago that Iran was backing at least 36 Shiite Islamic cultural centers in Central America, the Caribbean and South America. This year Gen. John Kelly, who now runs Southern Command, testified that there are more than 80.

Last October a Hezbollah operative was arrested in Lima on suspicion of plotting terrorism in Peru. Press reports said that police discovered detonators and TNT in his home, and evidence that he may have been scouting out the Jorge Chávez International Airport for a possible attack.

President Obama is boasting that his deal is Reaganesque. But Reagan did not abandon Latin America to enemies of liberty.

“You know, 2 Jews, 3 opinions. Here you have 8 million Jews, almost one opinion”

July 19, 2015

Tom Gross writes: This cartoon from the Saudi paper Al-Watan (one of many such cartoons in past days in the Arab world) shows Iran funneling billions more to terrorist groups, as it reaps the rewards of the nuclear agreement. Iran is acknowledged by almost all international intelligence agencies to be the world’s largest funder of state-sponsored terrorism, from Thailand to Argentina to Bulgaria to Lebanon. In one “small” overlooked incident this week, an Iranian-sponsored group slit the throats and shot dozens of prostitutes in Baghdad.

* Update: There is another dispatch on the Iran deal here: Above a children’s store called Mummy & Me (& Jon Stewart: “Sounds like a good partner for peace”).

KHAMENEI IN MAJOR TELEVISED SPEECH YESTERDAY: “YOU CHANTED ‘DEATH TO ISRAEL’, ‘DEATH TO AMERICA.’ WE ASK ALMIGHTY GOD TO ACCEPT THESE PRAYERS”

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

Yesterday in Tehran, in a major speech to mark the end of Ramadan, and just four days after Iran and some world powers signed a “peace deal,” Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hailed the “magnificent Iranian people” for demanding the destruction of Israel and America, and said he hoped that Allah would soon answer their prayers.

Referring to last week’s Al-Quds day rallies, Khamenei said yesterday: “You heard the chants of ‘Death to Israel’, ‘Death to the US.’ You could hear it… So we ask Almighty God to accept these prayers by the people of Iran.”

You can watch the lengthy speech here with a translation courtesy of the Iranian government’s Press TV.

In later stages of Khamenei’s speech, which was broadcast live on state television, it was punctuated by chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.

“FATHER OF IRAN'S NUCLEAR BOMB” TO ENJOY SANCTIONS RELIEF

Reports indicate that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is to enjoy full sanctions relief.

Fakhrizadeh is a senior officer in the elite Revolutionary Guards and is the driving force behind Tehran's nuclear bomb program. Western intelligence officials say he enjoys the full support of Ayatollah Khamenei, that he has three passports and travels widely (to Russia, north Korea and elsewhere) to obtain the most up-to-date know-how on the international nuclear black market.

The IAEA report in 2011 identified Fakhrizadeh as the central figure in suspected Iranian work to develop technology and skills needed for nuclear bombs.

“If the IAEA had a most-wanted list, Fakhrizadeh would head it,” Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the non-proliferation program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank in London, said.

“8 MILLION JEWS, ALMOST ONE OPINION”

Some of President Obama’s spin-doctors continue to put out the myth that the only opposition to his Iran deal comes from Republicans and the Israeli right.

In fact, virtually the entire Israeli political spectrum has come out harshly against the deal.

For example, Tzipi Livni (who is a fierce opponent of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on other issues) told Foreign Policy magazine: “The Iran agreement is terrible not only because of what it includes but also what it does not.”

Opposition Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog said the deal is so dangerous that he will now work with Netanyahu to try and block it.

Israel’s third opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said: “We thought it was a bad deal, but it is in fact a terrible deal. This agreement allows Iran to continue developing nuclear weapons, only this time with the help of the international community.

New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Jodi Rudoren and others re-tweeted Israeli minister Yuval Steinitz: “You know, 2 Jews, 3 opinions. Here you have 8 million Jews, almost one opinion.” (There are in fact about 6.2 million Jews in Israel, but Steinitz’s point is nevertheless well taken – TG)

The vast majority of Jews around the world, as well as a clear majority of American non-Jews (and possibly Europeans too) also oppose the deal, in spite of the claims being made in a multimillion dollar advertising and PR campaign launched by the anti-Israel Jewish lobby group J Street.

Newspapers around the world are far from supportive. Many have run editorials opposing it. For space reasons I include only a few of them below -- from the London Times (“A reckless gamble”), the London Daily Telegraph (“Peace in our time? Not with this shoddy agreement”) and The Guardian. But many other pieces opposing the deal have appeared in other European and international papers.

And the Canadian government has announced it will keep its sanctions against Iran despite Obama’s deal, as The Globe and Mail (Toronto) reports.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Rob Nicholson said Canada “will continue to judge Iran by its actions not its words.”

WESTERN COMPANIES RUSH TO TEHRAN

Before the UN has even voted, the sanctions are collapsing,

For example, Iran’s Press TV reports that a 60-strong German trade delegation led by German Vice Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel arrives in Tehran today. Representatives from car manufacturers Volkswagen and Daimler will accompany the delegation.

Spanish Foreign Affairs Minister Josè Garcìa-Margallo y Marfil announced that he will visit Iran to look “for business opportunities in the country.”

Iranian car manufacturers Iran Khodro and Tisser have signed a trilateral agreement with Italian car designer BDI to establish a car manufacturing corporation.

9 AM – MONDAY, IN AN ATTEMPT TO OVERRIDE U.S. DEMOCRACY

The U.N. Security Council resolution vote on the Iran deal is set to be rushed through tomorrow, Monday, at 9 am.

An announcement by the New Zealand delegation which assumed the monthly rotating UNSC’s Presidency for July reads: “The Iran JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) resolution is now under silence and its adoption has been scheduled for Monday 20 July at 9 a.m.”

(“Under silence” is diplomatic jargon for a rarely used procedure in which there is no debate and a resolution is automatically passed if the UNSC votes for it.)

In other words, the U.S. has circulated a vote that would make it legally binding as far as possible on the U.S. before Congress has even had time to debate it.

Secretary of State John Kerry said that by having the Iran deal incorporated in a UN Security Council resolution, President Obama could tie the hands of future presidents, legally obligating them to abide by the Council’s resolution.

There is fury in Washington among both Republicans and Democrats about this. (I attach some of their statements below.)

The chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations committee on Thursday wrote a letter to President Obama saying, “We urge you to postpone the vote at the United Nations until after Congress considers this agreement.” (Letter below.)

However, while UN and other international sanctions will then be lifted before any Iranian compliance with the deal, if Congress rejects the deal and President Barack Obama’s threatened veto is overridden, separate U.S. sanctions on Iran wouldn’t be lifted.

The Obama administration is turning up the heat on the many Democrats who oppose this deal and I don’t believe lobbying attempts by allies of Israel will succeed. Indeed, I believe that the myth of an “all powerful Israel lobby” – often propagated by borderline (and not so borderline) anti-Semites in the mainstream media – is just that: largely a myth.

And for some in the liberal media it is all about attacking America’s ally Israel (see for example, this cartoon in the San Francisco Chronicle) rather than looking at the dangers of the deal and why it loudest cheerleaders are groups like Hizbullah (“the party of Allah”) and Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad, who will now be given billions of dollars more by Iran to continue his near genocidal war on Syria’s majority Sunni population, in which he continues to use chemical weapons on civilians.

Indeed I find it disappointing that Samantha Power (who says she went into politics to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing), will be the U.S. ambassador to support this deal at the UN tomorrow, a deal that will provide Assad with more tools to carry out his slaughter. It is a deal by the Obama administration which takes no account whatsoever of human rights.

KERRY-NETANYAHU TAKE TO THE AIRWAVES

The face-off between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the nuclear deal will dominate U.S. networks this morning (Sunday).

Kerry is set to appear on morning shows on four U.S. networks, including ABC’s “This Week” and CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Netanyahu, meanwhile, will be interviewed right afterward on the ABC and CBS shows, where he will try to counter Kerry’s arguments.

ASSAD’S “MAN IN WASHINGTON” TO GET HIS NOBEL?

One should not forget about Kerry’s poor judgment over the Middle East in the past. It was not for nothing that he was known as Assad’s man in Washington as he repeatedly apologized for the Syrian dictator. (As chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Kerry even reportedly had Assad on his speed-dial.)

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on Wednesday nominated Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif for the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe they will get it. But then Yasser Arafat was also given the prize, just months before he launched his war of suicide bombers on Israelis.

SAUDI ARABIA’S LEADING DIPLOMAT: “THIS DEAL WILL WREAK HAVOC IN THE MIDDLE EAST”

A number of pieces, letters and statements are attached below.

There are extracts from some of them first, for those who don’t have time to read them in full. (The authors of most of the pieces below are subscribers to this email list.)

(I have been travelling and was unable to send some of these pieces in a dispatch earlier this week, but if you “like” and visit my public Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia you can see some of these and other Mideast items when they appear.)

-- Tom Gross

CONTENTS

1. Extracts to pieces: including the former Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, and Haaretz writers Ari Shavit and Anshel Pfeffer
2. U.S. will train Iranians to counter any sabotage attempts on its nuclear facilities
3. Corker, Cardin urge Obama to postpone United Nations vote
4. Democratic Whip Hoyer: UN vote should wait for congressional review period
5. Joe Lieberman: the administration needs to regather the P5+1 and get a better deal
6. Saudi’s leading diplomat: This deal will wreak havoc in the Middle East
7. “A reckless gamble” (Lead editorial, Times of London, July 15, 2015)
8. “Peace in our time? Not with this shoddy agreement” (Daily Telegraph, July 14, 2015)
9. “We should not let euphoria about the Iran nuclear deal cloud our judgment” (By Michael Herzog, The Guardian, July 14, 2015)
10. “Israeli labor opposition leader: Iran deal will bring chaos to the Middle East” (The Atlantic, July 16, 2015)
11. “Obama’s false Iran choice” (Wall St Journal editorial, July 16, 2015)
12. “Worse than we could have imagined” (By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, July 16, 2015)
13. “The best arguments for an Iran deal” (By Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2015)

EXTRACTS

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who until last year ran Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service (and before that served as ambassador to Washington for 20 years), writing in The Washington Post:

Pundits are saying that President Obama’s Iran deal stirs deja vu of President Clinton’s 1994 North Korean nuclear deal. I humbly disagree. President Clinton made his decision based on a strategic foreign policy analysis, top-secret intelligence and a desire to save the people of North Korea from starvation induced by its leadership.

