Testing the Canada-Israel alliance

Here's my latest op-ed for the Times of Israel, titled: "Testing the Canada-Israel alliance". Enjoy. - R.O.
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/testing-the-canada-israel-alliance/

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"Testing the Canada-Israel alliance"

By: Robert D. Onley - 20 January 2014

The inaugural visit of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to Israel represents a significant moment for an Israeli government that is in vital need of dependable friends and reliable moral allies. Much has already been said about Prime Minister Harper’s unequivocal and unparalleled support of Israel since being elected in 2006.

Indeed because the governments of Canada and Israel see eye-to-eye on nearly every geopolitical issue facing the Jewish State, an important question must be asked about the long-term nature of this bilateral relationship, as the Canada-Israel alliance could soon be tested in both word and deed.

Though the United States remains Israel’s unquestioned military ally, many observers note the increasing willingness of the Obama Administration to publicly object to all of Israel’s policies – on the Palestinian peace process, on settlement construction, and most notably on the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The latter is most troubling when coupled with the obvious intent of the United States to codify a questionable “final nuclear deal” with the Iranian government later this year and thus absolve the U.S. of any potential military response toward the issue.

Of course it is unsurprising that after two long wars in the Middle East, the United States is ready to step off the stage. Nonetheless the timing could not be worse, as Iran appears to be using present negotiations to buy time for the development of its Persian Bomb.

For example the delay between the announcement of the P5+1′s “interim deal” with Iran on November 24, 2013 in Geneva, and the final text of what then became the “preliminary deal” actually enacted on January 17, 2014, emphasizes Iran’s disconcerting abuse of process.

Accordingly under the Harper government, Canada has stated that it is “deeply skeptical” about the deal, which will hopefully see Iran scale back its nuclear work in exchange for the West easing multiple layers of sanctions which were painstakingly agreed upon by the largely disunited U.N. Security Council.

Canada shares Israel’s primal fear about whether or not the Iranian government can be trusted to live up to the terms of the deal. But aside from echoing Netanyahu’s pessimism about the trustworthiness of the radical theocratic regime in Tehran, it would appear that Canada can contribute little toward stopping Iran’s covert march toward nuclear weapons.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) seen with his Canadian counterpart Stephen Harper during a welcoming ceremony for Harper at Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem January 19, 2014.

To be sure, there is likely cooperation between Canada and Israel on the espionage and sabotage of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, just as there is with many Western powers.

However in the context of Canada and Israel’s growing alliance, consideration must be given to what might transpire between the nations if diplomacy with Iran ultimately fails. In such a scenario – one that has undoubtedly been war-gamed – Canada’s steadfast moral support of Israel, and Harper’s fundamental belief in Israel’s unique position within the Middle East, will be tested in the flesh.

If there is any government on earth that based on its public statements alone appears willing to ensure Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon, it is Canada; not France, not the U.K., not Italy and not Germany. None of these Western nations even come close to Canada in levying consistent condemnation of Iran’s rhetoric and in pronouncing warnings about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Moreover if there is one government on earth that would publicly and defiantly endorse an Israeli decision to conduct unilateral military strikes against Iran’s nuclear program, again it is Canada. This would be no small measure for a “middle power” like Canada, closely allied with the United States but fiercely carving its own identifiable policy in the Middle East apart from its natural Western allies.

The Netanyahu government’s recent criticism of the European Union‘s “hypocrisy” toward Israel bears out Canada’s policy independence on the myriad issues affecting Israel.

Canada’s nearly solitary voice of moral support for Israel is also reflected in comments made by Rafael Barak, Israel’s ambassador to Canada. Speaking to the Canadian media recently, Barak stated,

“We see Iran as a serious threat. Canadians have the same view. I feel that other countries have the same view, but the difference is that Canada is expressing their ideas in public.”

The biggest question for this alliance in early 2014 is whether the Harper government would back up its public expressions with tangible action, either to facilitate effective military strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, or perhaps more reasonably to help protect the Jewish homeland against Iranian counter-strikes through cooperative defensive military manoeuvres.

The Canadian Forces gained invaluable counter-terrorism experience in over ten years of fighting in Afghanistan (where it bore a disproportionate number of combat losses compared to its ISAF partners) and is adept at assisting in disaster relief operations: might Israel call upon Canadian help if Iran unleashes Hezbollah against the Jewish State? Such a seemingly hyperbolic scenario cannot simply be ignored.

If Netanyahu is in fact preparing for unilateral military action against Iran, as is perennially reported, it is reasonable to suggest that amid all the other nations, Canada alone might be asked for even the smallest contribution on or after that fateful day. This suggestion is particularly probative if the Obama Administration refuses to give Netanyahu a “green light” for the mission. Harper may in fact be the only friend Netanyahu will have to call for help.

These are topics rarely explored in light of Canada’s relatively small military capacity, as some would immediately dismiss out of hand the idea of Canada providing military assistance to Israel.

Perhaps the Harper government would rather not publicly breach such a discussion for fear of unnerving its domestic audience, and this much is understandable. Nonetheless Canada’s unwavering moral alliance with Israel since 2006 clearly provokes legitimate inquiry in the event that Israel’s “D-Day” with Iran arrives.

There is no question that both Israel, Canada and the world desires a peaceful resolution to the stand-off with Iran over its illicit nuclear weapons program. Diplomacy, as it is occurring today, should indeed be given a chance. The unfortunate reality is that time is not on the side of those who seek to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

As Canada’s lonely stand with Israel makes clear, neither country operates in the realm of diplomatic wishful thinking. Rather, the Canada-Israel alliance recognizes the ruthless reality of the hate-filled, anti-Semitic dystopia that Israel’s enemies, like the Iranian regime, never cease to concoct and broadcast right next door. As Harper visits Netanyahu in Israel this week, this reality is surely on their agenda.

Read more: Testing the Canada-Israel Alliance | Robert David Onley | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/testing-the-canada-israel-alliance/#ixzz2quL0Fkt0
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Tags: Harper visits Israel, Canadian visit to Israel, Prime Minister visits Israel, Canadian delegation trip to Israel, Harper meets Netanyahu, Harper in Israel, Harper in Jerusalem, Prime Minister in Israel

My visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem - A Tourist's Guide - July 2013

Below is the video I produced based on my visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem back in July of this year. I've included comments on all of the major sites on the Temple Mount and some of my thoughts on the experience, and packaged the clips as a tourist's guide. If you've never before been to Jerusalem, join me in the video on a journey to the most contested piece of real estate on earth. Enjoy! - R.O.

Visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem - A Tourist's Guide - July 2013

Iran's Plans to Take Over Syria

Iran’s Plans to Take Over Syria
By: Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Dr. Shimon Shapira, May 2, 2013  Vol. 13, No. 10 5 May 2013

In mid-April, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah paid a secret visit to Tehran where he met with the top Iranian officials headed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the commander of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Gen. Qasem Suleimani, who is in charge of Iranian policy in Lebanon and Syria. The visit was clandestine and no details were divulged on an official level – except for the exclusive posting on Hizbullah’s official website of a photograph of Khamenei with Nasrallah beside him in the former’s private library, with a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini above them.1

Suleimani’s involvement in the meeting with Nasrallah was significant. He has been the spearhead of Iranian military activism in the Middle East. In January 2012, he declared that the Islamic Republic controlled “one way or another” Iraq and South Lebanon.2 He now appeared to be prepared to extend Iran’s control to all of Syria.

