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As the humanitarian horrors in Syria continue, the debate about foreign intervention intensifies. Today the Daily Telegraph published a pro-intervention blog post by Michael Weiss, who heads Communications and Public Relations at the Henry Jackson Society, a self-described “non-partisan” think tank with neoconservative affiliations.

Weiss mainly focuses on Israel-Palestine and human rights in the Middle East. He also headed “Just Journalism”, a media monitoring organization focused on “how Israel and Middle East issues are reported in the UK” prior to its September 2011 closure (lack of funding was cited). His own work has been widely published and last month Foreign Affairs printed his “What it Will Take to Intervene in Syria“, where he argued that intervention “at this moment would be premature” and then proceeded to describe how it could be executed anyway. Less than a month later the crux of Weiss’s position is that Bashar al-Assad is no longer a legitimate leader and Iran and Russia are already “intervening” in Syria, so the West should too:

…Russia, Iran and Hezbollah have all been “intervening” in Syria’s internal affairs for ten months now. Meanwhile, the Arab League, the United States and the European Union have all determined that any claim to sovereignty Assad might have had in 2011 is null and void in 2012. What is needed, therefore, is not condemnations, demarches and shuttered embassies but a Western equivalent of intervention in Syria, namely in the form of:

• Humanitarian “safe areas” to provide food, aid and medical supplies to the civilian population and give the various opposition groups a headquarters inside their own country
• Advanced weapons and communication devices for the Syrian rebels
• A no-fly zone to stop the regime from using its aircraft to conduct reconnaissance, offload security personnel and – yes – strafe rebel strongholds from the sky.

Weiss also strongly criticizes the US, UK and France for not working to push the Assad government out more forcibly:

Hillary Clinton, William Hague and Alain Juppe can grumble all they like about travesties at Turtle Bay and the inevitability of Assad’s fall. Even if they got their toothless Security Council resolution calling for Assad’s departure, then what? Would he pack up and go quietly? If so, where to? How’s the tabouleh in the Black Sea?

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An online NBC report by Robert Windrem published on Friday goes into explicit technical detail about the military hardware that will be brought to bear in an Israeli attack on Iran:

Israel has both medium and intermediate range Jerichos. The medium-range Jericho I would not have the range to reach many Iranian targets  but the intermediate-range Jericho II’s, capable of hitting targets 1,500 miles away, would have no problem.  The Jerichos would be equipped with high explosives, not nuclear warheads. Asked if the Jericho would have the accuracy and the explosive power to take out a hardened bunker of the sort believed to be protecting Iran’s most-sensitive underground nuclear facilities, one official replied, “You would be surprised at their accuracy” and that the high explosives involved is a special mix of chemical explosives that could conceivably penetrate the Iranian fortifications.

Missile attacks would be coordinated with fighter-bomber attacks (presumably  the Israelis’ extended-range F-15I Strike Eaglet) as well as drone strikes. The fighter bombers would use what one official described as  “high-low, low-high” flight paths — high first to increase fuel efficiency, then low for most of the trip to evade radar, then climbing high again as the weapons are released in what is known as a “flip toss” on the target.  The Israelis would be prepared to lose aircraft if necessary, the officials said.

Windrem amalgamates and synthesizes the views of various unidentified “US and Israeli officials” about a more than likely Israeli attack on Iran in the next several months into a tidy and digestible question-and-answer format. One question he neither asks nor answers is whether Israel is actually capable of successfully carrying out a winner-take-all high tech attack on Iran that could destroy or (more likely) delay the development of Iran’s budding nuclear program, at minimal costs–financial, environmental or in casualties–to itself and anyone else except Iran.

Whether it’s due to technical glitches or human error, military hardware doesn’t always function the way it’s supposed to. A mysterious Yasour helicopter  crash on July 26, 2010, during a training exercise in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania was, according to Jerusalem Post military analyst, Yaakov Katz:

…a blow to the IAF’s image and raises two serious questions – first, whether the transport helicopter, which has been in IAF service for over 40 years, is still a reliable and sturdy aircraft, and second, if this is what happens during a regular training exercise in Romania, what will happen in a future IAF long-range operation.