It turned out that the strategic foreign policy analysis was wrong. If Mr. Clinton had known about the major intelligence failure, he would have made a different decision. Mr. Obama made his decision on the Iran nuclear deal aware that the strategic foreign policy analysis, the national intelligence information and intelligence from U.S. allies in the region predict a worse outcome than in North Korea…

***

Tom Gross addsAnother senior member of the Saudi royal family, former intelligence Chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, told the BBC that if Iran is being allowed by the world to develop atomic fuel, then “Saudi Arabia would then seek the same right, as would other nations.”

Leading Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit:

Experience reveals a yawning gap between the way the United States and Europe understand the Middle East and the way the Middle East understands itself. Here on the ground, between Casablanca and Kabul, the Vienna agreement could be perceived as evidence that America is in retreat, Europe is declining and Shi’ite power is on the rise.

Hence the concern that in the long run a nuclear arms race will develop around us, in the short run a conventional arms race will emerge, and in the intermediate term neighboring powers like Hezbollah will strengthen and feel that their time has arrived. The move that is intended to bring peace for our time may lead to the opposite…

[The threat from this deal is not only nuclear.] Iran’s military-industrial complex has few parallels in the world. Some 50,000 skilled and creative Iranians have learned to make satellites, missiles, sophisticated ships and drones. Iran, even when it stood on the brink of bankruptcy, built its own defense industry, including its own aircraft industry. The injection of tens of billions of dollars into Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s R&D labs and assembly lines could take us back 30 years: a semi-existential threat by conventional weapons.

(For space reasons, the full piece is not attached below.)

Haaretz correspondent Anshel Pfeffer:

If Ali Khamenei had a button which he could press in order to make all the citizens of Israel perish, would he push it?

I don’t have any actual proof of course, but I’m pretty sure he would. Check out his track record, his quotes and bear in mind what men with titles like “Supreme Leader” have done in the past. Barack Obama has said he believes that despite their virulent anti-Semitism, the Iranian leaders are also pragmatic people who wouldn’t act against their national interest. But then Obama thought that his administration could “re-set” relations with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and that the former KGB officer would play by the rules.

How have Iran’s supreme leaders, be they the Ayatollahs or the Shahs, been working in their nation’s interests? Has any nation been so short-changed by its leaders? This is Khamenei who signed off on the 1994 AMIA operation in which 85 people were killed in an Iranian-directed bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. This is the leader who is propping up a murderous regime in Syria, which is responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 people and the displacement of millions more.

Yes, he’d push the button.

(For space reasons, the full piece is not attached below.)

Lead editorial, Times of London:

Few gambits are more seductive to an American president than the grand realignment of relations with a hostile regime. As time passes, Nixon’s opening to China has come to define his legacy even more powerfully than Watergate. It is no wonder that Obama has tried the same tricks with Castro’s Cuba and fundamentalist Iran, but to pull it off takes more than America’s inimitable optimism. It requires Kissinger-style worldliness as well…

Bedazzled by the idea of a deal, the US and its partners, Britain among them, have settled for a bad one… Obama’s gamble will make life more dangerous for Iran’s neighbours and more difficult for future US presidents.

Daily Telegraph (London): Iranians have long enjoyed a reputation for being wily negotiators, but the outcome of the marathon talks that concluded in Vienna amidst a fanfare of mutual congratulation will have surpassed even their wildest expectations.

Guardian (London) op-ed piece: While the negotiators in Vienna celebrate the nuclear deal, across the Middle East there is an atmosphere of gloom. In Israel, coalition and opposition -- who rarely agree on anything -- are now united in deep concern about the long-term implications for Israel and the region... In Teheran, flags of the US, Britain, and Israel were burned in the streets, followed by chants of “death to...,” and a new video game was unveiled simulating an Iranian missile strike on Israel.

Claudia Rosett (Forbes magazine):

With implications reaching far beyond the Middle East, the Iran nuclear deal opens the gates not to a safer world, but to proliferation on a scale likely to defy any peaceful efforts at containment. With the fatally flawed bargain announced Tuesday in Vienna, the U.S. and its negotiating partners have underscored, bigtime, the sorry lesson of the series of failed nuclear deals that helped sustain North Korea’s regime all the way to the bomb: In a game of nuclear chicken, the U.S. will flinch. In the post-Cold War era, nuclear blackmail works.

Iran had before it the example of North Korea’s successful nuclear extortion. Now comes the example of Iran.

Welcome to a mafia world in which the rules of the game increasingly favor the worst actors and penalize the most decent. That message will be read into this deal not only by Iran’s near-neighbors, but by nations around the globe, from Asia to Africa to Latin America.

(For space reasons, the full piece is not attached below.)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/claudiarosett/2015/07/16/nuclear-extortion-pioneered-by-north-korea-perfected-by-iran/

William Tobey, the former deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration (Wall Street Journal):

In the months leading up to Tuesday’s announcement of a nuclear agreement with Iran, American proponents and skeptics of the deal at least agreed on one thing: the importance of “anywhere, anytime” inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

On the Obama administration side, there was Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in April saying, “We expect to have anywhere, anytime access.” And Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes also in April saying: “In the first place we will have anytime, anywhere access [to] nuclear facilities.”

Yet in announcing the deal this week, President Obama said inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency “will have access where necessary, when necessary.”

Note the distinction: Agreeing on what is “necessary” is going to be a preoccupation of the new inspections regime. No wonder Mr. Rhodes was on CNN on Wednesday denying that negotiators had ever sought anytime, anywhere inspections…

A successful Iran nuclear agreement would have required far more than anywhere, anytime inspections, let alone the delayed, managed access with a 24-day duration provided under the Iran nuclear deal that President Obama hailed on Tuesday. What was essential is now conspicuously missing: Tehran’s submission of a complete and correct nuclear declaration, and the regime’s cooperation with IAEA efforts to verify it. Anything short of that is an illusion.

(For space reasons, the full piece is not attached below.)

Jeffrey Goldberg (The Atlantic):

Last December, when I interviewed the leader of Israel’s left-leaning Labor Party, Isaac Herzog, he said, in reference to nuclear negotiations with Iran: “I trust the Obama administration to get a good deal.” In a telephone call with me late last night, Herzog’s message was very different. The deal just finalized in Vienna, he said, “will unleash a lion from the cage, it will have a direct influence over the balance of power in our region, it’s going to affect our borders, and it will affect the safety of my children. There are clear risks to Israel’s security in this deal.”

For Obama, Netanyahu is a permanent adversary, but Herzog is a respected friend – one who could do damage to the administration’s cause on Capitol Hill, if he so chooses.

Wall Street Journal editorial:

Obama knows there has always been an alternative to his diplomacy of concessions because many critics have suggested it. It’s called coercive diplomacy, and it might have worked to get a better deal if Obama had tried it. A bipartisan majority in Congress was prepared to impose more sanctions this year, but Obama refused as he rushed for a second-term deal.

Obama’s policy opposite of coercive diplomacy, which shows determination so an adversary under pressure concludes that it must make more concessions. This is the diplomacy Ronald Reagan practiced with the Soviets, refusing to budge on missile defenses at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit. The Soviets were soon back at the negotiating table.

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post:

When you write a column, as did I two weeks ago, headlined “The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history,” you don’t expect to revisit the issue. We had hit bottom. Or so I thought. Then on Tuesday the final terms of the Iranian nuclear deal were published. I was wrong…

The most serious issue is not Iranian exports but Iranian imports – of sophisticated Russian and Chinese weapons. The net effect of this capitulation will be not only to endanger our Middle East allies now under threat from Iran and its proxies, but also to endanger our own naval forces in waterways we have kept open for international commerce for a half-century…

The other major shock in the final deal is what happened to our insistence on “anytime, anywhere” inspections. Under the final agreement, Iran has the right to deny international inspectors access to any undeclared nuclear site. The denial is then adjudicated by a committee – on which Iran sits. It then goes through several other bodies, on all of which Iran sits. Even if the inspectors’ request prevails, the approval process can take 24 days… Ten years of painstakingly constructed international sanctions will vanish overnight, irretrievably… Obama has laid down his legacy, and we will have to live with the consequences for decades.

Bret Stephens, The Wall Street Journal:

But the hope that Iran is the new China fails a few tests. Mao faced an overwhelming external threat from the Soviet Union. Iran faces no such threat and is winning most of its foreign proxy wars. Beijing ratcheted down tensions with Washington with friendly table-tennis matches. Tehran ratchets them up by locking up American citizens and seizing cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Deng Xiaoping believed that to get rich is glorious. Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, a supposed reformer, spent last Friday marching prominently in the regime’s yearly “Death to America, Death to Israel” parade.

Maybe we’ll get lucky again. Maybe Iran will change for the better after Mr. Khamenei passes from the scene. Maybe international monitors will succeed with Iran where they failed with North Korea. Maybe John Kerry is the world’s best negotiator. Or maybe we won’t be lucky. Maybe there’s no special providence for nations drunk on hope, led by fools.

FULL ARTICLES AND STATEMENTS

U.S. WILL TRAIN IRANIANS TO COUNTER ANY (ISRAELI) SABOTAGE ATTEMPTS ON ITS NUCLEAR FACILITIES AND SYSTEMS

http://www.scribd.com/doc/271540618/Iran-Deal-Text (scroll down to 142 to find the section).

10. Nuclear Security

E3/EU+3 parties, and possibly other states, as appropriate, are prepared to cooperate with Iran on the implementation of nuclear security guidelines and best practices. Cooperation in the following areas can be envisaged:

Co-operation in the form of training courses and workshops to strengthen Iran’s ability to prevent, protect and respond to nuclear security threats to nuclear facilities and systems as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems;

Co-operation through training and workshops to strengthen Iran’s ability to protect against, and respond to nuclear security threats, including sabotage, as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems.

CORKER, CARDIN URGE PRESIDENT OBAMA TO POSTPONE UNITED NATIONS VOTE ON IRAN DEAL UNTIL CONGRESS CONSIDERS THE AGREEMENT

http://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/chair/release/corker-cardin-urge-president-obama-to-postpone-united-nations-vote-on-iran-deal-until-congress-considers-the-agreement

WASHINGTON, DC – In a letter to President Barack Obama today, U.S. Senators Bob Corker (Republican -Tenn.) and Ben Cardin (Democrat -Md.), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the administration to postpone a United Nations Security Council vote on the Iran deal until Congress considers the agreement. The mandatory 60-day congressional review period does not begin until all documents associated with an agreement are submitted to Congress, along with assessments on compliance and non-proliferation.

