Exceptional analysis.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/01/putin_russia_ukraine_intervention_war
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Thursday, September 5, 2013
How US Actions are Seen in the Middle East
Top notch, albeit unfortunately true, commentary. Worthy read. - R.O.
How US Actions are Seen in the Middle East - Gatestone Institute
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3965/syria-us-actions
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Did Vladimir Putin Bait a Trap for the United States in Damascus?
Utterly fascinating proposition. A must read.
Did Vladimir Putin Bait a Trap for the United States in Damascus? - Tablet Magazine
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/143492/samuels-syria-vladimir-putin
"By showing that Obama’s America is unable and unwilling to keep its promises, Putin has widened the leadership void in the Middle East—as a prelude to filling it himself. By helping to clear Iran’s path to a bomb, Putin positions himself as Iran’s most powerful ally—while paradoxically gaining greater leverage with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States, who would much rather negotiate with Russia than with Iran, their sworn enemy."
Is Putin really that crafty? Hard to say. But I wouldn't put it past the Russian president. Putin has shown his willingness to stick it to Obama on numerous occasions. - R.O.
Friday, August 30, 2013
US Govt's Assessment of Assad's Chemical Weapons Attack
Here's the damning U.S. government report on Assad's chemical weapons attack on August 21, in full. The report contains all of the declassified intelligence collected about the attack.
The questions now are: how forceful will Obama's response be? What targets will the U.S. hit and why? Obama has already stated today that his response will be "a narrow act." What exactly does that mean? Why is Obama tipping his hand? So that Assad's wife can continue swimming in the presidential pool?
I believe there is an overwhelming need for the U.S. to decimate the capabilities of the Syrian Air Force. It is time to shut down Assad's air power. I say this not because I believe the U.S. should pick sides in this civil war, but instead, because it is time to level the playing field. If Syria's civil war is truly a popular uprising, then a levelled playing field should reveal the true extent of the support for the (disparate) rebel opposition groups. Otherwise Assad will continue bombing the rebels into oblivion, and the bloodshed will continue unabated.
This is a horrific scenario in which the West is rightfully reticent to get involved. But the reality is that Assad has just committed an unthinkable atrocity, in a region fraught with men willing commit atrocities on a daily basis. The precedent that the UK's Parliament just set -- of sitting out of the action when the U.S. and France are ready to attack Syria -- is simply untenable and cowardly. The West has a moral duty and imperative to act and react when a nation crosses all international mores and norms, such as through the use of WMD's.
The impending U.S. attack on Syria (however limited it might be) is designed to convey one message: the use of WMD's is wholly, completely and eternally unacceptable, and will always be universally condemned by the West. Importantly, this is a crucial message that will be heard loud and clear in Tehran. You can be sure that the Iranians are watching and waiting with wide eyes to see whether or not the West has the backbone and resolve to stop reckless regimes from using WMD's (as Iran has promised to use on Israel, numerous times).
As Iran races to complete its nuclear weapons program, the world is witnessing the opening acts of what will eventually become a broader war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria makes certain that the Iranian regime will not hesitate to do the same. Hence the need for the West to punish Assad. However, Russia's intransigence and blind support of Assad, even in the face of nearly incontrovertible evidence of Assad's chemical attack, also sends a signal to Israel that Russia will similarly stand behind Iran until the very end. These are complex times.
Should the day ever come when Israel feels it must act to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program, unilaterally, Russia's unwavering support of Iran is indeed a brutal reality that the entire world will have to face. We are certainly in for some fireworks. Bring your gas mask.
The questions now are: how forceful will Obama's response be? What targets will the U.S. hit and why? Obama has already stated today that his response will be "a narrow act." What exactly does that mean? Why is Obama tipping his hand? So that Assad's wife can continue swimming in the presidential pool?
I believe there is an overwhelming need for the U.S. to decimate the capabilities of the Syrian Air Force. It is time to shut down Assad's air power. I say this not because I believe the U.S. should pick sides in this civil war, but instead, because it is time to level the playing field. If Syria's civil war is truly a popular uprising, then a levelled playing field should reveal the true extent of the support for the (disparate) rebel opposition groups. Otherwise Assad will continue bombing the rebels into oblivion, and the bloodshed will continue unabated.
This is a horrific scenario in which the West is rightfully reticent to get involved. But the reality is that Assad has just committed an unthinkable atrocity, in a region fraught with men willing commit atrocities on a daily basis. The precedent that the UK's Parliament just set -- of sitting out of the action when the U.S. and France are ready to attack Syria -- is simply untenable and cowardly. The West has a moral duty and imperative to act and react when a nation crosses all international mores and norms, such as through the use of WMD's.
The impending U.S. attack on Syria (however limited it might be) is designed to convey one message: the use of WMD's is wholly, completely and eternally unacceptable, and will always be universally condemned by the West. Importantly, this is a crucial message that will be heard loud and clear in Tehran. You can be sure that the Iranians are watching and waiting with wide eyes to see whether or not the West has the backbone and resolve to stop reckless regimes from using WMD's (as Iran has promised to use on Israel, numerous times).
As Iran races to complete its nuclear weapons program, the world is witnessing the opening acts of what will eventually become a broader war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria makes certain that the Iranian regime will not hesitate to do the same. Hence the need for the West to punish Assad. However, Russia's intransigence and blind support of Assad, even in the face of nearly incontrovertible evidence of Assad's chemical attack, also sends a signal to Israel that Russia will similarly stand behind Iran until the very end. These are complex times.
Should the day ever come when Israel feels it must act to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program, unilaterally, Russia's unwavering support of Iran is indeed a brutal reality that the entire world will have to face. We are certainly in for some fireworks. Bring your gas mask.
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Baird: Iran has just “2 or 3 months” to change course, diplomatic process “nearing the end.”
These are critical insights into a tense state of affairs. With Syria on the mainstream news media's front burner, the Iranian nuclear crisis has been left to simmer. But with newly elected Iranian President Rouhani set to take office in Iran, the world's focus will soon shift back to Iran's covert nuclear weapons program and all of its perilous implications for global stability. The following comments from Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird are worth reading, as they implicitly represent the perceptions of the Israeli government. The question is whether U.S. President Obama is feeling the same way. - R.O.
Canadian Foreign Minister: Iran has just “2 or 3 months” to change course, diplomatic process “nearing the end.”
- Flash Traffic Blog - June 25, 2013
By: Joel C. Rosenberg
(Jerusalem, Israel) – After having just been in Ottawa meeting with Canadian Members of Parliament to discuss Israel and Middle East issues, I’ve now been in Israel for ten days of meetings and preparations for our upcoming Joshua Fund tour and Epicenter Conference. I was encouraged to read this morning that the Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird was recently in town to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli and Palestinian officials. His comments on the Iran threat were worth noting because he indicated a concrete time frame by which Iran needs to show it has ended its nuclear program or other action — decisive action — needs to be taken. Coming from the most pro-Israel government on the planet, this was encouraging. My hope is that the Foreign Minister was also laying the groundwork for a state visit by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but there was no public report of this.