Katz went on to ask and answer the obvious question:

One might wonder why an Israeli helicopter was in Romania in the first place. The answer is that every long-range IAF operation today, wherever it may take place in the world including in Israel, takes into consideration ‘third-sphere threats’ like Iran, which are far from Israel.

On Nov. 10, 2010, two Israeli pilots were killed in the Negev Desert when their F15-I crashed. Last Sunday (Jan. 29)  a state of the art Israeli Heron TP unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), also known as the Eitan, crashed in central Israel. No further reports have emerged to date regarding the cause of the disintegration of “the drone that can reach  Iran,” believed to be the first such Israeli UAV crash of its kind.

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Iran analyst Patrick Disney examines why it might be a US or Israeli red line for Iran to install advanced centrifuges at the Fordow facility and explains why the US will continue pushing Iran to relinquish its stockpile of 20% enriched material at the next round of P5+1 nuclear negotiations:

If you recall, Matthew Kroenig and Colin Kahl, both recently-departed Obama administration officials, noted that if Iran were to install advanced centrifuge designs in the deeply-buried Fordow facility, then Western officials would need to consider taking military action against that site.  Kroenig said such a move by Iran would mean “the United States must strike immediately or forfeit its last opportunity to prevent Iran from joining the nuclear club.”

I viewed this as an unreasonable redline to draw, since Iran is already operating next-generation centrifuges at its other enrichment facility and that moving IR-2m or IR-4 machines into Fordow wouldn’t fundamentally alter the nature of Iran’s nuclear weapons potential in the same way that, say, a decision to start stockpiling weapons-grade uranium would.  But I then got to thinking: wouldn’t more advanced centrifuges at the Qom site mean Iran could breakout quicker — possibly even in the 2-3 months between IAEA inspections?  That would, after all, fundamentally alter the state of play on the nuclear issue, and probably would necessitate some deep thinking in Washington and Tel Aviv.

So let’s figure out what we’re really dealing with here.

Read on.

Republished by arrangement with Think Progress

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper reminded Congress earlier this week that U.S. intelligence estimates indicate that Iran has not yet decided to build a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, U.N. nuclear inspectors report that their recent talks in Tehran made for a “good trip” and scheduled a second round of talks for later this month, and a flurry of recent articles from experts have cast doubt on the effectiveness of a U.S. or Israeli military attack on Iran’s nuclear program.

While some of the more hawkish rhetoric and efforts to drive forward on unilateral sanctions continue to come out of Congress, the new United Technologies/National Journal “Congressional Connection Poll,” found that public support for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is extremely low.

Forty-seven percent of respondents favored economic sanctions against Iran, only 13 percent said the U.S. should “go farther and take covert action against Iran such as sabotage and assassination of scientists working on their nuclear program,” and 17 percent would support “tak[ing] military action against Iran, including bombing weapons facilities inside the country.”

The combination of E.U. sanctions banning oil purchases from Iran and tighter U.S. sanctions led 60 percent of National Journal’s “National Security Insiders,” in a separate poll, to conclude that the new sanctions regime will stave off the need for military action.

In response to a worrying trend in U.S. politics, Lobe Log publishes “Hawks on Iran” (formerly “Iran Hawk Watch”) every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.

*This week’s must-read is “Envisioning a Deal With Iran” by William H. Luers and Thomas R. Pickering, two Cold War diplomatic veterans writing in the New York Times.

Mainstream Media and Pundits:

Clifford D. May in the National Review: Former journalist and spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Clifford May is now president of the hawkish Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. This week he applauded the imposition of more crippling sanctions on Iran, which he calls a “weapon” for bringing about regime change. Despite praising the recent waves of strangling measures against the isolated Islamic Republic, May also implied that the U.S. should keep the military option wide open:

But sanctions are no panacea. They should be just one weapon in an arsenal of policies aimed at weakening Iran’s fanatical rulers immediately and dislodging them eventually.