Text of the letter is included below and in the attached document.

Dear Mr. President:

The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, a bill which 98 Senators and 400 Representatives supported and you signed, established a 60-day period for Congress to consider the nuclear agreement. We are deeply concerned that your administration plans to enable the United Nations Security Council to vote on the agreement before the United States Congress can do the same.

Doing so would be contrary to your statement that “it’s important for the American people and Congress to get a full opportunity to review this deal…our national security policies are stronger and more effective when they are subject to the scrutiny and transparency that democracy demands.”

We urge you to postpone the vote at the United Nations until after Congress considers this agreement.

Sincerely,

Bob Corker, Chairman
Ben Cardin, Ranking Member

DEMOCRATIC WHIP HOYER: U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL VOTE SHOULD WAIT FOR CONGRESSIONAL REVIEW PERIOD

Democratic Whip Hoyer: U.N. Security Council Vote Should Wait for Congressional Review Period
For Immediate Release: July 17, 2015

WASHINGTON, DC - House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer (MD) released the following statement today in support of the letter by Senators Cardin and Corker urging President Obama to delay the U.N. Security Council’s vote on the Iran deal until after Congress has reviewed the agreement: “I agree with Senators Cardin and Corker that the U.N. Security Council should wait to move ahead with a resolution implementing parts of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action until after Congress has completed its review of the agreement with Iran. I believe that waiting to go to the United Nations until such time as Congress has acted would be consistent with the intent and substance of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act.”

http://www.democraticwhip.gov/content/hoyer-un-security-council-vote-should-wait-congressional-review-period

***

Related reading:

[1] http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/248228-senators-balk-at-un-action-on-iran
[2] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/congress-responds-to-obamas-un-move-on-iran-deal-120257.html
[3] http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/15/obama-turns-to-u-n-to-outmaneuver-congress-iran-nuclear-deal/

JOE LIEBERMAN: THE ADMINISTRATION NEEDS TO REGATHER THE P5+1 AND GET A BETTER DEAL

Former Democratic Vice-presidential nominee and U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman (who is a long time subscriber to this email list) writes:

The agreement announced today, temporarily delays, but ultimately allows Iran to become a nuclear weapons state and indeed legitimizes Iran's possession of the nuclear capabilities that it has built up, much of it covertly in violation of international law and in breach of its obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty.

I know there will be some who will try to convince members of Congress that if Congress rejects this deal, the result will be catastrophic. Some may try to intimidate and demonize critics of the agreement by arguing that a vote against this deal is a vote for war. Those are false arguments and I urge you to reject them…

If this agreement is rejected by Congress, nobody can predict what will happen, but I would say that I would hope that the administration would try to regather the P5+1 and basically go back to Iran and say we couldn't sell it. We got to do a better deal here, and again, I believe that Iran needs a deal much more than we do.

SAUDI ARABIA’S LEADING DIPLOMAT/INTELLIGENCE CHIEF: THIS DEAL WILL WREAK HAVOC IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Letters to the Editor
Why the Iran agreement is worse than the U.S. deal with North Korea
Washington Post
July 16, 2015

Pundits are saying that President Obama’s Iran deal stirs deja vu of President Clinton’s 1994 North Korean nuclear deal [“A landmark nuclear pact with Iran,” front page, July 15]. I humbly disagree. President Clinton made his decision based on a strategic foreign policy analysis, top-secret intelligence and a desire to save the people of North Korea from starvation induced by its leadership.

This deal will wreak havoc in the Middle East, which is already a disastrous environment. Iran is a major player in the destabilization of the region. Why would Mr. Obama go ahead with such a deal with Iran? It is definitely not because Mr. Obama is not smart enough, because he is. He must believe that what he is doing is right. Still, I am convinced that my good friend Henry Kissinger was correct when he said, “America’s enemies should fear America, but America’s friends should fear America more.”

People in my region now are relying on God’s will and consolidating their local capabilities and analyses with everyone except our oldest and most powerful ally.

Bandar Bin Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

The writer was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States from 1981 to 2005.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-the-iran-agreement-is-worse-than-the-us-deal-with-north-korea/2015/07/16/7d7747f4-2b0d-11e5-960f-22c4ba982ed4_story.html

A RECKLESS GAMBLE

A Reckless Gamble
Nuclear negotiators have chosen a weak deal with Iran over longterm security
Lead editorial
The Times of London
July 15, 2015

Few gambits are more seductive to an American president than the grand realignment of relations with a hostile regime. As time passes, Nixon’s opening to China has come to define his legacy even more powerfully than Watergate. It is no wonder that President Obama has tried the same tricks with Castro’s Cuba and fundamentalist Iran, but to pull it off takes more than America’s inimitable optimism. It requires Kissinger-style worldliness as well.

Without that balance the risks are high. In the nuclear deal reached between Iran and the P5 plus 1 group they are unacceptable. An unreconstructed theocracy has won concessions on sanctions that enable it to tighten its grip on power and enrich its hardliners, including those who sponsor international terrorism. In return Iran has agreed to limits on its nuclear ambitions that are in principle tighter than previous schemes. In reality they are weakened by loopholes that could all too easily be used to outmanoeuvre weapons inspectors. Bedazzled by the idea of a deal, the US and its partners, Britain among them, have settled for a bad one. They should have resisted the temptation.

Ostensibly the 20-month negotiating marathon that ended yesterday in Vienna yields progress on two fronts. In practical terms, assuming Iran acts in good faith, two thirds of its enrichment centrifuges will be removed and 98 per cent of its enriched uranium diluted or shipped abroad. A stockpile big enough for ten bombs would shrink to less than enough for one, and aspects of the new inspection regime will stay in place for a quarter of a century.

On the political front, supporters of this deal argue that it will strengthen the relatively reformist Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, and embolden an emerging generation to demand full-blown Iranian glasnost. It is more likely that having accomplished the mission of getting sanctions relaxed Mr Rouhani will now be dispensable. Worse still, the compromise over military site inspections thrashed out in the final sessions of the Vienna talks gives far too much away.

For a watertight deal such inspections should be possible without notice, at any time. Instead, inspectors will have to give warning, show grounds for suspicion and if challenged by Tehran, persuade a panel of representatives from the P5 plus 1 that the inspection is needed. This gives Russia, a determined pro-Iranian maverick, a potentially decisive say whenever Iran chooses to drag its feet. At the very least Iran has been granted a means to delay inspectors’ access long enough to hide whatever they hoped to inspect.

The point of this deal was to deny Iran the capacity to build nuclear weapons, for the sake of regional security and above all for the sake of Israel. That it has been condemned by Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and welcomed by Syria’s President Assad hardly inspires confidence. It has further been rejected by every Republican presidential candidate to have expressed a view. This reflects the depth of opposition in Washington to what most American friends of Israel consider appeasement for the sake of a presidential legacy.

Mr Obama has gambled that a changing Iran will respond to his opening by backing reformers against the clerical elite. It is a gamble that will make life more dangerous for Iran’s neighbours and more difficult for future US presidents.

PEACE IN OUR TIME? NOT WITH THIS SHODDY AGREEMENT

Iran nuclear deal: Peace in our time? Not with this shoddy agreement
By Con Coughlin, Defence Editor
Daily Telegraph (London)
July 14, 2015

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/11739683/Iran-nuclear-deal-Peace-in-our-time-Not-with-this-shoddy-agreement.html

You only had to look at the beaming smiles on the faces of the Iranian negotiating team to see who had emerged as the undisputed winners of the drawn-out negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme.

Iranians have long enjoyed a reputation for being wily negotiators, but the outcome of the marathon talks that concluded in Vienna amidst a fanfare of mutual congratulation will have surpassed even their wildest expectations.

Tehran entered these talks, let us not forget, out of sheer desperation to escape the crippling effects of the economic sanctions imposed by the West in retaliation for Iran’s less-than-forthright disclosures about its nuclear activities.

These included building a heavily fortified underground uranium enrichment facility at Natanz (whose existence was exposed by the Iranian opposition in 2003) and a similar establishment built deep within a mountain at Fordow (whose existence was exposed by British intelligence in 2009).

Iran’s obsession with acquiring the ability to enrich uranium well beyond the level required for civilian and commercial applications, as well as its concurrent investment in building ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, has led Western intelligence to conclude – not unreasonably – that Tehran has been working on a clandestine atomic weapons programme.

WE SHOULD NOT LET EUPHORIA ABOUT THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL CLOUD OUR JUDGMENT

We should not let euphoria about the Iran nuclear deal cloud our judgment
By Michael Herzog
The Guardian
July 14, 2015

While the P5+1 negotiators in Vienna celebrate the nuclear deal with their Iranian counterparts, across the Middle East there is an atmosphere of gloom. In Israel, coalition and opposition – who rarely agree on anything – are now united in deep concern about the long-term implications for Israel and the region.

Israel was not a participant in these negotiations, but its national security will be impacted more than anybody else’s. After all, Iran combines ideological commitment to Israel’s destruction with nuclear ambitions and the ability to project violence and instability through proxies on Israel’s borders and around the world. It is Israel whose elimination the Iranian supreme leader proudly tweets about. It is Israel that is targeted by tens of thousands of rockets supplied by Iran to armed groups on our borders, including Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

How will the agreement impact on these intentions and capabilities? As these lines are written, the full details of the deal still need to be digested. Not everything is yet clear, and questions abound regarding inspections, R&D, addressing the military dimensions of Iran’s programme and sanctions relief. Nonetheless, the main contours are known.

True, the deal pushes Iran back from the ability to quickly “break out” to nuclear weapons, and is likely to reduce its incentive to do so, for the next decade or so. However, in the second decade Iran is legitimised as a nuclear threshold state, by allowing it to expand and upgrade its enrichment programme and reduce the breakout time almost to zero.

Will time bought by the deal serve to positively change Iran’s current policies or will it instead empower them? Most Middle Easterners assume the latter and refuse to bet on the former. While the clock is ticking down until Iran can expand its uranium enrichment capacity, the impact of the deal will likely pour fuel on the fires of the region.

First, the lifting of financial and trade sanctions is likely to empower Iran, both politically and economically, in pursuing its radical and sectarian agenda. This includes arming and bankrolling designated terror organisations, propping up Bashar al-Assad in Syria (Iran has already spent billions of dollars on that under sanctions), fueling the sectarian conflict in Iraq, arming rebels in Yemen, and threatening the security of a number of Gulf Arab states.