”Canada’s foreign minister has warned Iran that it has only two to three months to prove to the West that it seeks a negotiated resolution to the crisis over its rogue nuclear program,” reports the Times of Israel “The diplomatic process is ‘nearing the end,’ John Baird said in an interview with The Times of Israel, though he declined to say what consequences that could bring.”
“He added that the election to the Iranian presidency of Hasan Rouhani, seen by many as a relative moderate, does not justify any further Western patience, since Rouhani, as Iran’s former nuclear negotiator, ‘doesn’t need to have any time to read up on the files,’” reported the Times. “Baird was speaking exclusively to The Times of Israel last week during a visit to Jerusalem, where he represented Canada’s government at Shimon Peres’s Facing Tomorrow presidential conference, and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He also went to Jordan during the trip, and held talks in Ramallah with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other senior PA officials.”
Other key points from the article:
- If incoming president Rouhani “wants me to say something kind or generous, he’s going to have to solicit that by his actions, not by any perceived notion of being a reformer,” Baird said, adding, “These people don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.”
- Asked whether diplomacy had run its course, Baird said, “There’s always a reason to wait another two or three months… If they want to prove the naysayers wrong, they can make meaningful progress with the P5+1. I’m pessimistic on that but I hope to be proven wrong.”
- The diplomatic process, he went on, “is nearing the end, and should have been nearing the end in my judgment. If Iran wants to seek out concrete, meaningful solutions to this, they have the opportunity to demonstrate to the world in the coming weeks that they’ll do that… And you have someone [in Rouhani, a former Iranian nuclear negotiator] who doesn’t need to have any time to read up on the files. This person does not need anytime to be briefed up.”
- And if at the end of two or three months there isn’t some kind of concrete progress? Then, said Baird, “I think fair and reasonable people will have shown that they have taken every reasonable measure, every diplomatic measure, to try to successfully bring this to a conclusion.”
And then comes the time for intervention? “I’ll just leave it at that,” the minister said.
June 25, 2013
Monday, June 17, 2013
The Future of Global Diplomacy
Here is my latest op-ed, "The Future of Global Diplomacy", published today by the Canadian International Council at the opening of the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland. I discuss the Y8 and Y20 Summits which also open this week and next, which bring together the leading graduate and young professional minds from around the world, for a week-long series of negotiations amongst the global youth. Check it out below. - R.O.
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The Future of Global Diplomacy
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The Future of Global Diplomacy
Robert Onley | June 17, 2013
The leaders of the G8 are convening in Northern Ireland for the 39th G8 Summit. The backdrop for this two-day meeting of the globe’s preeminent economic powers is a world facing multiple global crises, all of which demand that summit participants engage in constructive dialogue that leads to measurable progress. Despite that need, the annual G8 Summits are known more for eliciting empty political promises and saddling host cities with exorbitant costs.
In 2013, this geopolitical lip service simply will not cut it, as the world leaders of tomorrow are demanding results.
The baby boomer generation presidents and prime ministers at the G8 Summit are facing increasingly frustrated populations. With economic instability entrenching in the West, a still teetering world financial order, and escalating tensions in the Middle East, an entire generation of young people is growing up without opportunity, and with few prospects for change. But persistent unemployment, declining standards in health care and education, and environmental degradation are also driving growing numbers of young people to demand sophisticated and coordinated global action.
From this mess, two significant questions arise: are the boomer generation leaders simply incapable of consensus-driven international cooperation, one that sets aside national interests for the collective good of humanity? And if this is the case, are tomorrow’s Facebook generation leaders damned to inherit the quagmire of their political predecessors?
These are the serious, credible questions that today’s brightest 20-something leaders have asked themselves, and which they have actively set out to answer together through their own international diplomacy at the 2013 Y8 and Y20 Summits being held in London, UK (June 24-28) and St. Petersburg, Russia (June 18-20), respectively.
These are not mere “Model U.N.” simulations: the Y8 and Y20 Summits are the world’s premier youth assemblies, bringing together graduate students and young professionals from across the G20 for a week of intensive negotiations, dialogue, and bargaining. Whether or not any of the delegates at the Y8 and Y20 Summits end up in a prominent political office, these young minds have already created space for meaningful change, via the creation of a global network that has the potential to fundamentally reshape the dynamics of international diplomacy and global governance for decades to come.
Unlike their boomer political forebears, the leaders of the Facebook generation are “digital natives”, accustomed to instantaneous communication, and constant updates on the personal, political, and career decisions of their peers. Every day, they exploit social networks to grow and sustain an online community comprised of the most engaged and committed student leaders from across the G20. These new generation leaders are utilizing all available tools and innovations to exchange ideas, think critically and solve problems together, well before entering into positions of power. The Youth Summits are simply the annual physical manifestation of the dynamic online relationships among future leaders.
This year marks the 7th anniversary of the Youth (“Y”) Summits, which are formally sponsored by the presidents and prime ministers of the actual G8 and G20. The 2013 Y8 Summit in London has been organized by the UK-based International Diplomatic Engagement Association (The IDEA), a global network composed of ascending young leaders from all different cultural backgrounds. The 2013 Y20 Summit in Russia is the official G20 youth event, held under the Russian G20 Presidency alongside with G20 Leaders’ Summit.
Critically, young Canadian leaders have been a part of this global youth diplomatic network since its inception in 2006. The IDEA’s Canadian partner is YouthCan for International Dialogue (YFID), a federal non-profit, non-partisan, youth-led think tank responsible for recruiting and selecting Canada’s delegates at the Y8 and Y20. YFID seeks to engage Canadian young leaders in diplomacy and meaningful dialogue at an international level, through access to hands-on global initiatives and diplomacy. YFID targets Canadian undergraduate and graduate students, as well as young professionals from all disciplines, focusing on highly accomplished academic and intellectual leaders with experience in negotiation, debate, and advocacy.
Delegates are selected by YFID for portfolio positions that replicate their real-life national counterparts, be it the Prime Minister, or Ministers of Defence, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Environment and Health. In the months and weeks leading up to the Summits, delegates from around the globe utilize social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Docs, and Podio to debate and determine their agenda topics for the actual negotiations. The Y8 and Y20 Summits are unique in that delegates are given the freedom to approach global issues using any theory, opinion, or proposal available. The goal of the Youth Summits is not to mimic each nation’s standing policies, but rather to capture the spirit, ideas, and consensus of the globe’s next generation of leaders.
The catch is that all proposals must be achievable (no utopian idealism allowed), tangible (results-based), and more importantly, must be simultaneously agreed to by the rest of the Y8 or Y20 delegates. While skeptics may assume that the end result of these negotiations is series of far-flung “save-the-world” panaceas, past Youth Summits have shown that the negotiations produce hard-fought, comprehensive, genuine solutions to complex world problems.