A media source normally hostile to Iran and Hizbullah but which nonetheless contains accurate information, reported that Iran has formulated an operational plan for assisting Syria. The plan has been named for Gen. Suleimani. It includes three elements: 1) the establishment of a popular sectarian army made up of Shiites and Alawites, to be backed by forces from Iran, Iraq, Hizbullah, and symbolic contingents from the Persian Gulf. 2) This force will reach 150,000 fighters. 3) The plan will give preference to importing forces from Iran, Iraq, and, only afterwards, other Shiite elements. This regional force will be integrated with the Syrian army. Suleimani, himself, visited Syria in late February-early March to prepare the implementation of this plan.3

In the past, senior Iranian officers, like Major General Yahya Rahim-Safavi, the former commander of the Revolutionary Guards who is an adviser to Khamenei, have said that Lebanon and Syria gave Iran “strategic depth.”4 Now it appears that Tehran is taking this a step further, preparing for a “Plan B” in the event Assad falls.

Nasrallah rarely makes such trips. The last time he went on a visit outside Lebanon was in February 2010 when he met in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nasrallah has taken great care not to appear in public since the Second Lebanon War in 2006, and even more so since the assassination of the head of Hizbullah’s military wing, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus in February 2008. Even in Iran itself Nasrallah maintained total secrecy for fear of becoming an assassination target there. After the visit, he gave a speech in Lebanon on April 30, but did not say anything about his visit to Iran. He did remark that Syria “has real friends” that wouldn’t let it fall, implying that, if necessary, he would redouble his efforts to defend Iranian interests, which has always been one of the missions of Hizbullah.

It appears that Hizbullah’s ongoing involvement in Syria, and the extent of this involvement, formed the main issue on the agenda during Nasrallah’s visit to Tehran. The more time passes, the more Iran appears to regard Syria as a lynchpin of its Middle Eastern policy, in general, and of leading the jihad and the Islamic resistance to Israel, in particular. Hizbullah’s inclusion in the armed struggle in Syria is intended first and foremost to serve the Iranian strategy, which has been setting new goals apart from military assistance to the Syrian regime. Iran already seems to be looking beyond the regime’s survivability and preparing for a reality where it will have to operate in Syria even if Assad falls. Even before recent events in Syria, observers in the Arab world have been warning for years about growing evidence of “Iranian expansionism.”5

An important expression of Syria’s centrality in Iranian strategy was voiced by Mehdi Taaib, who heads Khamenei’s think tank. He recently stated that “Syria is the 35th district of Iran and it has greater strategic importance for Iran than Khuzestan [an Arab-populated district inside Iran]. By preserving Syria we will be able to get back Khuzestan, but if we lose Syria we will not even be able to keep Tehran.”6 Significantly, Taaib was drawing a comparison between Syria and a district that is under full Iranian sovereignty. What was also clear from his remarks was that Iran cannot afford to lose Syria.

Syria as a Shiite State
All in all, then, Iran will have to step up its military involvement in Syria. Khamenei’s representative in Lebanon will have to take part in building the new strategy in Syria, acting in tandem with Iran against the Sunni Islamic groups that threaten Iran’s interests in Syria.

Tehran has had political ambitions with respect to Syria for years and has indeed invested huge resources in making Syria a Shiite state. The process began during the rule of Hafez Assad when a far-reaching network was created of educational, cultural, and religious institutions throughout Syria; it was further expanded during Bashar’s reign. The aim was to promote the Shiization of all regions of the Syrian state. The Syrian regime let Iranian missionaries work freely to strengthen the Shiite faith in Damascus and the cities of the Alawite coast, as well as the smaller towns and villages.7 A field study by the European Union in the first half of 2006 found that the largest percentage of religious conversions to Shiism occurred in areas with an Alawite majority.8

In both urban and rural parts of Syria, Sunnis and others who adopted the Shiite faith received privileges and preferential treatment in the disbursement of Iranian aid money. The heads of the tribes in the Raqqa area were invited by the Iranian ambassador in Damascus to visit Iran cost-free, and the Iranians doled out funds to the poor and financial loans to merchants who were never required to pay them back..9 The dimensions of the Iranian investment in Raqqa, which included elegant public buildings, mosques, and Husayniyys (a Shiite religious institute), were recently revealed by Sunni rebels who took over the remote town and destroyed, plundered, and removed all signs of the Iranian and Shiite presence there.10

As of 2009 there were over 500 Husayniyys in Syria undergoing Iranian renovation work. In Damascus itself the Iranians invested huge sums to control the Shiite holy places including the tomb of Sayyida Zaynab, the shrine of Sayyida Ruqayya, and the shrine of Sayyida Sukayna. These sites attract Iranian tourism, which grew from 27,000 visitors in 1978 to 200,000 in 2003.

Iran also operates a cultural center in Damascus that it considers one of its most important and successful. This center publishes works in Arabic, holds biweekly cultural events, and conducts seminars and conferences aimed at enhancing the Iranian cultural influence in the country. The Iranian cultural center is also responsible for the propagation and study of the Persian language in Syrian universities, including providing teachers of Persian.11

Iran’s Sponsorship of Shiite Forces in Syria
At present, bloody battles are being waged over the centers of Iranian influence in Syria, most of all the mausoleum of Sayyida Zaynab – sister of the Imam Husayn – who in 680 carried his severed head to Damascus after the massacre at Karbala. In Iranian historiography, the great victory over the Sunnis is marked in Damascus in the form of a Shiite renaissance in the capital of the hated Umayyad Empire. The Sunnis, however, are now threatening these Iranian achievements. Hizbullah has been recruited to the cause, with hundreds of its fighters coming to Syria from Lebanon. These fighters try to downplay their Hizbullah affiliation and instead identify themselves as the Abu El Fadl Alabbas Brigade, named after the half-brother of the Imam Husayn.

Iran is also recruiting Shiite forces in Iraq for the warfare in Syria. These are organized in a sister framework of Lebanese Hizbullah. Known as the League of the Righteous People and Kateeb Hizbullah, its mission is to defend the Shiite centers in Damascus.12 Hizbullah fighters are also operating in other areas, some of them beyond the Lebanese border in the Shiite villages in Syrian territory on the way to Homs, thereby creating a sort of territorial continuity for ongoing Alawite control under Iranian influence. This continuity is strategically important to Iran since it links Lebanon and Damascus to the Alawite coast.13 Iran aims to have a network of militias in place inside Syria to protect its vital interests, regardless of what happens to Assad.14

The war in Syria persists with no decisive outcome on the horizon. Hizbullah’s battle losses are growing. Subhi Tufayli, the first head of Hizbullah who was dismissed from its leadership by Iran at the start of the 1990s, has been one of the prominent critics of Hizbullah’s involvement in Syria. Tufayli claimed that 138 Hizbullah fighters had been killed there along with scores of wounded who were brought to hospitals in Lebanon.15 Ceremonies for burial of the dead are frequently held clandestinely, sometimes at night, so as to avoid anger and resentment. These casualties, however, did not disappear from sight, and the families have raised harsh questions about such unnecessary sacrifice that is not in the sacred framework of jihad against Israel, which is Hizbullah’s raison d’être.