Second, the legitimising of Iran’s nuclear threshold status threatens to spark nuclear proliferation across the region, with other states seeking the same status as Iran.

Third, the financial windfall coming to Iran may spark a conventional arms race. Iran will invest more in its arms industry, and with sanctions on arms sales to be lifted within five to eight years, it can be expected to go on a major shopping spree, with Russia as a willing supplier. Gulf states will not stay left behind.

As gloomy as this prospect is for those of us on the sharp end, now is not the time to despair. The closing of the agreement is a dramatic watershed, but not the final word. The international community must now focus on two vital issues.

The first is the rigorous implementation of the deal itself. The P5+1 powers (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), and especially the US, must ensure that effective measures will be taken against any kind of violation. Iran must get the message that it will pay a swift and heavy price if it tries to cheat, as it has so often in the past.

Second and no less important is re-establishing effective deterrence against Iran’s dangerous non-nuclear policies which are outside the scope of the agreement. Since the deal focuses on nuclear issues to the exclusion of all other aspects of Iran’s dangerous policies, the distinction should be maintained in the post-deal reality. This means confronting such policies rather than turning a blind eye to them for fear of upsetting the nuclear deal.

On Friday, in the run-up to the deal, Iranians celebrated “Al-Quds (Jerusalem) day,” an annual holiday devoted to Israel’s destruction. Flags of the US, Britain, and Israel were burned in the streets, followed by chants of “death to...,” and a new video game was unveiled simulating an Iranian missile strike on Israel.

Israel and its Arab neighbours are alarmed by the huge contrast between these scenes and the euphoric celebrations surrounding the deal. They expect friends around the world not to be blinded by their euphoria, and to work together to contain an emboldened Iran.

HERZOG: OBAMA HAS LEFT ALL ISRAELIS – OF THE “LEFT, CENTER, AND RIGHT” – FRIGHTENED

Israeli labor opposition leader: Iran deal will bring chaos to the Middle East
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic
July 16, 2015

Last December, when I interviewed the leader of Israel’s left-leaning Labor Party, Isaac “Bougie” Herzog, at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum, he said, in reference to nuclear negotiations with Iran: “I trust the Obama administration to get a good deal.”

In a telephone call with me late last night, Herzog’s message was very different. The deal just finalized in Vienna, he said, “will unleash a lion from the cage, it will have a direct influence over the balance of power in our region, it’s going to affect our borders, and it will affect the safety of my children.”

Iran, he said, is an “empire of evil and hate that spreads terror across the region,” adding that, under the terms of the deal, Iran “will become a nuclear-threshold state in a decade or so.” Iran will take its post-sanctions windfall, he said, and use the funds to supply more rockets to Hezbollah in Lebanon, more ammunition to Hamas in Gaza, and “generally increase the worst type of activities that they’ve been doing.”

Herzog, who lost a race for the prime ministership in March to the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, had mainly kind words for his archrival, and he even invoked an expression popularized by Netanyahu’s ideological guide, the founding father of right-wing Zionist revisionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, to describe what he sees as Israel’s next, necessary step: “We have to build an iron wall to protect Israel. There are clear risks to Israel’s security in this deal.”

The Iran deal represents one of those rare issues that has unified Israelis of most political parties. Herzog and Netanyahu agree on very little – not on a whole basket of social and economic issues, and certainly not on the need for territorial compromise to advance the cause of a two-state solution with the Palestinians. But Iran, Herzog told me, has Israelis – of the “left, center, and right,” he said – frightened.

Netanyahu appears eager to bring Herzog, the official head of the Israeli opposition in the Knesset, into his government as foreign minister. This makes good sense from Netanyahu’s perspective – he knows that he has burned bridges with the Obama administration, and he needs an interlocutor who could gain access to the West Wing. Herzog wouldn’t tell me the status of his talks with Netanyahu, though he said he believed he could do a more effective job critiquing the Iran deal from outside the government. And this is where things gets complicated: When I asked Herzog if he would be lobbying Congress to disapprove the deal (AIPAC, I’m told, has invited him to do so), he said he wouldn’t. “I think it’s a bad deal, but I’m not going to lobby, I’m not going to tell senators what to vote. I think what I need to do is explain the weak points and have them understand our concerns. I’m taking the practical approach.”

Isn’t that a description of lobbying? “I don’t intend to hide my feelings. Most of the Israeli body politic is worried about the agreement, and people need to understand our worries. The world doesn’t fully understand the fact that we are left here alone in this neighborhood, that there is a Shia empire that is trying to inflame the region with a heavy hand. But I don’t intend to clash with the administration. We’re very glad for all that the Obama administration has done for us. We have respect for the United States, for this great ally and friend, and we don’t want to be in a confrontation or clash. But we have to let people know that we think this is a dangerous situation.”

Herzog’s militancy on the subject of the deal places the Obama administration in an uneasy position. While the administration can – and has – dismissed Netanyahu as a hysteric, the eminently reasonable Herzog, who is Secretary of State John Kerry’s dream of an Israeli peace-process partner, will find receptive ears among Democrats for his criticism. Herzog’s critique of the deal also places American Jewish organizations in a curious dilemma. It will be fraught for liberal Jewish organizations to endorse the Vienna agreement if both the right-wing government in Jerusalem, and its center-left opposition, are so vehemently opposed to it. (The only major Jewish organization to line up with the Obama administration so far is J Street, which describes itself as “pro-Israel and pro-peace,” but which is keenly interested in advancing Obama administration interests, whether or not Israelis agree with them. “Our No. 1 agenda item,” its founder, Jeremy Ben-Ami, once said, “is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.” Herzog, J Street’s natural ally in Israeli politics on matters of the peace process, is putting the group in an uncomfortable position. It can’t be easy to be a self-described pro-Israel group that is lobbying for a deal that the large majority of Israelis loathe.)

Herzog would not tell me when he’s arriving in Washington to launch his non-lobbying lobbying campaign, but I expect he will arrive soon, and I expect that he will find himself the target of a great deal of lobbying as well; from the administration’s perspective, Netanyahu is a permanent adversary, but Herzog is a respected friend – one who could do damage to the administration’s cause on Capitol Hill, if he so chooses.

THERE WAS A BETTER ALTERNATIVE TO HIS DEAL. HE NEVER PURSUED IT

Obama’s False Iran Choice
There was a better alternative to his deal. He never pursued it.
Wall Street Journal editorial
July 16, 2015

The debate is raging over President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and Mr. Obama held a rare press conference Wednesday to say that “99% of the world community” agrees with him. Then why bother with a press conference? Mr. Obama made other claims we’ll address in coming days, but for today it’s worth rebutting his assertion that “none” of his critics “have presented to me or the American people a better alternative.”

Specifically, Mr. Obama resorted to his familiar default of the false political choice. “There really are only two alternatives here. Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war. Those are – those are the options,” Mr. Obama said. He added that no better deal was or is possible than the one he has negotiated.

Mr. Obama knows there has always been an alternative to his diplomacy of concessions because many critics have suggested it. It’s called coercive diplomacy, and it might have worked to get a better deal if Mr. Obama had tried it.

Take the sanctions regime, which finally started to get tough in December 2011. By 2013 Iran had an official inflation rate of some 35%, its currency was falling, and its dollar reserves were estimated to be down to $20 billion. Mr. Obama had resisted those sanctions, only to take credit for them when Congress insisted and they began to show results in Tehran.

Yet Mr. Obama still resisted calls to put maximum pressure on Iran. He gave waivers to countries like Japan to import Iranian oil. He was reluctant to impose sanctions on global financial institutions that did business with Iran (especially Chinese banks that offered Tehran access to foreign currency). The U.S. could have gone much further to blacklist parts of Iran’s economy run by the Revolutionary Guard Corps. A bipartisan majority in Congress was prepared to impose more sanctions this year, but Mr. Obama refused as he rushed for a second-term deal.

Mr. Obama now argues that the sanctions could not have been maintained, and that they are sure to collapse if Congress scuttles his deal. But there was no sign sanctions were collapsing as long as the U.S. continued to keep the pressure on. And to the extent support did weaken, one reason was the momentum of Mr. Obama’s negotiations. The more the U.S. gave the impression that it desperately wanted a deal, the more other countries and businesses began to maneuver for post-sanctions opportunities.

This is the opposite of coercive diplomacy, which shows determination so an adversary under pressure concludes that it must make more concessions. This is the diplomacy Ronald Reagan practiced with the Soviets, refusing to budge on missile defenses at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit despite pressure from 99% of the world to do so. The Soviets were soon back at the negotiating table.

Mr. Obama could also have pressured Iran on other fronts, the way Reagan did the Soviets by arming enemies of its proxies. The U.S. could have armed the Free Syrian Army to defeat Iran’s allied Assad regime in Damascus, and it could have helped Israel enforce U.N. Resolution 1701 that imposes an arms embargo on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

On Wednesday Mr. Obama conceded that Iran supplies Hezbollah and Assad, while implying he could do nothing about it. The truth is that he chose to do nothing because he didn’t want to offend Iran and jeopardize his nuclear talks. Instead he should have increased the pressure across the board to assist the negotiations and get a better deal.

As for Mr. Obama’s false choice of war and diplomacy, the truth is that war becomes less likely when diplomacy is accompanied by the credible threat of war. The President removed that credible threat from Iran by insisting war was the only (bad) alternative to his diplomacy, as well as by threatening force against Syria only to erase his own “red line.” In May Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei boasted that the U.S. military “can’t do a damn thing” against Iran. He understood his negotiating partner all too well.

Mr. Obama is now presenting his deeply flawed deal to Congress and the public as a fait accompli that must be embraced or war will result. Congress shouldn’t be any more impressed by his false ultimatums than the Iranians were by his weak diplomacy.

“HE HAS LAID DOWN HIS LEGACY, AND WE WILL HAVE TO LIVE WITH THE CONSEQUENCES FOR DECADES”

Worse than we could have imagined
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post
July 16, 2015

Who would have imagined we would be giving up the conventional arms and ballistic missile embargoes on Iran? In nuclear negotiations?

When asked Wednesday at his news conference why there is nothing in the deal about the American hostages being held by Iran, President Obama explained that this is a separate issue, not part of nuclear talks.

Are conventional weapons not a separate issue? After all, conventional, by definition, means non-nuclear. Why are we giving up the embargoes?