The final byproduct of a week-long series of negotiations is the Final Communiqu̩, which is presented to the national president or prime Minister of the respective G8 and G20 (Read the 2011, 2012 communiqu̩s). However, in many respects, more important than this policy paper is the creation of a lasting social and digital network of aspiring young leaders Рone that grows in number and depth with each passing Youth Summit. Many youth delegates, like their real-life counter-parts, return year to year, cementing personal relationships with friends and national rivals alike. Empowering all of this, of course, are online social networks.
In recent years the world witnessed the power of these networks to organize protests, spread political messages, and even help topple governments and national leaders. Today, social media is often idolized as a force equalizer, empowering the “people” vis a vis their elected or non-elected “leaders”.
Less well understood is how online social networks may come to impact decision-making processes at the global level: will they change how individual leaders conceive of and approach problems, and the tools they choose to use to deploy? Social networks have yet to positively change how the boomer generation does business, however, as the Y8 and Y20 Summits demonstrate, the next generation of leadership will be composed of twenty-somethings who recognize the power of online relationships in navigating geopolitics, and collaborate in finding solutions to global crises.
Our current leaders are faltering, but there is no small measure of comfort to be found in the skills, determination, and connections among those who will follow them.
You can follow YFID during the Summits at: @YFIDCanada and Facebook.com/CanadaYFID
 |
| Reuters |
In 2013, this geopolitical lip service simply will not cut it, as the world leaders of tomorrow are demanding results.
The baby boomer generation presidents and prime ministers at the G8 Summit are facing increasingly frustrated populations. With economic instability entrenching in the West, a still teetering world financial order, and escalating tensions in the Middle East, an entire generation of young people is growing up without opportunity, and with few prospects for change. But persistent unemployment, declining standards in health care and education, and environmental degradation are also driving growing numbers of young people to demand sophisticated and coordinated global action.
From this mess, two significant questions arise: are the boomer generation leaders simply incapable of consensus-driven international cooperation, one that sets aside national interests for the collective good of humanity? And if this is the case, are tomorrow’s Facebook generation leaders damned to inherit the quagmire of their political predecessors?
These are the serious, credible questions that today’s brightest 20-something leaders have asked themselves, and which they have actively set out to answer together through their own international diplomacy at the 2013 Y8 and Y20 Summits being held in London, UK (June 24-28) and St. Petersburg, Russia (June 18-20), respectively.
These are not mere “Model U.N.” simulations: the Y8 and Y20 Summits are the world’s premier youth assemblies, bringing together graduate students and young professionals from across the G20 for a week of intensive negotiations, dialogue, and bargaining. Whether or not any of the delegates at the Y8 and Y20 Summits end up in a prominent political office, these young minds have already created space for meaningful change, via the creation of a global network that has the potential to fundamentally reshape the dynamics of international diplomacy and global governance for decades to come.
Unlike their boomer political forebears, the leaders of the Facebook generation are “digital natives”, accustomed to instantaneous communication, and constant updates on the personal, political, and career decisions of their peers. Every day, they exploit social networks to grow and sustain an online community comprised of the most engaged and committed student leaders from across the G20. These new generation leaders are utilizing all available tools and innovations to exchange ideas, think critically and solve problems together, well before entering into positions of power. The Youth Summits are simply the annual physical manifestation of the dynamic online relationships among future leaders.
This year marks the 7th anniversary of the Youth (“Y”) Summits, which are formally sponsored by the presidents and prime ministers of the actual G8 and G20. The 2013 Y8 Summit in London has been organized by the UK-based International Diplomatic Engagement Association (The IDEA), a global network composed of ascending young leaders from all different cultural backgrounds. The 2013 Y20 Summit in Russia is the official G20 youth event, held under the Russian G20 Presidency alongside with G20 Leaders’ Summit.
Critically, young Canadian leaders have been a part of this global youth diplomatic network since its inception in 2006. The IDEA’s Canadian partner is YouthCan for International Dialogue (YFID), a federal non-profit, non-partisan, youth-led think tank responsible for recruiting and selecting Canada’s delegates at the Y8 and Y20. YFID seeks to engage Canadian young leaders in diplomacy and meaningful dialogue at an international level, through access to hands-on global initiatives and diplomacy. YFID targets Canadian undergraduate and graduate students, as well as young professionals from all disciplines, focusing on highly accomplished academic and intellectual leaders with experience in negotiation, debate, and advocacy.
Delegates are selected by YFID for portfolio positions that replicate their real-life national counterparts, be it the Prime Minister, or Ministers of Defence, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Environment and Health. In the months and weeks leading up to the Summits, delegates from around the globe utilize social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Docs, and Podio to debate and determine their agenda topics for the actual negotiations. The Y8 and Y20 Summits are unique in that delegates are given the freedom to approach global issues using any theory, opinion, or proposal available. The goal of the Youth Summits is not to mimic each nation’s standing policies, but rather to capture the spirit, ideas, and consensus of the globe’s next generation of leaders.
The catch is that all proposals must be achievable (no utopian idealism allowed), tangible (results-based), and more importantly, must be simultaneously agreed to by the rest of the Y8 or Y20 delegates. While skeptics may assume that the end result of these negotiations is series of far-flung “save-the-world” panaceas, past Youth Summits have shown that the negotiations produce hard-fought, comprehensive, genuine solutions to complex world problems.
The final byproduct of a week-long series of negotiations is the Final Communiqu̩, which is presented to the national president or prime Minister of the respective G8 and G20 (Read the 2011, 2012 communiqu̩s). However, in many respects, more important than this policy paper is the creation of a lasting social and digital network of aspiring young leaders Рone that grows in number and depth with each passing Youth Summit. Many youth delegates, like their real-life counter-parts, return year to year, cementing personal relationships with friends and national rivals alike. Empowering all of this, of course, are online social networks.
In recent years the world witnessed the power of these networks to organize protests, spread political messages, and even help topple governments and national leaders. Today, social media is often idolized as a force equalizer, empowering the “people” vis a vis their elected or non-elected “leaders”.
Less well understood is how online social networks may come to impact decision-making processes at the global level: will they change how individual leaders conceive of and approach problems, and the tools they choose to use to deploy? Social networks have yet to positively change how the boomer generation does business, however, as the Y8 and Y20 Summits demonstrate, the next generation of leadership will be composed of twenty-somethings who recognize the power of online relationships in navigating geopolitics, and collaborate in finding solutions to global crises.
Our current leaders are faltering, but there is no small measure of comfort to be found in the skills, determination, and connections among those who will follow them.
You can follow YFID during the Summits at: @YFIDCanada and Facebook.com/CanadaYFID
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
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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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.
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| The S-300 anti-aircraft missile system. (BBC) |
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.
Monday, May 20, 2013
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.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Israel caught in the middle as U.S. and Russia clash over Syria’s future
Excellent analysis on the complex dynamics at play in the Middle East. This period in world history is certainly not for the faint of heart. Looks like we're in for some fireworks. -R.O.