…

Finally, there must be no ambiguity about the fact that, if all else fails, sharper arrows remain in our quiver; no ambiguity about our determination to prevent this regime — which, the evidence clearly shows, works hand in glove with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups — from acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

There are conflicts, and then there are conflicts. Iran’s rulers need to understand that if they continue to escalate this conflict, sooner or later they will come to the end of the road. And there they will find not just a hive of bumblebees but the jaws of a very angry junkyard dog.

Michael Ledeen in Pajamas Media: Veteran hawk and pundit Michael Ledeen (who was far more prominent during the runup to the Iraq war) continues to push for U.S. sponsored regime change in Iran. This week he downplayed concern about a military conflict by saying that the U.S. and Iran are already at war. He went on to argue that more sanctions against Iran are welcomed but won’t bring about his goal of regime change:

But I don’t know anyone this side of the White House who believes that sanctions, by themselves, will produce what we should want above all:  the fall of the Tehran regime that is the core of the war against us.  To accomplish that, we need more than sanctions;  we need a strategy for regime change.

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Editor’s note: Greg Thielmann of the Arms Control Association is a veteran intelligence official who last served as Director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office in the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Thielmann’s blog post at Arms Control Now which we have republished below was written after the Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing on January 31.

By Greg Thielmann

The United States’ intelligence community’s judgments on Iran’s nuclear program have not fundamentally changed from those revealed in its controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. In presenting the intelligence community’s annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment” to the Senate Committee on Intelligence on January 31, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper used language identical to that used in recent years on a number of critical points:

- We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.

- Iran has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons, making the central issue its political will to do so. These [technical] advancements contribute to our judgment that Iran is technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon, if it so chooses.

- We judge Iran’s nuclear decision making is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran.

Clapper’s testimony acknowledged Iran’s additional accumulation of low-enriched uranium at both the 3.5 percent and 20 percent level and the start of enrichment at its second enrichment plant near Qom.

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On January 23, the EU announced more sanctions and an oil embargo on Iran. The new restrictions impede cooperation with Iran in foreign trade, financial services, energy sectors and technologies, and ban any form of insurance by member states to businesses associated with Iran. EU countries also have until July 1 to secure alternative oil and petroleum sources from states like Saudi Arabia, which is supposed to increase output to prevent market supply shocks. In response, Tehran has threatened to sanction itself by halting oil shipments to certain EU countries ahead of the summer, a move it’s reportedly still debating.

Iran complained that the EU measures were “unfair” and “doomed to fail”, but the effects of the new sanctions, which enhance the pains of preexisting EU, US and UN sanctions, are already being felt. A Thomson Reuters headline from today reads: “Iran grain shipments stranded as sanctions bite“. Jonathan Saul and Michael Hogan build on a report from last week detailing how cargo ships destined for Iran, a major importer of grain, are waiting outside Iranian ports stocked with “about 420,000 tonnes” of product, because Tehran, with its blacklisted Central Bank, is finding it increasingly difficult to send “workable” letters of credit. These Iranian trade partners are in a lose-lose situation–at risk of incurring major losses if they deliver without guaranteed payment and facing the same consequences if they don’t. So the stocked cargo ships and European distributors are just waiting, like port employees and Iranian businesses are hoping, for some solution to materialize.

All the while Iran’s currency, the Rial, continues to devalue while its revenue sources are diminishing. An immediate EU-imposed ban on all new contracts for Iranian crude prevents the isolated country from courting new customers with deals enjoyed by countries like China and Russia. Financial headaches could also turn into major humanitarian issues if waivers and exceptions aren’t issued, especially with regard to food and other essential products.

Three days after the EU sanctions were announced, Israel declared that more, swifter sanctions are needed to halt Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions. Influential U.S. voices, such as the Wall Street Journal’s hawkish editorial board, are making similar claims. Congress is also taking the U.S.’s Iran-sanctions policy to new levels by simultaneously approving legislation that makes diplomacy nearly impossible and pushing Iran into even smaller corners with the threat of more crippling sanctions.

The Obama administration has described its “dual-track approach” with Iran as a policy of sticks and carrots, but the sanctions that the U.S. has adopted and pressured other countries to implement are beginning to look like sticks being thrown at average Iranians at an increasing rate.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in 2010 that the U.S. wants to change the behavior of the Iranian government “without contributing to the suffering of the ordinary people”, but in light of recent events and nightmares that could follow, the opposite seems to be occurring. Meanwhile, another drumbeat rolls on.