Because Iran, joined by Russia – our “reset” partner – sprung the demand at the last minute, calculating that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were so desperate for a deal that they would cave. They did. And have convinced themselves that they scored a victory by delaying the lifting by five to eight years. (Ostensibly. The language is murky. The interval could be considerably shorter.)

Obama claimed in his news conference that it really doesn’t matter, because we can always intercept Iranian arms shipments to, say, Hezbollah.

But wait. Obama has insisted throughout that we are pursuing this Iranian diplomacy to avoid the use of force, yet now blithely discards a previous diplomatic achievement – the arms embargo – by suggesting, no matter, we can just shoot our way to interdiction.

Moreover, the most serious issue is not Iranian exports but Iranian imports – of sophisticated Russian and Chinese weapons. These are untouchable. We are not going to attack Russian and Chinese transports.

The net effect of this capitulation will be not only to endanger our Middle East allies now under threat from Iran and its proxies, but also to endanger our own naval forces in the Persian Gulf. Imagine how Iran’s acquisition of the most advanced anti-ship missiles would threaten our control over the gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, waterways we have kept open for international commerce for a half-century.

And what do you think will be left to be found, left unscrubbed, after 24 days? The whole process is farcical.

The action now shifts to Congress. The debate is being hailed as momentous. It is not. It’s irrelevant.

Congress won’t get to vote on the deal until September. But Obama is taking the agreement to the U.N. Security Council for approval within days. Approval there will cancel all previous U.N. resolutions outlawing and sanctioning Iran’s nuclear activities.

Meaning: Whatever Congress ultimately does, it won’t matter because the legal underpinning for the entire international sanctions regime against Iran will have been dismantled at the Security Council. Ten years of painstakingly constructed international sanctions will vanish overnight, irretrievably.

Even if Congress rejects the agreement, do you think the Europeans, the Chinese or the Russians will reinstate sanctions? The result: The United States is left isolated while the rest of the world does thriving business with Iran.

Should Congress then give up? No. Congress needs to act in order to rob this deal of, at least, its domestic legitimacy. Rejection will make little difference on the ground. But it will make it easier for a successor president to legitimately reconsider an executive agreement (Obama dare not call it a treaty – it would be instantly rejected by the Senate) that garnered such pathetically little backing in either house of Congress.

It’s a future hope, but amid dire circumstances. By then, Iran will be flush with cash, legitimized as a normal international actor in good standing, recognized (as Obama once said) as “a very successful regional power.” Stopping Iran from going nuclear at that point will be infinitely more difficult and risky.

Which is Obama’s triumph. He has locked in his folly. He has laid down his legacy, and we will have to live with the consequences for decades.

“DRUNK ON HOPE, LED BY FOOLS”

The Best Arguments for an Iran Deal
The heroic assumptions, and false premises, of our diplomacy.
By Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal
July 14, 2015

In formal rhetoric, prolepsis means the anticipation of possible objections to an argument for the sake of answering them. So let’s be proleptic about the Iranian nuclear deal, whose apologists are already trotting out excuses for this historic diplomatic debacle.

The heroic case. Sure, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is an irascible and violent revolutionary bent on imposing a dark ideology on his people and his neighborhood. Much the same could be said of Mao Zedong when Henry Kissinger paid him a visit in 1971 – a diplomatic gamble that paid spectacular dividends as China became a de facto U.S. ally in the Cold War and opened up to the world under Deng Xiaoping.

But the hope that Iran is the new China fails a few tests. Mao faced an overwhelming external threat from the Soviet Union. Iran faces no such threat and is winning most of its foreign proxy wars. Beijing ratcheted down tensions with Washington with friendly table-tennis matches. Tehran ratchets them up by locking up American citizens and seizing cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Deng Xiaoping believed that to get rich is glorious. Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, a supposed reformer, spent last Friday marching prominently in the regime’s yearly “Death to America, Death to Israel” parade.

If there is evidence of an Iranian trend toward moderation it behooves proponents of a deal to show it.

The transactional case. OK, so Iran hasn’t really moderated its belligerent behavior, much less its antediluvian worldview. And a deal won’t mean we won’t still have to oppose Iran on other battlefields, whether it’s Yemen or Syria or Gaza. But that doesn’t matter, because a nuclear deal is nothing more than a calculated swap. Iran puts its nuclear ambitions into cold storage for a decade. In exchange, it comes in from the cold economically and diplomatically. Within circumscribed parameters, everyone can be a winner.

But a transaction requires some degree of trust. Since we can’t trust Iran we need an airtight system of monitoring and verification. Will the nuclear deal provide that? John Kerry will swear that it will, but as recently as January Czech officials blocked a covert $61 million purchase by Iran of “dual-use” nuclear technologies. A month before that, the U.S. found evidence that Iran had gone on an illicit “shopping spree” for its plutonium plant in Arak. That’s what we know. What do we not know?

Also, how does a nuclear deal not wind up being Iran’s ultimate hostage in dictating terms for America’s broader Mideast policy? Will the administration risk its precious nuclear deal if Iran threatens to break it every time the two countries are at loggerheads over regional crises in Yemen or Syria? The North Koreans already mastered the art of selling their nuclear compliance for one concession after another – and they still got the bomb.

The defeatist case. All right: So the Iran deal is full of holes. Maybe it won’t work. Got any better ideas? Sanctions weren’t about to stop a determined regime, and we couldn’t have enforced them for much longer. Nobody wants to go to war to stop an Iranian bomb, not the American public and not even the Israelis. And conservatives, of all people, should know that foreign policy often amounts to a choice between evils. The best case for a nuclear deal is that it is the lesser evil.

Then again, serious sanctions were only imposed on Iran in November 2011. They cut the country’s oil exports by half, shut off its banking system from the rest of the world, sent the rial into free fall and caused the inflation rate to soar to 60%. By October 2013 Iran was six months away from a severe balance-of-payments crisis, according to estimates by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. And that was only the first turn of the economic screw: Iran’s permitted oil exports could have been cut further; additional sanctions could have been imposed on the “charitable” foundations controlled by Iran’s political, military and clerical elite. Instead of turning the screw, Mr. Obama relieved the pressure the next month by signing on to the interim agreement now in force.

It’s true that nobody wants war. But a deal that gives Iran the right to enrich unlimited quantities of uranium after a decade or so would leave a future president no option other than war to stop Iran from building dozens of bombs. And a deal that does nothing to stop Iran’s development of ballistic missiles would allow them to put one of those bombs atop one of those missiles.

Good luck. Americans are a lucky people – lucky in our geography, our founders and the immigrants we attract to our shores. So lucky that Bismarck supposedly once said “there is a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.”

Maybe we’ll get lucky again. Maybe Iran will change for the better after Mr. Khamenei passes from the scene. Maybe international monitors will succeed with Iran where they failed with North Korea. Maybe John Kerry is the world’s best negotiator, and this deal was the best we could do.

Or maybe we won’t be lucky. Maybe there’s no special providence for nations drunk on hope, led by fools.

Two Israelis held captive by Hamas in Gaza (& Vienna’s sex trade sizzles during Iran talks)

July 09, 2015

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

HAMAS REPORTEDLY HOLDING TWO ISRAELIS CAPTIVE IN GAZA

An Israeli court this morning lifted a gag order to allow publication of the fact that two Israelis are being held captive by Hamas in Gaza.

Avraham Mengistu, 28, an Ethiopian-Israeli from the coastal town of Ashkelon, has been held in Gaza since September. The other man has not been named, but is believed to be from Israel’s Bedouin community.

Both men are said to have a history of mental problems and both apparently voluntarily entered Gaza (not together) and are now being held captive. Mengistu reportedly walked into Gaza holding a bible.

The gag order on the case was lifted following lawsuits by the Haaretz and Yediot Ahronot newspapers. An Israeli government source tells me he is concerned that the lifting of the gag order will now make it more complicated for Israel to negotiate to free them.

Hamas has not admitted they are holding the two men but Israel says it has solid intelligence that they are.

Israeli Channel 2 TV reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been in touch with Mengistu’s parents for some time and the families have also met privately with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and President Reuven Rivlin.

Israeli officials say that Hamas also holds the remains of deceased IDF soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul and that they have been trying to negotiate for their release, along with Mengistu and the other man.

IRANIAN FM ZARIF REPORTEDLY THREATENS EU FOREIGN POLICY CHIEF MOGHERINI

As EU Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini announced that nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 powers will continue in Vienna for the next few days, reports have emerged that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made threatening remarks to her, raising his voice and pointing to her in an aggressive way, warning her: “Never threaten an Iranian.”

Zarif is usually portrayed in Western media outlets as the friendly, sophisticated face of the regime.

IRANIAN PRO-REGIME PROFESSOR: “U.S. NEEDS NUCLEAR DEAL MORE THAN IRAN”

Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reports (July 7):

“Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a political analyst and an academic at Tehran University, underscored that given the new regional order and Iran’s growing influence in the region, Washington strongly needs a nuclear agreement more than Tehran.

“‘Today the Americans know that they need the agreement more than Iran. The crisis in the EU and the region, the region’s collapse by Wahhabism, and the rise of China and Russia are all actually happening as a result of Iran’s leadership and might in the region,” Marandi told FNA in Vienna, the venue of nuclear talks between Iran and the world powers, on Tuesday. ‘Obama needs negotiations with Iran and these conditions strengthen Iran’s position at the negotiating table,’ he added.”

***

Among past recent dispatches on the Iranian nuclear issue, please see The true winner in Syria: Iran (& The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history)

“VIENNA’S SEX TRADE SIZZLES DURING IRAN NUCLEAR TALKS”

Reuters reports from Vienna:

Anyone who says it’s all work and no play for the hordes of diplomats, officials, security agents, analysts and reporters who have descended on Vienna for what should be the finale of almost two years of Iran nuclear talks is dead wrong. As the manager of a local brothel said, when the Iran talks are in town, “business is booming”.

He declined to say who were his most frequent customers, but made clear that, as far as he was concerned, the longer the negotiations between Iran and six world powers drag on, the better.

IRGC: “PURSUING STRATEGY OF DESTRUCTION OF [ISRAEL]” IS ISLAMIC WORLD’S TOP PRIORITY

Iran’s (semi-official) Tasnim News agency reports that Iran’s all-powerful Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) released a statement yesterday ahead of “International Quds Day,” “calling on the people of Iran and other Muslim countries to attend mass rallies this Friday in support of Palestine.”

It added that the “destruction of the Zionist regime” (i.e. Israel) must be “Muslims’ first priority”.