Tufayli, for his part, asserted that Hizbullah fighters who are killed in battle in Syria “are not martyrs” and “will go to hell.” Syria, he remarked, “is not Karbala” and the Hizbullah men in Syria “are not fighters of the Imam [Husayn]. The oppressed and innocent Syrian people is Karbala and the members of the Syrian people are the children of Husayn and Zaynab.” Tufayli went on to say that he “lauds the fathers and mothers who prevent their children from going to Syria and says to them that God’s blessing is with them.” Tufayli further pointed out that, legally speaking, no fatwa has been issued that permits Hizbullah’s participation in the war in Syria. He said he had appealed to the supreme religious authority – the sources of emulation (Maraji Taqlid) in Najaf and in Lebanon – not to issue such a fatwa.16

In the Lebanese Shiite community, Tufayli is not alone in leveling severe criticism at Hizbullah’s role as an arm of Iran in Syria. Voices within Hizbullah itself are increasingly casting doubt on the wisdom of involving the movement on Bashar Assad’s side. Others refuse to go and fight in Syria, and there have already been desertions from Hizbullah’s ranks. So far, though, it does not appear that all this is deterring Hizbullah from persisting. At the end of the day, Hizbullah is not a Lebanese national movement but a creation of Iran and subject to its exclusive authority. Nasrallah was summoned to Tehran so as to encourage him and order him to continue as a faithful and obedient soldier of Velayt-e Faqih (literally: the Rule of the Jurisprudent, referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei).

It is likely that Tehran will make every effort to recruit additional Shiite elements from Iraq, the Persian Gulf, and even from Pakistan. For the Islamic Republic, this is a war of survival against a radical Sunni uprising that views Iran and the Shiites as infidels to be annihilated. This is the real war being waged today, and it is within Islam. From Iran’s standpoint, if the extreme Sunnis of the al-Qaeda persuasion are not defeated in Syria, they will assert themselves in Iraq and threaten to take over the Persian Gulf, posing a real danger to Iran’s regional hegemony. Khamenei does not intend to give in. Hizbullah’s readiness to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with Iran against the radical Sunnis could shatter the delicate internal order upon which the Lebanese state is based and bring about a Hizbullah take-over of Lebanon in its entirety.

- See more at: http://jcpa.org/article/irans-plans-to-take-over-syria/#sthash.yKTsDW0i.dpuf

Notes
1. On the picture and its significance, see Ali al-Amin, Al-Balad, April 23, 2013, http://www.alahednews.com.lb/essaydetails.php?eid=74383&cid=76.
2. “Chief of Iran’s Quds Force Claims Iraq, South Lebanon under His Control, Al Arabiya News, January 20, 2012, http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/01/20/189447.html.
3. A-Shiraa, March 15, 2013.
4. Nevvine Abdel Monem Mossad, “Implication of Iran Accepting Military Role in Syria, Lebanon,” The Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, October 7, 2012.
5. Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, “Iran and Its Expansionist Tendencies,” Arab News, February 6, 2013, http://www.arabnews.com/iran-and-its-expansionist-tendencies; “US Embassy Cables: Omani Official Wary of Iranian Expansionism,” The Guardian, November 28, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/165127.
6. Ali-al-Amin, Al-Balad, February 17, 2013.
7. On the Shiization of Syria, see Khalid Sindawi, “The Shiite Turn in Syria,” Hudson Institute, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, vol. 8, 82-127, http://www.currenttrends.org/research/detail/the-shiite-turn-in-syria.
8. Ibid., 84.
9. Ibid., 89-90.
10. Martin Kramer, “The Shiite Crescent Eclipsed,” April 16, 2013, http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2013/04/the-shiite-crescent-is-broken.
11. Nadia von Maltzahn, “The Case of Iranian Cultural Diplomacy in Syria,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2 (2009): 33-50.
12. Rabbiah Jamal, “Iraq’s Kateeb Hezbollah announces involvement in Syria,” Now Lebanon, April 7, 2013.
13. See the excellent article by Hanin Ghadder, “Hezbollah sacrifices popularity for survival: In Syria, The Party of God is struggling for an un-divine victory,” Now Lebanon, April 10, 2013.
14. Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick, “Iran and Hezbollah Build Militia Networks in Syria in Event that Assad Falls, Officials Say,” The Washington Post, February 10, 2013, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-10/world/37026054_1_syrian-government-forces-iran-and-hezbollah-president-bashar.
15. www.metransparent.com, April 25, 2013.
16. Subhi Tufayli, interview, Al Arabiya, February 26, 2013. - See more at: http://jcpa.org/article/irans-plans-to-take-over-syria/#sthash.yKTsDW0i.dpuf

Are Israel and Russia on the Same Page?

With reports today that Russia will ship its advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missile defense system to Syria, that and follow-up reports that Israel has threatened to attack Russia's missile shipments to Syria, suddenly Israel's relationship with Russia has come into sharp focus on the international stage. All of which is compounded by leading members of the European Union agreeing to lift their embargo on weapons shipments to the Syrian opposition/rebels. As a result, key questions must be asked:

• What is Russia's long-term objective in propping up the Assad regime, aside from maintaining its naval port at Tartus?
• How would Russia react if Israel indeed attacked shipments of Russian S-300 missiles?
• Is the West incrementally inching toward armed intervention in Syria?
• If Syrian President Assad were assassinated or incapacitated, what role might Iran and Hezbollah play in shaping the regime that replaces or displaces Assad?

Events are rapidly escalating the Syrian crisis. The number of innocent killed is over 80,000, with no end in sight. The major powers are apparently set to significantly increase their armaments to both sides of the civil war. Is this a powder keg about to explode? Sure looks like it. - R.O.

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Are Israel and Russia on the Same Page?

by Zalman Shoval

Though the U.S. and Russia have agreed to hold a summit in Geneva to try to diplomatically resolve the conflict in Syria and establish an interim Syrian government, it is highly doubtful that Russia and the U.S. are of one mind as to what the diplomatic resolution should be. Israel, as we all know, does not have a clear preference as to which side winds up on top: It is not indifferent to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's atrocities, but it is also aware that the rebels, or at least some of them, may pose no less of a threat.

The Russians have a direct interest in the events in Syria, and the lightning meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month is proof of that. We don't know exactly what was said behind closed doors in Sochi, but we cannot assume that Putin initiated the meeting (and he did in fact initiate it) just to inform Netanyahu that Russia would not cancel its missile deal with the Syrians due to supposed contractual obligations or commercial reputation considerations. A regime change in Syria would jeopardize the strategic, diplomatic and economic interests of Putin's Russia, much like the interests of the Soviet Union before it.