By Peter Jenkins

European leaders are telling their publics that the latest EU sanctions are to persuade Iran to talk to the P5+1 about its nuclear program. In the House of Commons, on 24 January, Foreign Secretary William Hague said the sanctions represent “peaceful and legitimate pressure on the Iranian government to return to negotiations”.

This begs a question: why does Iran need to be coerced into negotiating? Surely it is in Iran’s interest to take every opportunity to convince the P5+1 that it intends to abide by its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitment to place all nuclear material in its possession under International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) safeguards and to refrain from manufacturing or otherwise acquiring nuclear explosive devices—and that the 18 years during which Iran pursued a “policy of concealment” were an aberration that Iran’s leaders now regret.

The answer lies, I suspect, in the letter that EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton sent to Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, on 21 October. The letter was made public by the EU on 20 January. It contains the following sentences:

We remain committed to the practical and specific suggestions which we have put forward in the past. These confidence-building steps should form first elements of a phased approach which would eventually lead to a full settlement between us, involving the full implementation by Iran of UNSC and IAEA Board of Governors’ resolutions.

Dr. Jalili and his advisers could be forgiven for interpreting these sentences to mean that there is no point in turning up for talks unless they are committed to satisfying UN and IAEA demands in full. It looks as though the real goal of sanctions is not to get Iran back to the negotiating table, but to get Iran to give way on the demands that it has spent the last six years declining to concede.

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It Can’t Happen Here

Posted by Tom Dispatch

Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near U.S.

(Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the U.S.-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as the Joint Special Operations Gulf of Mexico Task Force, or JSOG-MTF, is to mentor Mexican military units in the border areas in their war with the deadly drug cartels.  The task force provides “highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments,” Maj. Amir Arastoo, a spokesman for Republican Guard special operations forces in North America, tells Fars, and “seeks to confront irregular threats…”

The unit began its existence in mid-2009 — around the time that Washington rejected the Iranian leadership’s wish for a new diplomatic dialogue. But whatever the task force does about the United States — or might do in the future — is a sensitive subject with the Republican Guard.  “It would be inappropriate to discuss operational plans regarding any particular nation,” Arastoo says about the U.S.

Okay, so I made that up.  Sue me.  But first admit that, a line or two in, you knew it was fiction.  After all, despite the talk about American decline, we are still on a one-way imperial planet.  Yes, there is a new U.S. special operations team known as Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council, or JSOTF-GCC, at work near Iran and, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, we really don’t quite know what it’s tasked with doing (other than helping train the forces of such allies as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia).

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Republished by arrangement with Gary’s Choices

By Gary Sick

The real answer is no, they will not. But you would never figure that out by reading the New York Times.

The sensationalist article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine (Jan. 29) adds to the hysteria surrounding U.S. and Israeli relations with Iran. Ronen Bergman, a columnist with the leading Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, concludes that Israel will probably attack Iran this year.

He draws this fearful conclusion after recounting his discussions with key Israeli military and intelligence officials, present and former, who describe to him in great detail: (1) why Israel is incapable of conducting such an attack; (2) why such a foolhardy action would fail to stop Iran’s nuclear program; and (3) why it would actually leave the situation far worse than it is now.

Say what?

Not only is his conclusion at odds with virtually everything he produces as evidence, but there are some omissions in his analysis that regrettably have become predictably routine in talking about the Iranian nuclear program:

He darkly quotes “the latest intelligence” about the number and current activity of Iran’s centrifuges. Where did he get that secret information? Well, just like you or me, he can read the periodic reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which are published on the web virtually the same day they are handed to member states.

How did the IAEA get that “intelligence?” Not hard: they have inspectors in all the sites where Iran is producing enriched uranium. These inspectors, who make frequent surprise visits, keep cameras in place to watch every move, and they carefully measure Iran’s input of feed stock to the centrifuges and the output of low enriched uranium, which is then placed under seal. You would think that would be worth mentioning, at least in passing, but it gets overlooked by virtually every journalist writing on this subject.

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