Tom Gross adds: The IRGC is expected to get billions more dollars to fight its various wars (it already backs the Assad regime in Syria and terrorists in Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere) as a result of sanctions relief following a nuclear deal.

Quds Day was established by the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1979 he officially declared that “the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan was International Quds Day.” (Quds is an Arabic word for Jerusalem.)

LARIJANI: ISRAEL CAUSES AND REPRESENTS “INTERNATIONAL EVIL”

The powerful Iranian politician Ali Larijani, who is now Speaker of the Iranian parliament, said on Tuesday that a nuclear agreement between Iran and the world powers will have no impact on the “Iran’s support for Palestine”.

He added that he believes Israel represents “international evil” and that “deep-rooted causes of evil” in the world stem from the “Zionist regime.”

(This very much echoes Hitler’s speeches of the 1930s, where he claimed that the Jews are “the cause of all international evil”.)

RAFSANJANI: “FORGED ISRAELI REGIME TO BE WIPED-OFF MAP”

The Iranian news agency IRNA reports:

Tehran, July 6, IRNA -- Presence of the forged Israeli regime is temporary as eventually one day this alien existence that has been urged into the body of an ancient nation and a historical region will be wiped off the map, said Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani on Monday....

Tom Gross adds: New York Times editorialists have claimed that one of the reasons Iranian President Rouhani should be considered a “moderate,” is because of his association with Rafsanjani.

AT LEAST 45 CIVILIANS WERE KILLED ON MONDAY: IT’S MINOR NEWS TO MAJOR MEDIA

If even one Palestinian dies – even when that Palestinian (a self-confessed militant) was killed by an Israeli in self-defense while being attacked by the Palestinian, the New York Times goes full out putting several reporters on it and making his death its main international story of the day (in its International edition) creating the impression that the Palestinian who died was not in act of trying to kill someone when he was shot.

However, these kinds of stories are ignored or downplayed.

For example, at least 45 civilians were killed on Monday:

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — A massive airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition targeting rebels hit a local marketplace in Yemen, killing over 45 civilians on Monday, security officials and eyewitnesses said.

More than 50 civilians were also wounded in the strike in Fayoush, a suburb just north of the southern port city of Aden.

“I came right after the explosion and saw dozens of dead strewn about and a sea of blood, while the wounded were being evacuated to nearby hospitals,” resident Abu-Ali al-Azibi said. “(There was) blood from people mixed with that of the sheep and other livestock at the market.”

***

In the Iraqi town of Fallujah on Sunday, more than 50 young men were killed when a coalition airplane mistakenly dropped a bomb on a soccer field, reports the Wall Street Journal.

***

And when Iran itself kills people in its own country, you can usually only read about it in the Iranian or regional media.

For example, the IRGC kill five separatists “on July 7 in the southwestern province of Sistan va Baluchistan,” reports Basij.

CHINESE COMPANY CONNECTS TEHRAN AND TEL AVIV RAIL PROJECTS

Israel’s Channel 2 television reports that the Chinese company which in May won the tender to build the forthcoming Tel Aviv light rail project is a subsidiary of the Chinese company building Iran’s major new rail project.

But the parent company of the China Railway Tunnel Group is not only involved in the high-speed rail project which will connect Tehran and Isfahan, but has business ties with a corporation linked to Iran’s nuclear facilities run by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

That IRGC company is blacklisted under Israeli law for having ties to an enemy government, but the China Railway Tunnel Group itself is not.

Israeli law forbids investment of over $20 million in companies trading with Iran. However, Haaretz says this is rarely enforced, noting for example, that Dutch and German companies operating in Iran received major deals with Israeli industry.

***

Tom Gross adds:

On Monday (July 6) Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif met privately with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of the nuclear talks in Vienna.

Meanwhile also on Monday, Israel’s Economy Minister and Negev and Galilee Development Minister Aryeh Deri met for the first time with China’s ambassador to Israel Zhan Yongxin. The two discussed the establishment of a free trade zone between Israel and China.

The Chinese ambassador reiterated China’s commitment to begin negotiations for such a zone, which was first announced by Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang in March in his report to the National People’s Congress.

As I have noted in previous dispatches there are ever increasing business ties between Israel and China, which has now invested $6 billion in Israel.

BBC QUIETLY REMOVES THE WORD “JEWISH” FROM THOSE WHO ISIS SAYS IT WAS TARGETING

Day by day, the BBC World Service twists the news in all kinds of ways, to misrepresent Israel’s enemies.

Here is just one small further example.

Regarding the rocket attacks a week ago into southern Israel, the ISIS-affiliated group in the Sinai that claimed responsibility, wrote in its twitter feed:

“Three Grad rockets were fired at Jewish positions in occupied Palestine.”

But the BBC, which claims on its website that its goal is to build “understanding of international issues,” quietly changed the word “Jewish” to “Israeli” in its report, once again obscuring the anti-Semitic nature of some of those who wish to destroy Israel.

The BBC also failed to explain to its audience that the rockets were fired at Jews in the Negev desert, which is neither “occupied” nor “Palestine” nor what most people understand by the term “settlements”.

DOME OF ROCK PICTURE TOPS CNN LIST OF SITES ON “VERGE OF EXTINCTION” -- BUT PALMYRA NOT ON LIST

CNN has (once again) been criticized by the Israeli foreign ministry after it placed a picture of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock as top its list headlined “Last chance to see: 25 magnificent structures on the verge of extinction.”

CNN made the claim based on allegations by UNESCO which have themselves been dismissed as completely fabricated and motivated by anti-Semitism.

Israel has no plans, nor has it ever had any, to destroy the 6th-century Dome of the Rock, contrary to the fake reports and incitement deliberately whipped by Palestinian leaders such as Nobel Peace prize winner Yasser Arafat.

Meanwhile the list of 25 did not include the UNESCO World Heritage site of Palmyra in Syria, where the Islamic State started to destroy monuments last week. (Pictures of Palmyra here.)

Recent UNESCO resolutions against Israel are sponsored by the non-democratic regimes of Algeria, Lebanon and Qatar

***

Among previous dispatch on CNN, please see CNN calls the attacked synagogue “a mosque”.

AT LEAST 45 ISIS MEMBERS REPORTEDLY DIE AFTER EATING RAMADAN MEAL

At least 45 Islamic State fighters died after eating a fast-breaking Ramadan meal in the Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday, Haaretz reported.

They are believed to have been poisoned, possibly by a Kurdish or Iranian spy.

In November, the Iraq Times reported that Free Syrian army fighters had infiltrated an ISIS camp, posed as cooks and poisoned their lunches. Dozens of ISIS fighters died in that incident.

CHINESE, KOREANS “BOTH HAVE SLANTED EYES” SAYS TURKISH OFFICIAL

Both Koreans and Chinese “have slanted eyes,” Turkish official and political leader Devlet Bahceli told Hurriyet Daily News in an interview yesterday. He made the remarks after Korean tourists, who were mistaken for Chinese, were beaten up by Turkish nationalists to protest the abuse of Muslim Uighurs in northwest China.

“What is the difference between a Korean and a Chinese? They both have slanted eyes,” he said.

One can only imagine the number of outraged editorials the New York Times would be running already if an Israeli (or American) official had said such a thing.

PALESTINIAN AMBASSADOR MAKES BLATANTLY ANTI-SEMITIC REMARKS; CITES “PROTOCOLS,” TEL AVIV PROFESSOR AS “PROOF”

Jewish organizations have called on donor governments who fund the Palestinian Authority, to denounce the Palestinian Authority ambassador to Chile, Imad Nabil Jadaa, after he made a series of blatantly anti-Semitic comments and read out passages from the notorious anti-Semitic Tsarist forgery ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ at a peace conference in Santiago, Chile. He warned that the Jews had to be stopped before they realized their plans to take over the world.

In a series of muddled remarks, Jaada also cited as “proof” that Jews don’t exist at all “the Jewish Israeli professor from the University of Tel Aviv, Dr. Shlomo Sand, in his book ‘The Invention of the Jewish people.’” (Sand is one of number of far left-wing anti-Zionist, and some would say anti-Semitic, academics teaching at Israel’s universities.)

POLISH MUSEUM, ARGENTINEAN, HUNGARIAN GOVERNMENTS CRITICIZED FOR ANTI-SEMITISM

Polish Jewish leaders have denounced as “sick” a “gas chamber ‘game of tag’ video” which has been installed by a Polish filmmaker at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow

The naked participants play tag in a Nazi gas chamber. The Associated Press reports that the video has previously been shown at museums in Germany and Estonia. The Krakow museum lies close to the Auschwitz death camp.

Yad Vashem has also written to the Krakow museum asking them to remove the installation.

***

American Jewish groups have strongly criticized statements made by Argentinean President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in which she evoked classic anti-Semitic stereotypes blaming Jews for Argentina’s financial challenges.

During a visit to an elementary school in Buenos Aires on July 4, President Fernandez de Kirchner recommended to the children there that they read Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to understand how Jews undermine economies. She then repeated her advice on her Twitter to her two million twitter followers, adding that “Usury and the bloodsuckers were immortalized by the best literature for centuries.”

Fernandez de Kirchner has been accused of possibly being connected to the assassination of the Argentinean prosecutor Alberto Nisman. He was killed the day before he was to expose a cover-up by the Argentinean authorities accused of helping Iran evade responsibility for the AMIA Jewish center bombing in Buenos Aires in which 85 people were killed.

***

The Hungarian government is being asked to cancel plans to erect a statue in the city of Székesfehérvár to honor Balint Homan, a notorious wartime politician, who supported the Nazis and oversaw anti-Jewish laws under the Horthy regime.

Hungarian Prime Minister Orban has claimed that he opposes anti-Semitism, but is not doing so in practice.

THE FUTURE IS HERE: KIBBUTZ MANUFACTURES TOUCH-SCREEN BULLET-RESISTANT WINDSHIELD

Israel Defense magazine reports (July 7):

The OSG Company of Kibbutz Palmach Zova has started manufacturing a bullet-resistant windshield with a touch screen embedded in it. “It is a cassette-like device inserted between the safety glass layers. The screen is connected to the vehicle’s multimedia system, so it may be used to display maps, live feeds from the day or night vision cameras mounted on the vehicle, and other video options,” explains Daniel Cohen, OSG CEO.