The S-300 anti-aircraft missile system. (BBC)

The Syrian port of Tartus is the home base of the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. Since Moscow wants to preserve its status (at least in its own view) as a regional superpower in the Middle East, it must carefully consider its conduct on the day after Assad's fall -- and Israel apparently plays into Russia's considerations.

It is possible that the Russians will try to forge ties with whomever rises to power in Damascus after Assad, but they are also considering the possibility that Syria will splinter and a small Alawite state will be established in the northeaster part of the country -- where the port of Tartus is situated. The Americans, unlike the Russians, are still hoping for a unified Syria with a democratic leadership that would cooperate with the West, though they are less confident in the likelihood of this actually happening.

In the past, Soviet policy in the Middle East rested mainly on support for the Arabs, including Arab terror organizations, and hostility toward Israel -- both because Stalin viewed Zionism as the most dangerous enemy of communism and because of Israel's relationship with the U.S. in the context of the Cold War. In this regard, things have changed, and thankfully so.

Currently, Russia isn't entirely in love with Assad either. Russia's support for Assad is a default policy. But much like Israel, Russia is worried that if Assad falls, a fundamentalist-Islamist hub will arise in his place. In this regard, Jerusalem and Moscow share a common future interest (even if it is for different reasons). In the meantime, Israel expects Russia to convince Assad that it has no intention of attacking him as long as he prevents the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah. Israel also wants Russia to make it clear to Assad that if he should violate this expectation, or provoke Israel other ways, there will be a response.

There is currently more than one game being played at the Syrian card table. One player is playing poker while another player is playing bridge. The players and partners are also inconsistent. At this point, it is not yet clear which player is holding the winning card, or even if such a card exists. In any case, Israel has to play its cards close to the chest and refrain from unnecessary chatter. And of course Israel must not forget that specific or temporary interests, as important as they may be, are no substitute for the long-term relationship with the U.S.

Russia's Brinkmanship with US Clashes with Israel's Security

A brief summary of Russia's recent foreign policy moves and how they impact Israel. Does Russia think there won't be consequences for supporting terror states like Iran and Syria? -R.O.

Middle East and Terrorism: Russia's Brinkmanship with US Clashes with Israel's Security

by Yaakov Lappin

"Jerusalem will find Russia's delivery of the S-300 missile system to Syria to be an intolerable development; it is safe to assume that Israel will act to prevent this from happening."

Russia is aggressively squaring off with an indecisive and rather meek West about Syria, and in the process, is also threatening to undermine Israeli efforts to ensure that Iran and Syria do not ship strategic weapons to Hezbollah.

The Syrian civil war has become a dangerous and complex battle of multiple actors and their proxies: Sunni versus Shi'ite, Iran versus the Gulf states, Al-Qaeda versus Hezbollah, and on a global scale, the United States versus Russia.

Moscow is trying to deter a potential US or NATO-led initiative to set up a no-fly zone over areas of Syria, and is seeking to stop Western-led air strikes against chemical weapons sites.
Russia also seems concerned that recent air strikes in Damascus targeting Hezbollah-bound guided Iranian missiles -- strikes attributed by the foreign media to Israel -- will pave the way to such an intervention.

Israel has no interest in getting involved in the Syrian civil war. Rather, it is looking out for the safety of millions of citizens, who already live in the shadow of some 80,000 Hezbollah rockets, and would be threatened further by the transfer of precise, powerful missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In recent days, Russia unleashed a flurry of moves to establish its support of Syria.

The Russian moves include: Declaring that it will proceed with deliveries of the advanced S-300 air defense system to Assad, mobilizing war ships to the eastern Mediterranean, and selling sophisticated surface-to-sea Yakhont missiles to Assad.

Moscow's recent maneuvers might be more bluster than real -- the S-300 has yet to be delivered, and Russia was in 2010 talked out of selling the formidable air defense system to Iran.

The threat, however, was serious enough for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to make an unscheduled trip last week to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. The two later held a press conference, repeating their public positions, but it is doubtful that those statements were a complete reflection of their private exchange.

Israel is opposed to Assad receiving the S-300 missile for several reasons: With its sophisticated radars and range of 200 kilometers, the S-300 can hamper Israel Air Force aircraft seeking to monitor Hezbollah in Lebanon. The system can also disrupt future Israeli efforts to intercept the transit of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah through Syria. Finally, Assad can choose to smuggle S-300 batteries to Hezbollah or Iran.

Should the S-300 fall into Iranian hands, the future potential mission of launching a military strike on Iran's developing nuclear program would be more even more complex than it already is. Knowing that the S-300 was in Hezbollah's hands, and could target Israeli aircraft sent to stop it, would only boost the Shi'ite terror organization's confidence to launch cross-border attacks on Israel. For these reasons, Jerusalem will find Russia's delivery of such a system to Syria to be an intolerable development; it is safe to assume that Israel will act to prevent this from happening.

Similarly, the Russian Yakhont missiles already delivered to Syria threaten Israel Navy ships carrying out vital missions in the Mediterranean.

Behind closed-doors, intense diplomacy -- including the sudden visit by CIA Director John Brennan to Israel -- is underway to try and contain these developments, and prevent them from triggering further regional security deterioration.

Yaakov Lappin

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3722/russia-syria-israel

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The next 100 years: what's going to happen?

A superb, thorough assessment of global trends and predictions for the next 100 years. A worthy read. - R.O.
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What is going to happen in the next hundred years?
The world is back to where it was in the late 19th century — no one great power controls everything on the planet, not the US and not China. And that makes the threat of war inescapable.
The New Statesman
By John Gray - Published 15 May 2013 16:03

In The Great Illusion, a bestseller in 1913, the Labour MP Norman Angell distilled the ruling wisdom of the time: the immense productivity of global markets had made war a destructive anachronism. A new phase in human history had arrived, a period of continuing growth and prosperity, bringing with it an era of peace. In fact, it was the long peace that Angell and so many others expected that turned out to be the great illusion, and the century that followed was shaped by violent global conflicts.

When the first issue of the New Statesman appeared, 14 months before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, European states controlled much of the globe. The culmination of many years of geopolitical rivalries, the First World War destroyed Europe’s primacy and led to another world conflict from which the United States emerged as the global hyperpower. Today the US can no longer claim any all-round pre-eminence; but that does not mean that China, or any other country, can occupy the position in the world that the US once did. Instead, we have entered an era in which no great power is predominant. For the foreseeable future, no one will rule the world.

In this, as in other ways, the next 100 years seem likely to resemble the late 19th century more than the late 20th. There have been significant changes in social and political structures, with women and gay people achieving partial emancipation, and varieties of democracy spreading across many countries. Yet the projects of inter­national peace and world government that many cherished a century ago have not been realised and the pattern that is emerging at a global level looks likely to be another round in a remarkably familiar kind of human conflict.

If geopolitics is the struggle of states for power over natural resources, we find ourselves in an era of geopolitical rivalry similar to the one that existed a century ago but with new players and higher stakes.

