by Marsha B. Cohen

One of the more remarkable aspects of the recent news coverage of Iraq — the Maliki government’s loss of control over the northern region of the country, the deadly confrontations taking place between Iraqi Shia and Sunnis, and the clashes between Kurds and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Marsha B. Cohen

One of the more remarkable aspects of the recent news coverage of Iraq — the Maliki government’s loss of control over the northern region of the country, the deadly confrontations taking place between Iraqi Shia and Sunnis, and the clashes between Kurds and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL or ISIS) — is the absence of any mention of Israel.

Commonalities between the Kurdish quest for a long-denied state of their own and Israel’s struggle to survive in a sea of geopolitical enemies are ubiquitous in reports on the Kurdish struggle, both in the Israeli press and among Israel’s supporters abroad. Indeed, it’s not unusual to see Kurdish separatism invoked and idealized as a reflection of the quest to establish a Jewish state, underscored by imagined historical parallels between  Jews and Kurds. For example, in an essay titled, “Surprising Ties between Israel and the Kurds,” in Middle East Quarterly’s Summer 2014 issue, Ofra Bengio, a senior research fellow specializing in Kurdish affairs at Tel Aviv University, points out several of these perceived parallels:

Both are relatively small nations (15 million Jews and 30 million Kurds), traumatized by persecutions and wars. Both have been leading life and death struggles to preserve their unique identity, and both have been delegitimized and denied the right to a state of their own. In addition, both are ethnically different from neighboring Arabs, Persians, and Turks, who represent the majority in the Middle East.

The idealized goals and strategies of sovereignty seeking Kurdish separatists are often contrasted with those of  Palestinian Arabs, as illustrated by Victor Sharpe at the American Thinker:

 …(A)fter the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Kurds displayed great political and economic wisdom. How different from the example of the Gazan Arabs who, when foolishly given full control over the Gaza Strip by Israel, chose not to build hospitals and schools, but instead bunkers and missile launchers. To this they have added the imposition of sharia law, with its attendant denigration of women and non-Muslims.

The Kurdish experiment, in at least the territory’s current quasi-independence, has shown the world a decent society where all its inhabitants, men and women, enjoy far greater freedoms than can be found anywhere else in the Arab and Muslim world — and certainly anywhere else in Iraq, which is fast descending into ethnic chaos now that the U.S. military has left.

For decades, Israel has been a silent stakeholder in northern Iraq, training and arming its restive Kurds. Massimiliano Fiore, a fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, cites a CIA document found in the US Embassy in Tehran and subsequently published, which reportedly attested that the Kurds aided Israel’s military in the June 1967 (Six Day) War by launching a major offensive against the Iraqi Army. This kept Iraq from joining the other Arab armies in Israel, in return for which, “after the war, massive quantities of Soviet equipment captured from the Egyptians and Syrians were transferred to the Kurds.” Former Mossad operative Eliezer Tsafrir has described in detail the decade of cooperation between 1965-75 of Israel’s Mossad and Iran’s SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, in arming and training Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces. That cooperation ceased when, without warning, the Shah and Saddam Hussein made a secret deal that abruptly ended the Israeli-Iranian partnership in northern Iraq.

The First Gulf War in 1991 gave Kurds a safe haven with an unprecedented degree of autonomy in the no-fly zone enforced by the US-led Coalition. In oil-rich northern Iraq, Kurds held regional parliamentary elections in May 1992, establishing the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Jacques Neriah, a retired colonel who served as foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and as deputy head for assessment of Israeli military intelligence, explains in a 2012 report published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs:

After the collapse of the Kurdish uprising of March 1991, which broke out after Saddam Hussein’s defeat by the U.S.-led coalition, Iraqi troops recaptured most of the Kurdish areas and 1.5 million Kurds abandoned their homes and fled to the Turkish and Iranian borders. It is estimated that close to 20,000 Kurds died from exhaustion, hunger, cold, and disease. On 5 April 1991, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 688, which demanded that Iraq end its measures against the Kurds and allow immediate access to international humanitarian organizations. This was the first international document to mention the Kurds by name since the League of Nations’ arbitration of Mosul in 1925.