“One of the problems with combat vehicles is the lack of space in the cabin occupied by the vehicle commander and driver. Today, the vehicle commander must balance his laptop computer on his knees during operational activity. This is awkward and inconvenient, and in the event of an accident – the computer can endanger the passengers. This need led us to develop ScreeneX – a touch screen embedded in the commander’s window. It saves space, and if the vehicle overturns or is hit by an explosive charge – the laptop computer will not harm the passengers. Our industry is going in that direction. These screens are used in such vehicles as HUMVEEs and MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles, where the cabin is fitted with bullet-resistant windows.”

The development of ScreeneX is yet another example of the creativity of the Israeli defense industry. Like previous innovations it is expected that it will eventually be used in civilian vehicles around the world too.

The U.S. army is interested in using the OSG innovation in its vehicles.

The true winner in Syria: Iran (& The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history)

July 05, 2015

CONTENTS

1. “The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history” (By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, July 2, 2015)
2. “How an Iran nuclear deal would upend U.S. non-proliferation policy” (By Ray Takeyh, Wall St Journal, July 4, 2015)
3. “The true winner in Syria: Iran” (By Ari Heistein, Haaretz, July 5, 2015)
4. “The Terrorist Challenge – Understanding and Misunderstanding” (By Amir Taheri, Asharq Al-Awsat, July 3, 2015)

ARTICLES

“THE DEVIL IS NOT IN THE DETAILS”

The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post
July 2, 2015

WASHINGTON -- The devil is not in the details. It’s in the entire conception of the Iran deal, animated by President Obama’s fantastical belief that he, uniquely, could achieve detente with a fanatical Islamist regime whose foundational purpose is to cleanse the Middle East of the poisonous corruption of American power and influence.

In pursuit of his desire to make the Islamic Republic into an accepted, normalized “successful regional power,” Obama decided to take over the nuclear negotiations. At the time, Tehran was reeling – the rial plunging, inflation skyrocketing, the economy contracting – under a regime of international sanctions painstakingly constructed over a decade.

Then, instead of welcoming Congress’ attempt to tighten sanctions to increase the pressure on the mullahs, Obama began the negotiations by loosening sanctions, injecting billions into the Iranian economy (which began growing again in 2014) and conceding in advance an Iranian right to enrich uranium.

It has been downhill ever since. Desperate for a legacy deal, Obama has played the supplicant, abandoning every red line his administration had declared essential to any acceptable deal.

Inspections

They were to be anywhere, anytime, unimpeded. Now? Total cave. Unfettered access has become “managed access.” Nuclear inspectors will have to negotiate and receive Iranian approval for inspections. Which allows them denial and/or crucial delay for concealing any clandestine activities.

To give a flavor of the degree of our capitulation, the administration played Iran’s lawyer on this one, explaining that, after all, “the United States of America wouldn’t allow anybody to get into every military site, so that’s not appropriate.” Apart from the absurdity of morally equating America with the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, if we were going to parrot the Iranian position, why wait 19 months to do so – after repeatedly insisting on free access as essential to any inspection regime?

Coming clean on past nuclear activity

The current interim agreement that governed the last 19 months of negotiation required Iran to do exactly that. Tehran has offered nothing. The administration had insisted that this accounting was essential because how can you verify future illegal advances in Iran’s nuclear program if you have no baseline?

After continually demanding access to their scientists, plans and weaponization facilities, Secretary of State John Kerry two weeks ago airily dismissed the need, saying he is focused on the future, “not fixated” on the past. And that we have “absolute knowledge” of the Iranian program anyway – a whopper that his staffers had to spend days walking back.

Not to worry, we are told. The accounting will be done after the final deal is signed. Which is ridiculous. If the Iranians haven’t budged on disclosing previous work under the current sanctions regime, by what logic will they comply after sanctions are lifted?

Sanctions relief

These were to be gradual and staged as the International Atomic Energy Agency certified Iranian compliance over time. Now we’re going to be releasing up to $150 billion as an upfront signing bonus. That’s 25 times the annual budget of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Enough to fuel a generation of intensified Iranian aggression from Yemen to Lebanon to Bahrain.

Yet three months ago, Obama expressed nonchalance about immediate sanctions relief. It’s not the issue, he said. The real issue is “snap-back” sanctions to be reimposed if Iran is found in violation.

Good grief. Iran won’t be found in violation. The inspection regime is laughable and the bureaucratic procedures endless. Moreover, does anyone imagine that Russia and China will reimpose sanctions? Or that the myriad European businesses preparing to join the Iranian gold rush the day the deal is signed will simply turn around and go home?

Non-nuclear-related sanctions

The administration insisted that the nuclear talks would not affect separate sanctions imposed because of Iranian aggression and terrorism. That was then. The administration is now leaking that everything will be lifted.

Taken together, the catalog of capitulations is breathtaking: spot inspections, disclosure of previous nuclear activity, gradual sanctions relief, retention of non-nuclear sanctions.

What’s left? A surrender document of the kind offered by defeated nations suing for peace. Consider: The strongest military and economic power on Earth, backed by the five other major powers, armed with what had been a crushing sanctions regime, is about to sign the worst international agreement in American diplomatic history.

How did it come to this? With every concession, Obama and Kerry made clear they were desperate for a deal.

And they will get it. Obama will get his “legacy.” Kerry will get his Nobel. And Iran will get the bomb.

THE END OF U.S. NON-PROLIFERATION POLICY

How an Iran Nuclear Deal Would Upend U.S. Non-Proliferation Policy
By Ray Takeyh
Wall Street Journal
July 4, 2015 (posted online, not yet in print)

The specter haunting negotiations between Iran and the U.S. is neither congressional hawks nor alarmed Israelis. It is Lyndon Johnson. Although the Johnson administration is better known for the Vietnam War and the Great Society, it was also the architect of contemporary U.S. non-proliferation policy. And that sensible policy stands to be eviscerated by a deal over Iran’s nuclear program.

In October 1964, China detonated an atomic bomb, sending shock waves throughout the U.S. government. Suddenly it was not just selective Western nations that possessed the bomb but a revolutionary Asian power. Fears of nuclear know-how proliferating from East Asia to Latin America gripped U.S. policymakers. Under the direction of Roswell Gilpatric, former deputy secretary of defense, U.S. policy toward the bomb was evaluated and assessed. A report by the Gilpatric committee established parameters of U.S. policy toward proliferation that would guide successive administrations for the next five decades.

In the wake of the committee’s recommendations–accepted after spirited debate–the U.S. took a firm line on access to sensitive nuclear technologies by both adversaries and allies. It sought to prevent all countries from enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium. Under the new strictures should, say, West Germany, Taiwan, or South Korea be tempted to pursue the technological precursors to the bomb, they would be risking their security ties to the United States. In short, it was in the 1960s that the United States became a proliferation hawk.

In 1968 President Johnson signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that was to regulate civilian nuclear programs. Peaceful nuclear energy has industrial uses, but the U.S. government position held that there was no need for states to enrich uranium to benefit from atomic power. It was U.S. policy that becoming a signatory of the NPT meant that a nation could use nuclear energy but not necessarily develop certain technologies that could easily be converted for military purposes. The U.S. also went on to institute rigorous export controls and established the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which restricts nuclear commerce. The efforts of several U.S. administrations–Republican and Democratic–were among the reasons that more states did not build the bomb after China.

U.S. actions on non-proliferation strained relations with many allies, including the enterprising shah of Iran. It is a talking point of the Islamic Republic today that Washington looked the other way and even assisted the shah as he sought to develop a nuclear weapon capability. This claim has been accepted as a truism by many U.S. policymakers and analysts. But the historical record belies such assertions. The Ford and Carter administrations opposed the shah’s quest for completion of the fuel cycle and refused to give him access to sensitive nuclear technologies. Washington insisted that the shah, then head of a regime considered a reliable U.S. ally, forgo the capacity to either enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium.

Any impending nuclear agreement with Iran would indeed be a landmark accord – for it would upend 50 years of U.S. policy. To be sure, there were failures along the way as India, Pakistan, and North Korea defied the U.S. and built their own bombs. But Washington did not facilitate their programs and, in each instance, tried to derail their efforts.

Today, by contrast, the U.S. appears poised to concede to an adversarial regime not only an enrichment capacity but also one that is likely to be industrialized after the expiration of a sunset clause. This would have been like Washington aiding the Soviets in constructing the bomb in the 1940s or helping China in the 1960s. There is no dispute between the Obama White House and its critics that Iran is a revolutionary regime seeking to expand its influence in the Middle East. Tehran’s destabilizing regional activities come at the detriment of the United States and its allies. The baffling part of all this is that Washington is seeking to conclude an agreement that envisions this radical regime gaining access to a sophisticated nuclear infrastructure that will not permanently be limited to peaceful exploitation of atomic power.

(Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.)

“PURE AND UNABASHED SELF-INTEREST”

The true winner in Syria: Iran
The gruesome images coming out of Syria make it hard to imagine it in such terms, but Tehran sees Damascus as an investment.
By Ari Heistein
Haaretz
July 5, 2015

While many in the United States discussed the ramifications of Iran losing Syria, Tehran was busy taking it. The Islamic Republic’s aid to the Syrian regime is not about cutting its losses, but about achieving economic, political and strategic goals that had previously been out of reach. There is nothing ideological about this alliance – it is and always has been pure and unabashed self-interest. The gruesome images coming out of Syria make it hard to imagine it in such terms, but Iran sees Damascus as an investment.

The Iranians have capitalized on the Syrian civil war to solidify their political control over the Syrian regime, changing a shaky ally into a dependable proxy. The origin of the Syrian-Iranian alliance is the Iran-Iraq war, as Syria was one of just two Arab countries to support the Iranians in their fight against Saddam Hussein. Syria’s support for Iran throughout this conflict was not about the ideological affinity of the two regimes but rather a shared interest in weakening Iraq. In fact, Syria and Iraq were much more culturally and ideologically aligned than Syria and Iran; Syria and Iraq were controlled by secular Arab Ba’athist regimes, while the government of Iran was a theocracy.

In the wake of the collapse of its longtime Soviet patron, there were several indications that Syria would try to follow in the footsteps of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat by making peace with Israel and reorienting itself towards the U.S. and away from Iran. Serious peace talks were held between Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and the Israeli leadership in 1993 under Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995 under Shimon Peres, and in 2000 under Ehud Barak. The negotiations were unsuccessful largely due to the inflexibility of both countries regarding Syria’s demand that Israel fully withdraw to the pre-1967 boundaries, based on the precedent set by the Israeli peace accords with Egypt.