The most obvious shift that has taken place in the past 100 years is also the most clearly irreversible. A trend since 1914, the dwindling significance of Europe as a global player has become an unalterable fact. If Britain has yet to acquire any coherent post-imperial role, Europe has consigned itself to impotence by trying to turn itself into a super-state. Writing in 1927, the visionary French poet Paul Valéry observed: “Europe visibly aspires to be governed by an American commission. Its entire policy is directed to that end.Not knowing how to rid ourselves of our history, we will be relieved of it by a fortunate people who have almost none.”

Being ruled by the US may have been the secret European dream during the interwar years, but the course of events after 1945 was rather different. Europe’s peace was guaranteed by US power (without which Nazism could not have been defeated or Stalin kept at bay) but the European elite were unhappy living in the shadow of the American shield, and from the late 1940s a movement developed aiming to reassert Europe in the world. Its goal was to escape from American rule by becoming like America – a federal state – but one held together by European values and a distinctive type of social market capitalism.

The resulting European project produced 40 years of peace and prosperity. But the goal of forging an American-style polity on the European continent neglected basic differences – not least that the US became a modern state only after a savage civil war and generations of sometimes coercive nation-building. There is no way Europe can replicate the US’s achievement.

A single European currency created in the absence of anything resembling a functioning European polity, the euro has divided the EU and plunged the southern half of the continent into a state of permanent depression. Under pressure from the austerity policies required to shore up the banking system, the social market economy that was meant to mark out European capitalism from the Anglo-American variety is being shredded relentlessly.

The classic toxins of European politics – xenophobia, anti-Semitism and hatred of migrants, gypsies and gay people – are re-emerging as strong forces in a number of countries, together with new forms of populism such as Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in Italy and Spain’s indignados. With its political elite fumbling in the face of continuous internal crisis, Europe has forfeited any prospect it may have had of becoming a global player. Peering ahead one or two decades, it is possible to glimpse a future in which the eurozone has disintegrated and Germany has re-emerged as a mid-ranking power whose chief focus is on Russia and the emerging economies. In any event, the supposed European superstate is out of the game. In geopolitical terms, Europe does not exist.

Europe is not the only player in world politics whose position has altered irrevocably over the past hundred years. Russia entered the First World War as the centre of one of history’s largest empires, but its importance today derives chiefly from the natural resources that it commands. The principal legacy of communism is that the country is ruled by the intelligence services intertwined with organised crime. The Putin regime is one of the clearest modern-day examples of the rise of the extractive state – a phenomenon that has appeared in countries with widely differing political systems. China has many of the characteristics of an extractive state, but so does India; with any increase in prosperity being distributed narrowly among the banks and the top few per cent, the US, Britain and the eurozone also qualify to some degree. Putin’s regime fits the model not only in the sense that its wealth derives chiefly from the extraction of natural resources, but also because one of its core functions is to transfer a large part of that wealth into the hands of a small elite.

Some have described Putin’s regime as a mafia state and, given the killings and unexplained deaths of opponents and critics inside and outside Russia, this may not be an unreasonable description. Reports by Russian central bank authorities of vast illegal movements of capital abroad reinforce the perception of a gangster economy, at the same time suggesting that Putin may not be able to control the system of nationalised criminality he has created. And yet, despite some recent weakness, the regime shows no signs of being in terminal decline. Reasserting Russian independence against the west after a period of national humiliation during the Yeltsin era, with lower government debt than most western countries, and presiding over rising prosperity for sections of the population beyond the oligarchy, while leaving the majority with more freedom than it ever had in Soviet times, the Putin regime still has more legitimacy than those that preceded it. If it is unstable, that is not because it faces political opposition but because of its over-reliance on oil and gas.

It is a mark of how interconnected the world is today that the principal threat to Putin’s regime should come not from any internal challenge, but from the Arab spring. Upheaval in the Arab world was fuelled by the loose monetary policies adopted in the US after the financial crash, which produced a speculative boom in wheat prices – one of the main triggers of unrest in Tunisia and Egypt. Upheaval in these countries was, in effect, an unintended consequence of American quantitative easing.

Now, another unintended consequence of the Arab spring is emerging: the cost of buying off mass discontent in the countries where it has not spread is rising. Repressive regimes in oil-producing countries need an oil price high enough to be able to fund the increased levels of public spending that are required to stave off radicalisation of their populations. Nowhere is this more true than in Saudi Arabia, which has headed off potential unrest with a mixture of repression and spending programmes. So far, these policies have worked but the medium-term effect is to raise the price of oil to a point at which other sources of energy become economically viable.

A good deal of hype surrounds the “shale revolution”, some claiming that fracking enables the US to achieve the elusive dream of energy independence, withdrawal from the Gulf and a return to a kind of isolationism. Claims of this sort are at best hyperbolic. The US has other reasons to remain in the Gulf aside from securing Saudi oil supplies – the prospect of rapid nuclear proliferation in the region if Iran acquires nuclear capability, for one. Outside the US and China, shale oil and gas are unlikely to be exploited on a large scale. Most European countries (including Britain) are too densely populated for the technology to be applied widely. Rapid depletion and environmental risks are daunting obstacles everywhere. There seems to be no firm, expert consensus on the technology’s potential but fracking is clearly no answer to the world’s energy needs.

The shift to unconventional energy may still be a game-changer, as the effect is to make the position of oil-producing countries increasingly untenable. If higher oil prices are needed in order to appease their restive populations, these same prices will boost other energy sources; at the same time, shifting to other fuels could force the oil price down to a point where the spending programmes that buy off unrest will become unaffordable. Some have forecast that oil-producing countries will be left destitute when reserves run dry – a prospect sometimes linked with theoretical projections regarding “peak oil”. The actual threat to oil-producing countries is less speculative and nearer at hand. By putting upward pressure on the oil price only to flatten it later, the Arab spring has left oil-dependent regimes in a bind that could entrap Russia as much as Middle Eastern producers. Simultaneously, it points to one of the reasons the US may be entering a rebound.

If the US was at the centre of the largest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, it is also the first country to show signs of renewal. The recovery is slow and sluggish and is occurring against the background of a continuing decline in the living standards of most Americans, which began to stagnate decades ago. The period between the end of the cold war and the eruption of the financial crisis, which many celebrated as confirming US hegemony, paradoxically marked its end. With its wealth founded on unsustainable levels of debt and the country’s chief exports dangerous financial derivatives and ruinously expensive wars, much of the US’s prosperity in the post-cold-war period was delusive.

The US claim to embody a universal model was empty, partly because of the country’s manifest failings – vast inequalities, poor standards of education outside the top universities, the world’s most overpriced medical care and a prison system larger than that of any other country – but also because the US was profoundly divided. As imagined by the Tea Party, it is a different country from the one represented by Barack Obama. If the world was becoming American, which America would it be? The near-collapse in 2007-2008 only emphasised the extravagance of the claims that had been made on behalf of the US. Ironically, the impact of the debacle has been to quench anti-Americanism. Now that Washington is no longer the centre of things, hostility has changed to indifference. With US power deflated, the rest of the world has largely lost interest.