A decade ago, Seymour Hersh called attention to Israel’s close ties with the Kurds. Hersh’s “Annals of National Security: Plan B“, published in the New Yorker is noteworthy, particularly in light of mounting criticism against the Obama administration’s handling of the current crisis. US officials interviewed by Hersh told him that by the end of 2003, “Israel had concluded that the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel needed other options.” One of those options was expanding Israel’s long-standing relationship with Iraqi Kurds and “establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan.” Although the reliability of Hersh’s sources was challenged at the time, they have been affirmed by more recent articles and reports. Neriah, writing in August 2012, cites numerous reports in the Israeli media about the activities of Israeli security and military personnel working for Israeli firms in Kurdistan:

According to Israeli newspapers, dozens of Israelis with a background in elite combat training have been working for private Israeli companies in northern Iraq, helping Kurds there establish elite antiterror units. Reports say that the Kurdish government contracted Israeli security and communications companies to train Kurdish security forces and provide them with advanced equipment.

Shlomi Michaels, an Israeli-American entrepreneur, and former Mossad chief Danny Yatom provided “strategic consultation on economic and security issues” to the Kurds, according to Neriah, although the Israeli government denied any official involvement.

Tons of equipment, including motorcycles, tractors, sniffer dogs, systems to upgrade Kalashnikov rifles, bulletproof vests, and first-aid items have been shipped to Iraq’s northern region, with most products stamped “Made in Israel.”The Kurds had insisted that the cooperation be kept secret, fearing that exposure of the projects would motivate terror groups to target their Jewish guests. Recent warnings that Al-Qaeda might be planning an attack on Kurdish training camps prompted a hasty exit of all Israeli trainers from the northern region. In response to the report, the Defense Ministry said: “We haven’t allowed Israelis to work in Iraq, and each activity, if performed, was a private initiative, without our authorization, and is under the responsibility of the employers and the employees involved.”

Laura Rozen, writing in Mother Jones in 2008, offered a less benign view of Michaels’ activities in Kurdistan.  Besides promoting corruption through kickbacks, Michaels attempted to sell — for $1 million — a dossier to the CIA that would prove Saddam Hussein had met with Ukrainian officials in order to develop a covert chemical  weapons program. Rozen also linked the 2005 AIPAC spy scandal to Israeli involvement in Kurdistan. In 2004, US intelligence agencies had heard rumors that Iranian agents planned to target Israeli and US personnel operating in northern Iraq. Larry Franklin, who worked for the Pentagon, had been caught leaking the intelligence to Washington hawks. That’s how he was was recruited by the FBI for a July 2004 sting operation that informed AIPAC officials about the alleged threat to Israelis operating in northern Iraq.  Franklin pled guilty to leaking classified information and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

In her Middle East Quarterly essay, Bengio also mentions many of Hersh’s claims about Israeli involvement in Kurdistan a decade earlier, which she cautiously avers “remain unproven,” drawing upon Neriah’s account of Michaels’ adventures (without naming names):

The Yedi’ot Aharonot newspaper published an exclusive regarding Israel’s training of peshmergas, the Kurdish paramilitary force. Another Israeli source mentioned the activities of an Israeli company in the construction of an international airport in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. The same source revealed “For their part, Iraqi sources, especially Shiite ones, have published lists of scores of Israeli companies and enterprises active in Iraq through third parties.

Less than a year ago, Lazar Berman of the Times of Israel, under the optimistic headline, “Is a Free Kurdistan, and a New Israeli Ally, Upon Us?” quoted Kurdish journalist Ayub Nuri who argued that Kurds were “deeply sympathetic to Israel and an independent Kurdistan will be beneficial to Israel.” Fast forward a year later to Neriah’s article titled, ”The fall of Mosul could become the beginning of Kurdish quest for independence,” where he says nothing about the stakes for Israel. Would an increasingly independent Kurdistan continue to look to Israel as its patron?