The conflict of interests between the U.S. and Russia over Syria is closely linked to an issue that has recently slipped down the priority ranks but is expected to take center stage again soon – the Iranian nuclear program.
By Amos Harel | May.18, 2013 | 10:55 PM
The recent developments in Syria have been overshadowed by the direct clash of interests between the United States and Russia, in which Israel plays a minor, if inadvertent, role.
While Washington continues to hesitate over the degree of force needed to affect regime change in Damascus, Moscow, which does not believe that toppling Syrian President Bashar Assad will necessarily benefit the Syrian people, continues to warn against its possible replacement by a Sunni extremist government.
On the strategic level, even after the publication of images of the latest atrocities in Syria and the new accusations of use of chemical weapons, Russia has two goals: To keep the regime in place for as long as possible, since it maintains its hold on Tartus as Moscow’s private port in the Mediterranean Sea, and to subvert U.S. influence in the region.
At the same time that it prepares to host an international conference on Syria in June, Russia finds it comfortable to also flex its muscles over the three aerial strikes in Syrian territory that have been attributed in the foreign media to Israel. That is the reason for the current talk of deliveries, not yet completed as far as is known, of Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Syria. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to persuade the Russians to halt the deal signaled the start of a new war of leaks between Washington and Moscow. Every day a different U.S. news outlet receives information about the worrying scope of Russian assistance to Assad’s regime. Of particular concern to Israel, in addition to the S-300 surface-to-air missiles, are an advanced version of the high-precision Yakhont shore-to-ship missiles and the punched-up presence of Russian warships in the waters surrounding Tartus.
There is probably little Israel can do to scotch the Russian-Syrian arms deal. Even assuming that Iran will keep prodding Assad to help it in getting armaments to Hezbollah, Israel may have already used up most of its ammunition. The temptation to intervene militarily to halt munitions smuggling is always great: Intelligence officials will say they have precise information and cannot promise the same quality of intelligence after the advanced weapons systems have crossed the border into Lebanon. The pressure on the leadership to approve additional operations targeting arms shipments will be significant.
On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that the paralysis that gripped Assad after the previous strikes will continue forever. A senior Israeli official responded in The New York Times on Wednesday to Syrian and Hezbollah threats to take action against Israel after the third strike, in late April, with a direct threat to take down the Assad regime. But that is not what Israel wants. Among the myriad dispiriting options in Syria it is the current situation, however unappealing, that is presumably the least terrible.
On Saturday, The Times of London reported a senior Israeli intelligence official as saying that Assad was preferable to the rebels. Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, writing in Foreign Affairs earlier this month, even went so far as to call Assad “Israel’s man in Damascus.”
Iran: The next chapter
The complex political battle surrounding Syria is closely linked to another issue, one that seems to have slipped down the priority ranks slightly in the past few months, namely Iran’s nuclear program. It’s been some months since Israel has explicitly threatened to attack Iran. The lull is partly due to the wintry weather, thought to further complicate aerial strikes on that country. It might also be linked to understandings reached between Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama during the latter’s March visit to Israel.
But that doesn’t mean the Iran chapter is behind us. It’s only a delay, until next month’s presidential election in Iran. America told Israel: Let’s wait for the election. If the ayatollahs’ regime tries to skew the results, as in 2009, perhaps another “green revolution” will break out in Iran, and perhaps this time it will, with inspiration from the Arab Spring, be more effective.
And even if the Iranian regime does survive, as is likely, the political and economic pressure on the country might finally convince the country’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to at least consider temporarily suspending the nuclear program in exchange for an easing of the international sanctions. If nothing happens, Washington has hinted, perhaps we will need to take direct action against Iran on our own.
Israel does not entirely trust this veiled promise from the United States, mainly in light of the White House’s embarrassing hesitancy over Syria and limp response to North Korea’s nuclear muscle-flexing. The Obama administration has been caught up in a series of public-relation disasters since the start of the president’s second term. All of this must suggest to Netanyahu that once again he has been left to fix the Iranian nuclear problem alone.
The prime minister will certainly not take comfort in a new report released on Friday by the Rand Corporation, that dares to ask the question that must not be raised in polite society: What will the region look like after Iran achieves nuclear capabilities? The veteran U.S. think tank, which often works for the government, says that obtaining nuclear weapons will further Iran’s national security goals, deter Israel and the United States from an attack in Iran, lead to greater instability in the region and increase the likelihood of war, whether by accident or as the result of a series of misunderstandings between Tehran and Jerusalem.
All of the obstacles that stood in the way of an Israeli attack on Iran last year will be relevant this year as well: The Obama administration is opposed to unilateral action from Israel, technocrats in Israel are against it, and there is a new, political obstacle in the form of Netanyahu’s main coalition partner in the new government, Finance Minister Yair Lapid. Lapid’s civil and economic agenda has no room for war with Iran. Nevertheless, it’s a safe bet that within a month, after the dust of the Iranian election settles, the issue of the ayatollahs’ nukes will once again claim center stage.
Friday, May 17, 2013
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)
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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)
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Russia vows response against Israel for future Syria strikes
The story below fits as a scenario that could lead to the prophesied war found in the book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39. In that prophecy, Biblical scholars (among them Joel Rosenberg who I interviewed in 2010) generally agree that Gog, a large kingdom from the north of Israel, will join forces against Israel's enemies to destroy Israel in the last days.
Carefully read Ezekiel's prophecy above in the context of the story below: Russian President Vladimir Putin is allegedly pledging to retaliate against Israel, if Israel conducts another strike on targets inside Syria.
At the same time, yesterday (May 15, 2013), the Israeli government publicly pledged to "bring down" Syria's President Assad if Assad retaliates against Israel for Israeli air strikes inside Syria on missiles and weapons systems bound for Iran's terrorist proxy militia Hizballah in southern Lebanon.
The threat posed to Israel by all of these interconnected alliances is compounded by Israel's long-rumoured potential mission to conduct air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and missile sites. In short: the Middle East is at the precipice of total conflagration.
The truth and potential fulfillment of the Bible's prophecies in Ezekiel is becoming explicitly clear, and is worthy of critical assessment by believers and non-believers alike. What if the as-yet-unfulfilled prophecies written 2500 years ago are coming true in this lifetime? Christians are commanded to pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6). In light of the likelihood of massive global war, perhaps non-Christians should be praying that too.
Even so, come Lord Jesus (Rev. 22:20).
Israeli military sources confirmed later that these were no stray shells from a Syrian-army-rebel battle as in former cases, but a deliberate attack. In Jerusalem, it was taken as a direct consequence of Moscow’s account to Assad of the conversation between the Russian and Israeli leaders. They concluded that Assad took it for granted that he was now at liberty to go on the offensive against Israel.
Wednesday night, Netanyahu’s office reacted to this deterioration with a swift and strong warning.