Partly because of this loss of interest, the US rebound has not yet been sufficiently appreciated. One source of the comeback may be the new energy technologies, which enable firms that have been offshored to “reshore” and come home, and could eventually help to restore the US as a major manufacturing economy. Another reason may be that the policies of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, have contained some of the largest threats to the US financial system, which is now safer than the financial system in Europe. It may be that the dollar is being slowly replaced as countries opt to trade in other currencies, but there is no alternative world reserve currency on the horizon. For all its problems, some of them probably insoluble, the US remains the world’s haven for capital.

However, the chief significance of the US’s rebound may be political. Obama has not been able to rid his country of its deep polarities and now faces a succession of spending cuts as a result of intransigent Republican opposition. Even so, he has prevailed over the messianic right and gone some way towards renovating government. With very high levels of inequality, a middle class that can no longer afford a middle-class lifestyle and large sections of the population with no real assets, the American version of capitalism remains badly flawed. Yet the system continues to command deep support, and although the US cannot regain the hegemony it has lost it is in a better position to cope with an era of low growth than any other great power.

Ever since the end of the Second World War, the stability of democracies has rested on economic expansion. The importance of continued growth is not simply that people are better off than they were in the past – in that case, it would not matter much if growth rates slowed. Rather, in the absence of growth at something like the pace to which most people have become accustomed, the tacit compact on which democracy has been based risks breaking down. When the social product is no longer increasing, issues of distribution can easily become politically explosive – particularly where there is a widespread perception that a government operates chiefly to transfer wealth to the few. And it is not only democracies that are threatened in this way. Authoritarian regimes are just as much at risk – in the case of China, more so.

There are several reasons why the future rate of growth in the world economy is unlikely to match that of the past. Some have argued that the rapid expansion of the past couple of centuries was a one-off episode, triggered by technological innovations such as electric light, the internal combustion engine and indoor plumbing that transformed life on a scale that cannot be repeated. Others – more plausibly, to my mind – point to rising human numbers, Malthus-style resource scarcities and rising climate change as the chief obstacles.

There are also demographic factors at work. While the population of countries such as Egypt will double over the next 20 years or so, many societies are ageing fast; this has implications for the debt burden that has been inherited from the crash. In Europe and Japan, as well as the United States, debt has been transferred to future generations – a policy that (whatever its morality) can be maintained as long as the next generation is large enough to shoulder the burden. When the next generation is smaller than the last, the merry-go-round slows down or stops.

Nowhere is slow growth potentially more destabilising than in China. The scale and pace of growth over the past three decades have been unprecedented, with hundreds of millions of people rising out of poverty more quickly than at any other time in history. Yet this achievement is also a source of vulnerability, because rapid expansion is the regime’s main source of popular support. China is not a democracy but it does have a form of popular government. Aside from anti-American and anti-Japanese nation­alism and painful memories of the Mao years, it may well be only the expectation of further expansion that protects the regime from mass unrest. Endemic corruption and the role of the Communist Party as a vehicle for elite enrichment have hollowed out the Chinese state. Chinese officials say that order could break down if the rate of growth fell much below 5 per cent annually for a few years in a row, and it is impossible to envision China repeating Japan’s ex­perience in suffering decades of near-zero growth while preserving social peace. With a Communist Party apparatus that is deeply distrusted and social bonds having been torn up repeatedly, China is more at risk from protracted economic slowdown than any other major state.

This is not to say, as some Chinese dissidents have done, that the current Chinese regime is facing a pre-revolutionary situation. Whatever else may happen, China is not going the way of the former Soviet Union. Its ethnic problems are not on anything like the scale of those of the USSR and it has not suffered military defeat as the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan. Again, Chinese institutions are not highly centralised and protest has so far been driven mostly by local issues. Nor are the Chinese elite anything like as demoralised as those of the former Soviet Union in the period leading up to the country’s implosion in 1991. Wealthy Chinese may be hedging their bets, moving capital abroad and acquiring property and residency in foreign countries, but China’s ruling class shows no sign of having lost its taste for power. If its authority comes into serious question, there is little doubt that it will respond with heavy-handed repression.

There has been a tendency to think of world politics as reverting to something like the bipolarity it exhibited in the cold war, with China replacing the Soviet Union as the chief adversary of the US and the west. This is a flawed analogy and not only because there is no likelihood of China collapsing later like the Soviet Union. China’s rise reverses the trend of the past several centuries, returning the world to something more like its condition before Europe began to assert global primacy. The emergence of India as a global power is part of the same pattern, along with the advancing roles of Indonesia and Brazil. Viewing the world today on the model of the cold war shows a parochial lack of perspective.

Russia did not become western when communism collapsed but reverted to its long-existing ambiguities as a Eurasian power. China is no more likely to embrace liberal democracy if the current regime falters. Western commentators are adamant that the values they associate with democracy are universal, and it is true that some values are generically human. Torture, slavery and persecution are bad for all human beings; peace, freedom and tolerance are universal goods. But universal values can be promoted – and subverted – by a variety of regimes. It has been forgotten that democracy can work against humane values, a lesson that the liberals of an earlier generation spent their lives teaching.

Would a democratic China be more restrained in its relations with Japan than the current Chinese oligarchy? Or a more democratic Russia that was no longer led by Putin less inclined to persecute gay people and other minorities? Would an Islamist democracy in Syria be less oppressive or bloodthirsty than Bashar al-Assad’s secular dictatorship? The answers are not obvious. In any case, such questions, though important, are academic. Power is leaking away from the west and no assertion of the superiority of western systems of government will stem the flow.

The result is a more pluralistic international system but not necessarily a more peaceful world. This need not entail industrial-style warfare of the kind that shaped much of the 20th century. Recent cyber-attacks in the US, the Baltic states, South Korea, Iran and other countries suggest a less visible but more continuous kind of conflict, and the use of drones is further reducing the role of the standing armies of the past.

Alongside new sorts of warfare, older kinds of conflict have resumed. With India and China at odds over Pakistan, Afghan­istan and control of the South China Sea, the world’s rising powers are locked into strategic competition with one another – and also with the west. Whatever the upshot of French intervention in Mali, it will not be the last such neocolonial incursion. Africa is being remilitarised by western powers in what seems to be a response to China’s economic expansion into the continent. The case of the Democratic Republic of Congo – where millions of non-combatants have died as a result of decades-long warfare – shows the damage this kind of conflict can wreak. The terrifying destructive potential of nuclear weapons has altered the modes of warfare without necessarily reducing the human costs of war.

Now, moving into another phase, the eurozone crisis is having geopolitical repercussions. Australia and Canada, though economically heavily dependent on China, are closely aligned with the US in military and security terms – which is not, in the medium to long term, a stable arrangement. In the eastern Mediterranean, the Cyprus banking crisis is taking place against the background of an emerging struggle for control of large deposits of natural gas that have been discovered off the island’s coast. There are big questions about the cost, risks and benefits of exploiting these resources, but they matter little in comparison to the geopolitical uncertainties that surround the reserves. Russia has shown signs of interest, though whether it is ready to spark conflict with Turkey and other states that may claim a stake remains doubtful.