Or will Kurdistan fully join an anti-ISIS Iraqi alliance, backed jointly, if discreetly, by Iran, with the approval of the US? Any scenario in which Iran is part of the solution, rather than the underlying problem, is a nightmare for Israel. “[W]e would especially not want for a situation to be created where, because both the United States and Iran support the government of (Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri) al-Maliki, it softens the American positions on the issue which is most critical for the peace of the world, which is the Iranian nuclear issue,” Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli minister of strategic affairs, told Reuters. 

After so many decades of trying to make use of the Kurdish dream of independence as a narrative and nuisance against its enemies, Israel stands at the cusp of being the biggest loser in whatever comes next in strife-ridden Iraq.

This article was first published by LobeLog. Follow LobeLog on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

by Aurélie M. Daher

In Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, Matthew Levitt, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and a former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, attempts to illustrate the threat posed to the West or its friends by Hezbollah, whose commitment [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Aurélie M. Daher

In Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, Matthew Levitt, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and a former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, attempts to illustrate the threat posed to the West or its friends by Hezbollah, whose commitment to violence constitutes, in the author’s view, its very essence. A compilation of the various attacks attributed to the group since the early 1980s, the book consists essentially of a review of the various reports and investigations undertaken by the U.S. CIA and FBI, Israel’s Mossad, and a long list of other western security, intelligence, and counter-terrorism agencies.

An initial problem, which is widely shared by most of this genre, is raised at the outset by the way the thesis is supposedly substantiated. Levitt in effect commits the methodological error of covering what is a highly interactive process from only one point of view; in this case, Hezbollah is detached from its environment, its culture and from the contexts in which it has developed since its creation. It is detached above all from the actors with which it has interacted over its 30-year history.

Thus, Hezbollah’s violence is approached as if it took place in a vacuum, presented as relevant to its own ethos, and practiced according to a logic comparable to “art for art’s sake.” As was noted a few years ago by the sociologist Didier Bigo, however, “terrorism” as an analytical category “doesn’t exist”. In other words, terrorism approached as a study frankly doesn’t permit any understanding of the organization that is responsible for it, nor does it even provide a real understanding of the phenomenon of the violence itself. By extension, to study an organization by cataloguing the violent acts of which it stands accused explains nothing at all. 

Indeed, terrorism, a form of violence, is never practiced for its own sake; it is rather undertaken as a means or as an expression of an idea or a message that requires identification. The intellectual challenge is not to look at the violence itself, but to identify the reasons for such a choice, the objectives the actor intends to achieve, the contexts and conditions for success of the chosen strategy, and the response that it provokes from the target. In that sense, Levitt’s book offers no clue, leaving us completely bereft of such enlightening elements.

Not a word, for example, regarding the realities of Israel’s second invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the factor of social history that stands at the origin of Hezbollah. Nor does the book have anything to say about the realities of Israel’s military occupation of southern Lebanon, an occupation that lasted a not insubstantial 22 years in the course of which checkpoints, curfews, threats, and even violence, abductions, mass deportations and torture became daily concerns for some 200,000 Lebanese of whom nearly half ended up leaving — or being forced out of — their homes in the occupied zone. Not to mention the 11,000 Lebanese — that is, more than 15 percent of the remaining population — who, without any form of due process, spent time in Israeli prisons, some of them for more than ten years, still others until the end of their lives that were lost as a result of the abuses they suffered. This first category of very real sociological facts contextualizes Hezbollah’s violence, less as an essential trait of its nature than as a strategy of war carried out in response to another kind of violence inflicted on the larger community of which it is a part. Without seeking to justify Hezbollah’s violence, it would have seemed appropriate, both for the sake of intellectual integrity and analytic coherence, for the author to offer us explanatory details of a phenomenon that he claims to decipher.

A second problem is posed by the book’s very subject. Given the difficulty of gaining access to empirical material, cataloguing the malign acts of a clandestine organization as secretive as Hezbollah does not lend itself to strictly academic research, which must necessarily rely almost entirely on documents and sources from the murky world of international intelligence and espionage. Thus, one would have preferred that Levitt would have avoided unattributed assertions or affirmations — Hezbollah is this, Hezbollah does that — and instead referred back to the source on which his account relies — the CIA says that Hezbollah is this, the Mossad believes that Hezbollah does that. The presentation of Hezbollah in the book is thus less a factual and objective depiction as it is more a subjective recitation among similar works, especially when one considers the highly questionable record for reliability of western intelligence agencies regarding the Middle East in the past (including very recently) — a record upon which Levitt’s book unfortunately fails to improve. The fact is that the text abounds with vague, questionable, and uncontextualized assertions; that is, when they are not simply false.