Israeli media were informed bluntly that if the Assad chose to retaliate for Israel’s air strikes, he would be removed from power.
That same night, “a senior Israeli official” contacted The New York Times with a more detailed warning quoted by the paper: "If Syrian President Assad reacts by attacking Israel, or tries to strike Israel through his terrorist proxies, he will risk forfeiting his regime, for Israel will retaliate."
Within hours, early Thursday morning, May 16, Jerusalem had its answer from Damascus.
A Palestinian group calling itself “Martyrs of the Abdel Qader al-Husseini Brigades” (named for the commander of a Palestinian force fighting Israel in its 1948 War of Independence) claimed responsibility for the "rockets" aimed at an Israeli military observation post in the Golan Heights. They were fired in honor of Nakba Day, said the statement released in Damascus "We are not celebrating but avenging the blood of our martyrs."
A video showing the launch was appended.
Palestinian terrorist groups habitually use made-up names when claiming attacks, a practice often followed by al Qaeda, but this one was easily identified by Israel and taken to mean that Assad had begun using what the Israeli official referred to in The New York Times as "his terrorist proxies."
Depending on the next move decided on by Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, this incident could mark the tipping-point of a slide towards a war confrontation against Israel by Syria, Hizballah and other Assad proxies.
The truth and potential fulfillment of the Bible's prophecies in Ezekiel is becoming explicitly clear, and is worthy of critical assessment by believers and non-believers alike. What if the as-yet-unfulfilled prophecies written 2500 years ago are coming true in this lifetime? Christians are commanded to pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6). In light of the likelihood of massive global war, perhaps non-Christians should be praying that too.
Even so, come Lord Jesus (Rev. 22:20).
-R.O.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The case Netanyahu and Military Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi put before Putin and Russian foreign intelligence chief, SVR Director Mikhail Fradkov, fell on deaf ears.
They found the Russian leader further infuriated by the docking that day at Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat of the USS Kearsarge, carrying 1,800 marines and a consignment of 20 V-22 Osprey helicopters which US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had promised to supply to Israel during his April visit.
Putin viewed the stationing of US forces in the Gulf of Aqaba just two hours away the Israeli-Syrian border for repelling Syrian-Iranian-Hizballah aggression against Israel or Jordan – signaled by the Kearsage’s arrival - as an act of bad faith by Washington. On the one hand, they want us to cooperate for an international conference to end the bloodshed in Syria, while on the other, they deploy military forces, he complained to Netanyahu.
The Israeli prime minister countered with a warning that Israel would continue to strike advanced weapons in Syria that were destined for Hizballah. And if President Bashar Assad hit back for Israel’s May 5 bombardment of weapons stores on Mount Qassioun near Damascus, Israel would intensify its bombardments of Syrian military targets and weapons until Assad was left to fight off rebel assaults empty-handed.
Putin rejected this threat as implausible.
Neither Putin nor Netanyahu put all their cards on the table, but the conversation ended with the Russian leader fully confident that his capabilities for safeguarding Assad were greater than Israel’s ability to destroy him.
In the end, Netanyahu and his party arrived home Tuesday evening with a bad feeling. They were certain that Moscow had given Assad the green light to go through with his threat to make the Syrian Golan and the Horan of southern Syria “a front for resistance” – i.e. the platforms for embarking on a war of attrition against northern Israel with the help of a flow of advanced weapons to Hizballah.
The Syrian ruler is strongly encouraged to adopt this path by Tehran. Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has embraced it. And the radical Palestinian leader, Ahmed Jibril, head of the Assad-satellite Popular Front-General Command, has eagerly offered his services.
And indeed, Wednesday, the day after Netanyahu’s trip to Sochi, Jibril’s group let loose with mortar fire on the Israeli Mt. Hermon ski site, firing from a Syrian army position.
"Syrian-Israeli war of words via Putin edges into Syrian-Hizballah war of attrition"
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report May 16, 2013, 10:58 AM (IDT)
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Netanyahu ended their three-hour meeting in Sochi Tuesday, May 14, at loggerheads on Syria. In fact, Putin warned his guest that Israel and its army, the IDF, were heading for war with Syria in which Russia might well be involved – and not just through the advanced S-300 anti-air missiles supplied to the Assad government.The case Netanyahu and Military Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi put before Putin and Russian foreign intelligence chief, SVR Director Mikhail Fradkov, fell on deaf ears.
They found the Russian leader further infuriated by the docking that day at Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat of the USS Kearsarge, carrying 1,800 marines and a consignment of 20 V-22 Osprey helicopters which US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had promised to supply to Israel during his April visit.
Putin viewed the stationing of US forces in the Gulf of Aqaba just two hours away the Israeli-Syrian border for repelling Syrian-Iranian-Hizballah aggression against Israel or Jordan – signaled by the Kearsage’s arrival - as an act of bad faith by Washington. On the one hand, they want us to cooperate for an international conference to end the bloodshed in Syria, while on the other, they deploy military forces, he complained to Netanyahu.
The Israeli prime minister countered with a warning that Israel would continue to strike advanced weapons in Syria that were destined for Hizballah. And if President Bashar Assad hit back for Israel’s May 5 bombardment of weapons stores on Mount Qassioun near Damascus, Israel would intensify its bombardments of Syrian military targets and weapons until Assad was left to fight off rebel assaults empty-handed.
Putin rejected this threat as implausible.
Neither Putin nor Netanyahu put all their cards on the table, but the conversation ended with the Russian leader fully confident that his capabilities for safeguarding Assad were greater than Israel’s ability to destroy him.
In the end, Netanyahu and his party arrived home Tuesday evening with a bad feeling. They were certain that Moscow had given Assad the green light to go through with his threat to make the Syrian Golan and the Horan of southern Syria “a front for resistance” – i.e. the platforms for embarking on a war of attrition against northern Israel with the help of a flow of advanced weapons to Hizballah.
The Syrian ruler is strongly encouraged to adopt this path by Tehran. Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has embraced it. And the radical Palestinian leader, Ahmed Jibril, head of the Assad-satellite Popular Front-General Command, has eagerly offered his services.
And indeed, Wednesday, the day after Netanyahu’s trip to Sochi, Jibril’s group let loose with mortar fire on the Israeli Mt. Hermon ski site, firing from a Syrian army position.
Israeli military sources confirmed later that these were no stray shells from a Syrian-army-rebel battle as in former cases, but a deliberate attack. In Jerusalem, it was taken as a direct consequence of Moscow’s account to Assad of the conversation between the Russian and Israeli leaders. They concluded that Assad took it for granted that he was now at liberty to go on the offensive against Israel.
Wednesday night, Netanyahu’s office reacted to this deterioration with a swift and strong warning.
Israeli media were informed bluntly that if the Assad chose to retaliate for Israel’s air strikes, he would be removed from power.
That same night, “a senior Israeli official” contacted The New York Times with a more detailed warning quoted by the paper: "If Syrian President Assad reacts by attacking Israel, or tries to strike Israel through his terrorist proxies, he will risk forfeiting his regime, for Israel will retaliate."