Further afield, significant reserves of natural gas have been identified off the coasts of Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Syria, all already involved in long-running conflicts.

Many will resist the suggestion that the coming century will be shaped by geopolitical competition. Like Norman Angell, they will insist that war is no longer a rational method of acquiring resources; production and trade are so much more efficient. From an economic point of view this may be true, but it is not economic calculation that determines the behaviour of states. The Gulf war of 1990-91 was a pure resource conflict, and oil was a vital factor in triggering the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As the polar ice melts from global warming, the Arctic may become a site in the next round of the New Great Game. In turn, as changes in the planetary environment become more disruptive, governments are likely to resort to geo-engineering and future wars may feature climate modification being deployed as a weapon. Great powers will co-operate in many areas but against a background of continued rivalry and heightened risks.

By a circuitous route, the world has returned to something like its condition a century ago. Yet there is nothing written that says the coming century must be a rerun of the 20th. Some have seen in the stand-off between China and Japan over the Senkaku islands parallels with the diplomatic tangles that preceded the First World War. It would be a mistake to write off the possibility of another outbreak of industrial-style global warfare, yet China is not yet the military power that some fear and any escalation in the conflict would probably soon be cut short by a show of American naval force. The next threat to world peace may end up coming from events no one anticipates.

Some patterns can be seen with reas­onable clarity. Globalisation has brought higher incomes to hundreds of millions, but it has also left them less secure as their jobs and savings are put at risk by volatile global markets. New religions and social movements will develop to cope with the anxieties of the large numbers who will be reasonably affluent and at the same time chronically anxious about the future. Advances in science and technology will alleviate some of the effects of resource scarcity and climate change, while enabling conflicts between states to be fought out in subtler and at times more destructive ways than in the past.

How these contending forces will play out, we cannot know. The harmonious world envisioned at the time this magazine was founded will continue to elude us, yet that does not mean that history is bound to repeat itself. If we know more than Norman Angell and those who shared his illusions a century ago did, we also have less of an excuse if we re-enact their errors on a larger scale.

John Gray is the New Statesman’s lead book reviewer. His latest book, “The Silence of Animals: on Progress and Other Modern Myths”, is published by Allen Lane (£18.99)

Russia condemns Israeli strike on Syria

By: Robert D. Onley
Without even a complete picture of exactly what transpired yesterday with regard to Israeli strikes in the Syria-Lebanon border region, Russia has unsurprisingly picked sides by today publicly condemning the Israeli strike. In doing so, Russia further entrenches its position as one of the world's lonely allies of the murderous Assad regime in Syria, and as an implicit ally to Iran's Hezbollah terrorist group proxy in Lebanon.

It is duplicitous and hypocritical for Russia to condemn what was likely a surgical strike on illegal Syrian weapons shipments to Syria, while turning an ignorantly blind eye to Assad's slaughter of his own people.

Russia should be cautioned that if the roles were reversed -- with Russia facing potential chemical weapons transfers to its avowed enemy and a terrorist organization (i.e. Hezbollah), situated a mere 100km north of it's capital Moscow -- Russia would too conduct identical surgical strikes without hesitation and without fear of condemnation.

It is patently absurd that the Russian government -- with all of its undoubted intellectual might -- repeatedly releases these prototypical anti-Israeli condemnations, denouncing the slightest move of self-defence, while plainly dismissing the ruthless, lethal reality on the ground in this region. To the astute denizens of the Russian foreign ministry: for shame.

That the Russian government is on this path is to be expected at this point. After propping up the Assad regime, and publicly backing Iran's march toward nuclear weapons capability (despite Russia's support for UNSC sanctions), Putin must feel honour-bound to repeat and solidify his anti-Western agenda, even if it will eventually blow back in his face. And it will.

Even with the potential to lose their strategic naval port in Tartus, Russia's unequivocal, reactive support for Assad will only increase the probability that the eventual new Syrian regime will immediately depose Russian interests from Syria -- forever.

Make no mistake -- Russian support for the murderous regimes in Syria and Iran will be seen as a grave marker in the pages of human history. For Putin et al have chosen to side with the forces of evil, despair and darkness at this crucial time, and their pronouncements for revenge and punitive measures against Israel will not be forgotten. Indeed, the Israelis, of all people, are more than prepared for the wars that are most assuredly fast approaching.

We must pray for the peace of Jerusalem. - R.O.

More headlines:

• Iran: Israeli assault on Syria will have “serious consequences”
• Russia, Hezbollah condemn Israeli strike
• White House Warns Syria Not to Transfer Arms to Hizbullah

We Ignore Islamism at Our Own Peril

For any avid foreign affairs reader, the distinction between Islam and Islamism is critical to properly understanding the drama of the Middle East. Moreover a full appreciation of what it is that defines these concepts will facilitate a much broader understanding of the threat facing Western and Arab powers alike. As we watch the violence unfolding in Syria, and the protests rising in Egypt, read the following article and carefully assess the distinction. - R.O.

Headlines to watch:
- Egyptian President's Defiant, Confrontational Speech
- Syria loads chemical weapons into bombs; military awaits Assad's order
- Islamic Fighters in Northern Syria Not United
- Assad faces life or death choice
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Islamology 101: What's the difference between Islam and Islamism?
By: Clifford D. May - Dec. 6, 2012 - National Review Online

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan

Google “Islamist” and you’ll get more than 24 million hits. Google “jihadist” and you’ll get millions more. Yet I bet the average American could not tell you what it is that Islamists and jihadists believe. And those at the highest levels of the U.S. government refuse to do so.

Why? John Brennan, the top counterterrorism adviser in the White House, argues that it is “counterproductive” to describe America’s “enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.” To describe terrorists using “religious terms,” he adds, would “play into the false perception” that the “murderers” waging unconventional war against the West are doing so in the name of a “holy cause.”

I get it. I understand why it would be useful to convince as many of the world’s more than a billion Muslims as possible that Americans are only attempting to defend themselves against “violent extremists.” By now, however, it should be obvious that this spin — one can hardly call it analysis — has spun out. The unpleasant fact is that there is an ideology called Islamism and, as Yale professor Charles Hill recently noted, it “has been on the rise for generations.”

So we need to understand it. We need to understand how Islamism has unfolded from Islam, and how it differs from traditional Islam as practiced in places as far-flung and diverse as Kuala Lumpur, Erbil, and Timbuktu. This is what Bassam Tibi attempts in his most recent book, published this year, Islamism and Islam. It has received nowhere near the attention it deserves.

A Koret Foundation Senior Fellow at Stanford University, Tibi describes himself as an “Arab-Muslim pro-democracy theorist and practitioner.” Raised in Damascus, he has “studied Islam and its civilization for four decades, working in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa.” His research has led him to this simple and stark conclusion: “Islamism is a totalitarian ideology.” And just as there cannot be “democratic totalitarianism,” so there cannot be “democratic Islamism.”