Though U.S.-Syrian relations did improve in the 1990s and later included some cooperation against al-Qaeda after 9/11, the 2003 Iraq war and Syrian assistance to those resisting the U.S. occupation of Iraq caused the thawing relations to freeze over. Hopes for an Israeli-Syrian peace were revived one last time when negotiations resumed in 2007 with the help of Turkey. The following year, the U.S. State Department reviewed its Syria policy, “leading to an effort to engage with Syria to find areas of mutual interest, reduce regional tensions, and promote Middle East peace.” Tehran was obviously concerned enough about the prospect of Syria “flipping” that Hussein Shariatmadari, an advisor to Iran’s supreme leader, publicly warned against it. However, U.S.-Syrian relations would soon sour as a result of Assad’s crackdown on Arab Spring protests, and since then the U.S. has withheld diplomatic efforts to put a crack in the “axis of resistance.”

By 2012, Iranian concerns regarding the blossoming of U.S.-Syrian relations or the signing of Israeli-Syrian peace accords were little more than a memory. As the conflict in Syria took on more sectarian and violent dimensions, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) supported an increasingly dependent and brutal Assad in his suppression of dissent. By January 2013, the Iranians had so much influence over the Syrian agenda that in a prisoner swap between the regime and the rebels, Assad did not demand the release of local loyalists but of 48 IRGC commanders in exchange for more than 2,000 rebels and anti-regime activists.

Also, the economic gains that Iran stands to make from this conflict have often been overlooked, as most assume that Tehran is just willing to stomach billions of dollars in financial losses in exchange for strategic benefit. Though Iran was often pushing to exert greater influence over Syria in their marriage of convenience, the Assads made sure to minimize their economic dependence on Iran, a fact evident in the extremely small volume of trade between the two countries in the years leading up to the Arab Spring.

While trade between the U.S. and Syria reached $940 million in 2010, the volume of trade between the supposed “Tehran-Damascus axis” was less than one-half that. One could argue that this was merely incidental or that economic cooperation between the countries simply wasn’t necessary, but counterbalancing Iranian influence by strengthening economic ties to other countries was Damascus’ unofficial state policy rather than coincidence. For example, out of six cellular companies vying for the rights to operate a third mobile network in Syria in 2010 (including companies from Qatar, the UAE, Turkey and Saudi Arabia – ostensibly more hostile to the “axis of resistance”), the only bid rejected was from an Iranian company rumored to be connected to the IRGC.

However, after the uprising against Assad began and Syria’s trading partners abided by the sanctions against it, Iran was not placed “in a foreign-policy predicament” but rather was positioned to exploit the fact that Assad no longer had the luxury to keep it at arm’s length. Despite Syria’s declining economic state, Syrian-Iranian trade has tripled since 2010, reaching $1 billion in 2014, and is expected to continue growing. Also, Iran’s close ties to the regime and its status as the Middle East’s largest producer of cement and iron mean that it is well-positioned to benefit from Syria’s ongoing destruction and reconstruction.

Though Iran has largely planned its strategy under the assumption that the Assad regime would survive, it has also trained and armed Syrian militias to serve Iranian interests long after state institutions have collapsed. Iran has invested a great deal in keeping Assad afloat while preparing for his fall, and as part of a “plan B” to maintain influence in case the Assad regime collapses, Iran and Hezbollah are cultivating relationships with minority-based militias fighting on Assad’s side. These militias include the shadowy criminal network with close ties to the Assad family known as the shabiha as well as the jaysh al-sha’bi which have been trained, and supplied by Iran and Hezbollah based on the model of the Iranian Basij militia. The more loosely affiliated militias will likely prove durable allies should Iran decide to cut costs by supporting a Shi’ite insurgency in a post-Assad Sunni-controlled Syria, rather than continuing to prop up the Syrian government. In essence, Iran has used the Syrian civil war as an opportunity to both nurture Assad’s political, economic, and military dependence and simultaneously support and train militias that can serve the interests of the Islamic Republic should Assad’s government prove unsustainable.

Granted, the fragmentation of Syria translates into only partial Iranian control of the country. Yet, in spite of the fact that it holds only about 50 percent of the territory, the Assad regime controls between 55 and 72 percent of the remaining population. ISIS may hold a great deal of territory in Syria, but it is clear from the sparsely dotted cities in the maps of its territory that it controls mostly Syrian desert and rural areas rather than urban centers. Provided the joint Syria-Iran-Hezbollah efforts can hold a few key areas like the road between Damascus and Beirut, the Assad regime’s ability to serve as a conduit for weapons flowing from Iran to Hezbollah will remain intact.

The Syrian civil war is approaching its fifth year and the P5+1 is hammering out a nuclear deal with Iran that could potentially unfreeze hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. Due to Tehran’s backing thus far, the numerous predictions that Assad could fall any minute remain unfulfilled. Though there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the final outcome of the Syrian civil war, one thing is clear: Iran will be ready.

(Ari Heistein is a research associate in the Middle East Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.)

“UNDERSTANDING AND MISUNDERSTANDING”

The Terrorist Challenge – Understanding and Misunderstanding
By Amir Taheri
Asharq Al-Awsat
July 3, 2015

Faced with the growing threat of terrorism, Western officials and analysts seem hard put as to how to deal with something they find difficult to understand.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has advised the media not to use the term “Islamic State” for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – known as “Da’esh” in Arabic – because, he claims, the “caliphate” based in Raqqa in Syria is not Islamic. In other words, Cameron is casting himself as an authority on what is Islamic and what is not. At the other end of the spectrum, French Premier Manuel Valls speaks of “Islamofascism” and claims that the West is drawn into a “war of civilizations” with Islam.

Cameron continues Tony Blair’s policy in the early days of Islamist attacks on Britain. Blair would declare that although the attacks had nothing to do with Islam he had invited “leaders of the Muslim community” to Downing Street to discuss “what is to be done.”

As for Valls, he seems to forget that Islam, though part of many civilizations including the European one, is a religion not a civilization on its own. He also forgets that civilizations, even at the height of rivalry, don’t wage war; political movements and states do.

While it is important to understand what we are dealing with, it is even more important not to misunderstand the challenge.

To circumvent the hurdle of labeling the Da’esh-style terror as “Islamic,” something that runs counter to political correctness and could attract cries of Islamophobia, some Western officials and commentators build their analysis on the “sectarian” aspect of the phenomenon.

Thus, we are bombarded within seminars, essays and speeches seeking to explain, and at times explain away, the horrors of ISIS and similar groups as part of sectarian Sunni–Shi’ite feuds dating back to 15 centuries ago.
However, the “sectarian” analysis is equally defective.

There is no doubt that much of the violence in the Middle East today does have a sectarian aspect.

However, what we have is not a war of Islamic sects but wars among sectarian groups. Nobody has appointed ISIS as the representative of Sunnis, some 85 percent of Muslims across the globe. And, in fact, so far ISIS has massacred more Sunnis than members of any other sect or religion. The Internet “caliph” and his cohorts have beheaded more of their own comrades than any kuffar (Infidels).

At the other end of the spectrum no one has appointed the Khomeinist mullahs in Tehran as leaders of the Shi’ites. The Khomeinist regime has killed many more Shi’ites than members of any other sect or religion. (Human Rights groups put the number of those executed since Khomeini seized power at over 150,000.)

Equally absurd is to present the Alawite (or Nusayri) community in Syria as a branch of Shi’ism, something that no Shi’ite theological authority has ever done. Even then, the Ba’athist regime led by President Bashar Al-Assad has never claimed religious credentials, boasting about a secular, supposedly socialist ideology. In Shi’ite theology, the Alawites are classified among the “ghulat” (extremists) with a host of other heterodox sects.

The Khomeinist regime’s backing for the Houthis in Yemen cannot be explained in sectarian terms either. The Houthis belong to the Zaydi sect which, though originally exported from Iran to Yemen, has never been regarded by Twelvers (Ithna-’ashariyah), who make up the bulk of Shi’ites across the globe, as being part of the Shi’ite family.

In the 1970s Iran’s Shah bribed a few ayatollahs in Qom to issue declarations in favor of Zaydis – which they did, without however providing definitive theological endorsement.

In any case, the Houthis, though representing a good chunk of the Zaydi community, cannot be equated with that faith as a whole. Tehran’s support for them is politically motivated as it is in the case of Assad in Syria and the various branches of Hezbollah, notably in Lebanon. (The other night in a discussion circle in London a self-styled expert was mistaking Zaydis with Yazidis, insisting that former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh was a Yazidi!)

There is no doubt that Tehran arms and supports a number of Shi’ite groups, ranging from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hazara in Afghanistan. However, it also supports some Sunni groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Tehran also did all it could to help the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, including the sending of a high-level mission with offers of billions of dollars in aid provided the brotherhood agreed to purge the Egyptian army.

In Afghanistan, Iran sheltered and, for years, financed Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Sunni Hizb Islami, although it had massacred quite a few Afghan Shi’ites in the early 1990s. Since 2004, Tehran has also maintained contact with the Taliban, a militant anti-Shi’ite Afghan terror group. (At the time of this writing Iran is preparing to allow the Taliban to open an unofficial embassy in Tehran.)

Iran is also training and arming Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga, almost all of them Sunnis, to fight ISIS, which casts itself as the standard-bearer of Sunnis.

At the other end of the spectrum, various opponents of the Khomeinist regime, among them some Sunni powers, have supported anti-regime Shi’ite groups at different times. Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein protected, financed, and armed the People’s Mujahedin, an Iranian Shi’ite group, for decades, and at one point sent them to fight inside Iran itself.

Pakistan, a Sunni-majority country, has become a base for anti-Iran terror groups which, according to Iranian Border Guard, have been responsible for more than 80 deadly attacks over the past 12 months.

At one end of the spectrum it is not enough to be Shi’ite of any denomination. Unless you also worship the “Supreme Guide” you are worse than the “infidel.” At another end, being a Sunni Muslim is not enough to let you live a reasonably human life in areas controlled by ISIS; you must also pledge fealty to the self-styled “caliph.”

The Khomeinists, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS, Boko Haram, Hizb Islami, and a whole host of other outfits may try to market their discourse with a religious narrative. They may even be sincerely motivated by rival interpretations of Islam. What they cannot claim is the exclusive representation of Islam as such or a particular sect. They are part of Islam but Islam is not part of them. These are political movements using violence and terror in pursuit of political goals. They pretend to be waging war against the “infidel” and may even be deviously sincere in that claim. But they are primarily waging war against Muslims, regardless of schools or sect.

(Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979.)