Within hours, early Thursday morning, May 16, Jerusalem had its answer from Damascus.
A Palestinian group calling itself “Martyrs of the Abdel Qader al-Husseini Brigades” (named for the commander of a Palestinian force fighting Israel in its 1948 War of Independence) claimed responsibility for the "rockets" aimed at an Israeli military observation post in the Golan Heights. They were fired in honor of Nakba Day, said the statement released in Damascus "We are not celebrating but avenging the blood of our martyrs."
A video showing the launch was appended.
Palestinian terrorist groups habitually use made-up names when claiming attacks, a practice often followed by al Qaeda, but this one was easily identified by Israel and taken to mean that Assad had begun using what the Israeli official referred to in The New York Times as "his terrorist proxies."
Depending on the next move decided on by Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, this incident could mark the tipping-point of a slide towards a war confrontation against Israel by Syria, Hizballah and other Assad proxies.
Source URL: http://www.debka.com/article/22970/
Monday, May 13, 2013
Israel-Russia talks focus on Syria
Israel-Russia talks focus on Syria
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22519770
Important developments in Israel and Russia. Which direction will this relationship head? -R.O.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
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:
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:
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
‘Israel hit target on Syria-Lebanon border’
A significant development, and one that Israel had warned about repeatedly over the last few months. This is not necessarily an escalation, but a stark warning to Iran and it's Hezbollah terror proxy, that meddling in the Syria conflict and taking advantage of the chaos by procuring advanced weapons will not be tolerated. - R.O.
‘Israel hit target on Syria-Lebanon border’
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israeli forces attacked a convoy on the Syrian-Lebanese border on Wednesday, sources told Reuters, after Israelis warned their Lebanese enemy Hezbollah against using chaos in Syria to acquire anti-aircraft missiles or chemical weapons.
"The target was a truck loaded with weapons, heading from Syria to Lebanon," said one Western diplomat, adding that the consignment seemed unlikely to have included chemical weapons.
A source among rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said an air strike around dawn (0430 GMT) blasted a convoy on a mountain track about 5 kilometers (3 miles) south of where the main Damascus-Beirut highway crosses the border. Its load probably included high-tech anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles.
"It attacked trucks carrying sophisticated weapons from the regime to Hezbollah," the source said, adding that it took place inside Syria, though the border is poorly defined in the area.
A security official in the region also placed the attack on the Syrian side. A Lebanese security official denied any strike in Lebanon. It was not clear whether special forces took part.
The Israeli government declined comment on the issue.
Such a strike would fit its existing policy of pre-emptive covert and overt action to curb Iranian-backed Hezbollah and does not necessarily indicate a major escalation of the war in Syria. It does, however, indicate how the erosion of Assad's family rule after 42 years is seen by Israel as posing a threat.
Some analysts suggested Hezbollah was moving its own arms caches from stores in Syria, fearing rebels would overrun them.
Though Israel this week echoed concerns in the United States about Syrian chemical weapons, officials say a more immediate worry is that the civil war could see weapons that are capable of denting its massive superiority in airpower and tanks from reaching Hezbollah; the group fought Israel in 2006 and remains a more pressing threat than its Syrian and Iranian sponsors.
Wednesday's strike could have been a rapid response to an opportunity. But a stream of Israeli comment on Syria in recent days was a reminder of a standing policy of pre-emptive strikes and may have been intended to limit surprise in world capitals.
The head of the Israeli air force said only hours before the strike that his corps, which has an array of the latest jet bombers, attack helicopters and unmanned drones at its disposal, was involved in a covert "campaign between wars".
"This campaign is 24/7, 365 days a year," Major-General Amir Eshel told a conference on Tuesday. "We are taking action to reduce the immediate threats, to create better conditions in which we will be able to win the wars, when they happen."
JETS OVER LEBANON
In Israel, where media operate under military censorship, broadcasters immediately relayed international reports of the strike. Channel Two television quoted what it called foreign sources saying the convoy was carrying anti-aircraft missiles.
In Lebanon, the army reported a heavy presence of Israeli jets over its territory throughout the night, following several days of increased incursions into Lebanese airspace. Israeli jets routinely fly and there have been unconfirmed reports in previous years of air strikes on Hezbollah arms shipments.
An Israeli attack inside Syria could be diplomatically provocative, particularly since Assad's Iranian ally said on Saturday that it would view such a strike as an attack on itself. Israel views Iran as its principal enemy and is engaged in a bitter confrontation over Tehran's nuclear program.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is set for a new term after an election earlier this month, told his cabinet that both developments in Iran and turmoil in Arab states, notably Syria and Egypt, meant Israel must be strong.
‘Israel hit target on Syria-Lebanon border’
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israeli forces attacked a convoy on the Syrian-Lebanese border on Wednesday, sources told Reuters, after Israelis warned their Lebanese enemy Hezbollah against using chaos in Syria to acquire anti-aircraft missiles or chemical weapons.
"The target was a truck loaded with weapons, heading from Syria to Lebanon," said one Western diplomat, adding that the consignment seemed unlikely to have included chemical weapons.
A source among rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said an air strike around dawn (0430 GMT) blasted a convoy on a mountain track about 5 kilometers (3 miles) south of where the main Damascus-Beirut highway crosses the border. Its load probably included high-tech anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles.
"It attacked trucks carrying sophisticated weapons from the regime to Hezbollah," the source said, adding that it took place inside Syria, though the border is poorly defined in the area.
A security official in the region also placed the attack on the Syrian side. A Lebanese security official denied any strike in Lebanon. It was not clear whether special forces took part.
The Israeli government declined comment on the issue.
Such a strike would fit its existing policy of pre-emptive covert and overt action to curb Iranian-backed Hezbollah and does not necessarily indicate a major escalation of the war in Syria. It does, however, indicate how the erosion of Assad's family rule after 42 years is seen by Israel as posing a threat.
Some analysts suggested Hezbollah was moving its own arms caches from stores in Syria, fearing rebels would overrun them.
Though Israel this week echoed concerns in the United States about Syrian chemical weapons, officials say a more immediate worry is that the civil war could see weapons that are capable of denting its massive superiority in airpower and tanks from reaching Hezbollah; the group fought Israel in 2006 and remains a more pressing threat than its Syrian and Iranian sponsors.
Wednesday's strike could have been a rapid response to an opportunity. But a stream of Israeli comment on Syria in recent days was a reminder of a standing policy of pre-emptive strikes and may have been intended to limit surprise in world capitals.
The head of the Israeli air force said only hours before the strike that his corps, which has an array of the latest jet bombers, attack helicopters and unmanned drones at its disposal, was involved in a covert "campaign between wars".
"This campaign is 24/7, 365 days a year," Major-General Amir Eshel told a conference on Tuesday. "We are taking action to reduce the immediate threats, to create better conditions in which we will be able to win the wars, when they happen."