Brennan and other American and European officials are wrong, Tibi says, to fear that “fighting Islamism is tantamount to declaring all of Islam a violent enemy.” As for the Obama administration’s insistence that “the enemy is specifically, and only, al-Qaeda,” that, Tibi writes, “is far too reductive.”

Tibi also faults Noah Feldman, the young scholar who advised the Bush administration, and who insisted, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that sharia, Islamic law, can be viewed as “Islamic constitutionalism.” Feldman failed to grasp the significance of the “Islamist claim to supremacy (siyadat al-Islam),” the conviction that Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists are inferior and that their inferiority should be reflected under the law and by government institutions.

Tibi makes this important distinction: All jihadists are Islamists, but not all Islamists are jihadists. In other words, not all Islamists are committed to violence, including terrorism, as the preferred means to achieve their goals. He asks: “Can we trust Islamists who forgo violence to participate in good faith within a pluralistic, democratic system?” He answers: “I believe we cannot.”

Chief among Islamist goals, Tibi writes, is al-hall al Islami, “the Islamic solution, a kind of magic answer for all of the problems — global and local, socio-economic or value-related — in the crisis-ridden world of Islam.” Islamists ignore the fact that such governance has been implemented, for example, in Iran for over more than 30 years, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, in Gaza under Hamas, and in Sudan. It has never delivered development, freedom, human rights, or democracy. As for Turkey, Tibi sees it as “not yet an Islamist state” but heading in that direction.

Tibi makes some arguments with which I’d quarrel. For example, he views Saudi religious/political doctrines as a “variety of Salafism (orthodox, traditional Islam) not Islamism.” I would counter that Salafism is a variant of Islamism, albeit one based not on the writings of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, but on nostalgia for the glory days of the seventh century.

Nevertheless, the debate Tibi is attempting to initiate is necessary — and long overdue. During the Cold War there was a field of study known as Sovietology. It was taught in our most elite universities with strong U.S. government support.

Why isn’t Islamology — not Islamic theology, or “Muslim-Christian understanding,” or “Islamic thought” — a discipline today? For one, Tibi observes, because to “protect themselves against criticism, Islamists have invented the formula of ‘Islamophobia’ to defame their critics.” (How did Stalin not come up with Sovietophobia or Russophobia?) And of course if such slander fails to intimidate, there are other ways to shut people up: Tibi has “survived attempts on my life by jihadists.”

A second reason for the absence of Islamology: The U.S. government cannot back the study of an ideology it stubbornly insists does not exist. Finally, those who do fund anything to do with Islam on campus — for example, the Gulf petro-princes who have given tens of millions of dollars to Georgetown and Harvard — have a different agenda, one that does not include free and serious inquiry. We ignore what they are doing — and what Tibi is telling us — at great peril.

— Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security.

Is this How the Israel-Iran War Begins?

Probably. Expect the second front in the north to open up sooner than later. Marching as to... - R.O.

Is this How the Israel-Iran War Begins?

Gaza Missiles a Bigger Threat Than Syria

Gaza Missiles a Bigger Threat Than Syria
By: Jonathan S. Tobin

Over the weekend, provocations on two of Israel’s borders presented the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with new challenges. In the Golan Heights, what was described in reports as “erratic mortar fire” from Syrian army positions brought a sharp, though limited, response from the Israel Defense Forces. In the south, Hamas launched a rocket offensive aimed at Israeli civilian targets. But while the Syrian incident made headlines in the international press since it threatened to drag Israel into the Syrian civil war, it was the situation in Gaza that was the more troubling.

As troubling as the possibility that Israel could be dragged into the ongoing chaos of Syria is, the country’s Gaza dilemma is far more worrisome. Rockets continued to fall on Israel Monday as the Hamas rulers of Gaza continued their own attempt to provoke Israel into an offensive. While both Israel and neighboring Egypt have little to gain from either a repeat of the 2008 Operation Cast Lead, in which Israel knocked out terrorist positions inside Gaza, or a more far-reaching offensive, in which the Islamist terrorist group would actually be deposed, the possibility that at some point Netanyahu will have to do something to stop the rain of fire on his country is very real.

Israelis don’t know for sure whether, as some observers seem to think, the fire from Syria was an attempt by the faltering Assad regime to portray its struggle as one against Israel rather than its own people. Given that such a ploy is a tried and true standby for Arab dictators, it seems logical to think that a desperate Bashar Assad thinks involving Israel in the fighting will bolster support for his embattled government. Yet it is just as likely that the fire into the Golan was unintentional spillover from that war. Certainly it was nothing comparable to the deliberate attacks from the regime on the Turkish border, which is actually a transit and supply route for the rebels who have the support of Ankara.

While Israel has no love for Assad and would be happy to see Iran’s ally fall, it must also ponder whether his replacement by a weak rebel regime would lead to more conflict in the future. Israel is likely to do just about anything to stay out of that mess, and it will take more than a few stray mortar shells to drag it into that war.

But Netanyahu’s choices with regards to Gaza are not so easy. Though Israel’s main strategic focus in the last year has understandably been on the Iranian nuclear threat, Hamas’ ability to make the lives of Israelis living in the south a living hell is a reminder that the enemies on the Jewish state’s border can’t be ignored. Since Saturday, more than 160 rockets have fallen on the region bordering Gaza. Their motives for this offensive are complex.

The impetus for the escalation may stem in part from a desire to remind the world that the Palestinian Authority is merely one of two groups competing for control of a future Palestinian state. The surge in violence doesn’t help PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s efforts to get the United Nations to unilaterally recognize Palestinian independence without first making peace with Israel, and that suits Hamas’s purposes.

The Hamas fire may also have a tactical purpose. Last Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces discovered a tunnel along the border with Gaza, the intent of which was obviously to facilitate a cross-border terror raid along the lines of the one that resulted in Gilad Shalit’s kidnapping as well as the murder of two other soldiers. Israel has sought to establish a 300-meter no-go zone on the Gaza side of the border in order to prevent such attacks, but Hamas uses rocket fire to defend its freedom of action.

Whether thinking tactically or strategically, Hamas continues to hold approximately one million Israelis living in the south hostage. Anti-missile defense systems like Iron Dome help limit the damage, but they can’t stop all or even most of the rockets, as the last two days showed. Hamas seems to be assuming that an Israeli counter-offensive into Gaza to silence the fire would be too bloody and too unpopular abroad to be worth it for Netanyahu. Another option would be to return to targeted killings of Hamas leaders, but that is likely to lead to more rockets fired at Israeli civilians rather than to stop the attacks.

The bottom line is that Israel has no good choices open to it with regard to Gaza. But with elections looming in January, Netanyahu can’t afford to let the people of the south sit in shelters indefinitely. If their Muslim Brotherhood friends in Egypt — who also worry about the spillover from a new war — can’t persuade Hamas to stand down soon, the prime minister may have to consider raising the ante with the Islamist terrorist movement. While the world is more interested in the violence in Syria, Gaza remains the more difficult dilemma facing the Israelis.