JETS OVER LEBANON
In Israel, where media operate under military censorship, broadcasters immediately relayed international reports of the strike. Channel Two television quoted what it called foreign sources saying the convoy was carrying anti-aircraft missiles.
In Lebanon, the army reported a heavy presence of Israeli jets over its territory throughout the night, following several days of increased incursions into Lebanese airspace. Israeli jets routinely fly and there have been unconfirmed reports in previous years of air strikes on Hezbollah arms shipments.
An Israeli attack inside Syria could be diplomatically provocative, particularly since Assad's Iranian ally said on Saturday that it would view such a strike as an attack on itself. Israel views Iran as its principal enemy and is engaged in a bitter confrontation over Tehran's nuclear program.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is set for a new term after an election earlier this month, told his cabinet that both developments in Iran and turmoil in Arab states, notably Syria and Egypt, meant Israel must be strong.
"In the east, north and south, everything is in ferment, and we must be prepared, strong and determined in the face of all possible developments," he said.
The Israeli military confirmed this week that it had lately deployed two batteries of its Iron Dome rocket-interceptor system to around the northern city of Haifa, which came under heavy Hezbollah missile fire during a brief war in 2006.
Israel's refusal to comment on Wednesday is usual in such cases; it has, for example, never admitted a 2007 air strike on a suspected Syrian nuclear site despite U.S. confirmation of it.
By not confirming that raid, Israel may have ensured that Assad did not feel obliged to retaliate. For 40 years, Syria has offered little but bellicose words against Israel. A failing Assad administration, some Israelis fear, might be tempted into more action, while Syria's Islamist rebels are also hostile to Israel and could present a threat if they seize heavier weapons.
Israeli Vice Premier Silvan Shalom said on Sunday that any sign that the Syrian army's grip on its presumed chemical weapons stocks was slipping could trigger Israeli intervention.
But Israeli sources said on Tuesday that Syria's advanced conventional weapons, much of it Russian-built hardware able to destroy Israeli planes and tanks, would represent as much of a threat to Israel as chemical arms in the wrong hands.
Interviewed on Wednesday, Shalom would not be drawn on whether Israeli forces had been in action in the north, instead describing the country as part of an international coalition seeking to stop spillover from Syria's two-year-old insurgency.
The Israeli military confirmed this week that it had lately deployed two batteries of its Iron Dome rocket-interceptor system to around the northern city of Haifa, which came under heavy Hezbollah missile fire during a brief war in 2006.
Israel's refusal to comment on Wednesday is usual in such cases; it has, for example, never admitted a 2007 air strike on a suspected Syrian nuclear site despite U.S. confirmation of it.
By not confirming that raid, Israel may have ensured that Assad did not feel obliged to retaliate. For 40 years, Syria has offered little but bellicose words against Israel. A failing Assad administration, some Israelis fear, might be tempted into more action, while Syria's Islamist rebels are also hostile to Israel and could present a threat if they seize heavier weapons.
Israeli Vice Premier Silvan Shalom said on Sunday that any sign that the Syrian army's grip on its presumed chemical weapons stocks was slipping could trigger Israeli intervention.
But Israeli sources said on Tuesday that Syria's advanced conventional weapons, much of it Russian-built hardware able to destroy Israeli planes and tanks, would represent as much of a threat to Israel as chemical arms in the wrong hands.
Interviewed on Wednesday, Shalom would not be drawn on whether Israeli forces had been in action in the north, instead describing the country as part of an international coalition seeking to stop spillover from Syria's two-year-old insurgency.
Recalling that President Barack Obama had warned Assad of U.S. action if his forces use chemical weapons, Shalom told Israel Radio: "The world, led by President Obama, who has said this more than once, is taking all possibilities into account.
"Any development ... in a negative direction would be something that needs stopping and prevention."
LEBANON WAR
During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Israeli aircraft faced little threat, though its navy was taken aback when a missile hit a ship. Israeli tanks suffered losses to rockets, and commanders are concerned Hezbollah may get better weaponry.
In what might have been a sign of seeking to reassure major powers, Israeli media reported this week that the country's national security adviser was dispatched to Russia and military intelligence chief to the United States for consultations.
Shashank Joshi of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London saw any strike on Wednesday as intended to deliver a signal rather than heralding a major escalation from Israel.
"I think the Israelis are sending a message not just to Hezbollah, but also to Assad's forces, that they have no wish to get dragged in, but chemical weapons and certain types of missiles are a red line for them, and that regime forces ought to signal, in turn, to Hezbollah that they should proceed with caution," he said.
Worries about Syria and Hezbollah have sent Israelis lining up for government-issued gas masks. According to the Israel post office, which is handling distribution of the kits, demand roughly trebled this week.
"It looks like every kind of discourse on this or that security matter contributes to public vigilance," its deputy director Haim Azaki told Israel's Army Radio. "We have really seen a very significant jump in demand."
(Additional reporting by Myra MacDonald in London; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Will Waterman)
"Any development ... in a negative direction would be something that needs stopping and prevention."
LEBANON WAR
During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Israeli aircraft faced little threat, though its navy was taken aback when a missile hit a ship. Israeli tanks suffered losses to rockets, and commanders are concerned Hezbollah may get better weaponry.
In what might have been a sign of seeking to reassure major powers, Israeli media reported this week that the country's national security adviser was dispatched to Russia and military intelligence chief to the United States for consultations.
Shashank Joshi of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London saw any strike on Wednesday as intended to deliver a signal rather than heralding a major escalation from Israel.
"I think the Israelis are sending a message not just to Hezbollah, but also to Assad's forces, that they have no wish to get dragged in, but chemical weapons and certain types of missiles are a red line for them, and that regime forces ought to signal, in turn, to Hezbollah that they should proceed with caution," he said.
Worries about Syria and Hezbollah have sent Israelis lining up for government-issued gas masks. According to the Israel post office, which is handling distribution of the kits, demand roughly trebled this week.
"It looks like every kind of discourse on this or that security matter contributes to public vigilance," its deputy director Haim Azaki told Israel's Army Radio. "We have really seen a very significant jump in demand."
(Additional reporting by Myra MacDonald in London; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Will Waterman)
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Russia warns NATO to stay away from Syria
Today Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov stated, "In our contacts with partners in NATO and in the region, we are calling on them not to seek pretexts for carrying out a military scenario or to introduce initiatives such as humanitarian corridors or buffer zones," Gatilov said, according to the Interfax news agency.
I'm not advocating for NATO intervention, but with the body count in Syria at 30,000 and rising - while the world community watches and does nothing - it is worthy to note that the Russians are even opposed to the idea of a humanitarian corridor to provide some relief to the millions of suffering Syrians.
Every now and then the Russians remind the world that they are just as cold-hearted and ruthless as they were during the Cold War. No wonder the United Nations is as useless as it ever was. Naked self-interest still rules the day. - R.O.
REUTERS 10/02/2012
The statements from Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov was one of Moscow's most specific warnings yet to the West and Gulf Arab leaders to keep out of the 18-month-old conflict.
"In our contacts with partners in NATO and in the region, we are calling on them not to seek pretexts for carrying out a military scenario or to introduce initiatives such as humanitarian corridors or buffer zones," Gatilov said, according to the Interfax news agency.
Russia and China have vetoed three UN Security Council resolutions condemning Syrian President Bashar Assad and blocked attempts to impose sanctions on the country or intervene more directly in its conflict.
Syria's neighbor Turkey has floated the idea of setting up "safe zones" inside Syria to protect civilians but that would also have to be approved by the Security Council.
Gatilov urged restraint between Syria and NATO-member Turkey, one of Assad's harshest critics. Ankara has repeatedly complained of artillery and gunfire spilling over its border and last week it signaled it would take action if there was a repeat of a mortar strike on its territory from inside Syria.
"We believe both Syrian and Turkish authorities should exercise maximum restraint in this situation, taking into account the risings number of radicals among the Syrian opposition who can intentionally provoke conflicts on the border," Gatilov was quoted as saying.
Assad gives orders to 'cleanse' Aleppo
Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar Assad visited the city of Aleppo to take a first-hand look at the fighting between government forces and rebels, a Lebanese paper said on Tuesday. The report also claimed that Assad has ordered 30,000 more troops into the battle.
Al-Diyar newspaper, which is known for its pro-Assad stance, said the president had flown by helicopter at dawn from the presidential palace in Damascus to Aleppo. It did not specify what day the trip started but said that Assad was still in Aleppo. The visit was decided on after reports that the situation in the city, Syria's largest and its commercial center, had become very serious.
"President Assad ordered units 5 and 6, estimated to be 30,000 soldiers and 2,000 personnel carriers, to move from Hama to Aleppo and to attack any occupied areas of Aleppo province from the Turkish border," it said. The paper said that Assad gave orders that Aleppo must be "cleansed" during the visit.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the report.
Rebels mounted a new offensive last week to seize the city, which was until July firmly under Assad's control. They claim to hold most of the Old City but are struggling to hang on to their positions in the face of heavy artillery fire.
The rebel forces are in the east and Assad's forces in the west of Aleppo. Fires started by the combat have gutted the historic market in the Old City, a world heritage site.
Opposition activists say 30,000 people have been killed in the 18-month-old anti-Assad uprising, which has grown into a full-scale civil war.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Ahmadinejad calls for annihilation of Israel
(Does the world need any more reason to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program immediately? The Iranian regime is not only insane; it's demonic. Israel continues to make noise about an impending unilateral strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. While the United States has made recent declarations of its willingness to use military force to stop Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamian Netanyahu remains openly and publicly skeptical. Historic precedents suggest overwhelmingly that when the Israelis say they will stop a threat, they mean it. Is the world ready for some fireworks? [For further proof, check out Iran's game of denial and deception.] - R.O.)
By JOANNA PARASZCZUK
08/02/2012 15:49
In Ramadan speech to ambassadors from Islamic countries, Iranian president calls Zionism “plight of world history,” says liberating Palestine would solve all the world’s problems.
Photo: REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi
In a speech published on his website Thursday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the ultimate goal of world forces must be the annihilation of Israel.
Speaking to ambassadors from Islamic countries ahead of ‘Qods Day’ (‘Jerusalem Day’), an annual Iranian anti-Zionist event established in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini and which falls this year on August 17, Ahmadinejad said that a “horrible Zionist current” had been managing world affairs for “about 400 years.”
Repeating traditional antisemitic slurs, the Iranian president accused “Zionists” of controlling the world’s media and financial systems.
It was Zionists, he said, who were “behind the scene of the world’s main powers, media, monetary and banking centers.”
“They are the decision makers, to the extent that the presidential election hopefuls [of the USA] must go and kiss the feet of the Zionists to ensure their election victory,” he added.
Ahmadinejad added that “liberating Palestine” would solve all the world’s problems, although he did not elaborate on exactly how that might work.
“Qods Day is not merely a strategic solution for the Palestinian problem, as it is to be viewed as a key for solving the world problems,” he said.
He added: “Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime in order to pave the way for world justice and freedom.”
The Iranian president said that Israel reinforced “the dominance of arrogant powers in the region and across the globe” and that Arab countries in particular – he cited Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria and Turkey – were affected by Israel’s “plots.”
Ahmadinejad, who has called the Holocaust a myth, has previously called for Israel’s annihilation, in a 2005 speech in which he used a Persian phrase that translates literally as “wiped off the page of time.”
08/02/2012 15:49
In Ramadan speech to ambassadors from Islamic countries, Iranian president calls Zionism “plight of world history,” says liberating Palestine would solve all the world’s problems.
Photo: REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi
In a speech published on his website Thursday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the ultimate goal of world forces must be the annihilation of Israel.
Speaking to ambassadors from Islamic countries ahead of ‘Qods Day’ (‘Jerusalem Day’), an annual Iranian anti-Zionist event established in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini and which falls this year on August 17, Ahmadinejad said that a “horrible Zionist current” had been managing world affairs for “about 400 years.”
Repeating traditional antisemitic slurs, the Iranian president accused “Zionists” of controlling the world’s media and financial systems.
It was Zionists, he said, who were “behind the scene of the world’s main powers, media, monetary and banking centers.”
“They are the decision makers, to the extent that the presidential election hopefuls [of the USA] must go and kiss the feet of the Zionists to ensure their election victory,” he added.
Ahmadinejad added that “liberating Palestine” would solve all the world’s problems, although he did not elaborate on exactly how that might work.
“Qods Day is not merely a strategic solution for the Palestinian problem, as it is to be viewed as a key for solving the world problems,” he said.
He added: “Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime in order to pave the way for world justice and freedom.”
The Iranian president said that Israel reinforced “the dominance of arrogant powers in the region and across the globe” and that Arab countries in particular – he cited Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria and Turkey – were affected by Israel’s “plots.”
Ahmadinejad, who has called the Holocaust a myth, has previously called for Israel’s annihilation, in a 2005 speech in which he used a Persian phrase that translates literally as “wiped off the page of time.”
Monday, July 23, 2012
Hillary Clinton: The Art of Smart Power
New Statesman - The art of smart power
An impressive summation of American foreign policy today and the overwhelming burden of leading the free world. A worthy read for anyone interested in geopolitics. -R.O.
Monday, November 21, 2011
"Israel's only ally is the truth" - Published in the National Post
Today I was published for the first time in a Canadian national newspaper, the National Post. The op-ed, "Israel's only ally is the truth" is a shorter version of my original op-ed "The Death of Truth" which was first published here on my blog. It is an honour to be published on the pages of the National Post. Thanks for reading. - R.O.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/11/21/robert-d-onley-israels-only-ally-is-the-truth/
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/11/21/robert-d-onley-israels-only-ally-is-the-truth/
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