At the same time, the author — who speaks no Arabic — fails to understand Hezbollah’s nature, as well as its aims. Nor does he have a grip on its internal organization or modus vivendi, just as he lacks familiarity with its history or environment and remains a stranger to the culture of its popular base. A number of events in the history of the region, and in particular, of Lebanon, are grossly distorted, leading at best to concerns about Levitt’s ignorance; at worst, about his intellectual honesty. His analysis of Hezbollah’s discourse is also literal; he thus interprets both ad hoc statements and lyrical flights of rhetoric by Hezbollah officials on ceremonial occasions as serious, well-planned strategies. For example, when, on the anniversary of the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniye, which was very likely carried out by the Mossad, Hezbollah officials declare, “We haven’t revenged him yet but we will,” that hardly means, as Levitt appears to believe, that Hezbollah is preparing to attack Israel or Israelis imminently. It is a mandatory slogan, just as Iranians have chanted (albeit with diminishing conviction) “Death to America” at Friday Prayer rallies over the past 34 years.

This lack of context is pervasive, as are important omissions, intended or not. Like Saudi anti-Shiite propaganda, Levitt depicts Lebanese Hezbollah and several other organizations based in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq with the same name as one and the same, thus attributing to the Lebanese group the acts of the others when the latter are not only products of their own distinct national histories, contexts, and aims, but also maintain no links or coordination with their Lebanese homonym.

Indeed, contrary to Levitt’s assertion, Hezbollah wasn’t created in 1982. The Israeli invasion initially provoked the formation of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon (IRL), a paramilitary group that first appeared in July of that same year. It wasn’t until several months later that the IRL chose to associate with a network of social and civic institutions that didn’t take definitive form as Hezbollah until the spring of 1984. The armed organization thus isn’t a branch, among others, of Hezbollah’s structure, but the inverse: Hezbollah is the civil extension of the IRL.

Moreover, Levitt’s attempts to describe the organization’s structure are replete with irrefutable errors of fact. Thus, the head of the Council of Jihad wasn’t Mughniye, nor even, after his 2008 assassination, Mustafa Badreddine, but rather Hassan Nasrallah himself, according to the group’s governing rules, which provide that the head of the IRL presides over the Central Decision Council under the secretary general. The mass media run by the party, similarly, are not responsible to the Political Council, as Levitt asserts, but to the Executive Council. These are just a few of the many simple errors in the book that naturally erode confidence in Levitt’s understanding of the most basic features of the organization.

Levitt’s own all-too-certain confidence in the reliability of reports by the CIA and its friendly counterparts leads him to a poor understanding of the socio-political contexts and developments that have taken place in the region during the past 30 years. For example, he notes, quoting from the CIA, that in the Bekaa Valley in 1987, “strict Islamic rule was implemented: Sale or transport of liquor are prohibited, women are forbidden from interacting with men in public and must adhere to a strict dress code, civil crimes are punished according to the Koran, and Western education and influences are prohibited.” Having myself grown up in Baalbek, the capital of the purported “Hezbollah State” in the Bekaa, I can attest without reservation that this description is a total fantasy: women wearing Bermuda shorts and short-sleeved and sleeveless t-shirts vastly outnumbered those donning chadors, however seductive, on the city’s streets. I also recall very clearly barbecues and other informal parties in our neighbours’ homes where orange juice was by no means the only beverage served for the thirsty. As in previous years, Hezbollah cadres lined up with other parents at the beginning of the academic year to enrol their kids in schools where Roman Catholic nuns taught classes in French. And in the courts, cases that applied Sharia law were not only extremely rare, but confined to those in which the families of criminal or tort victims specifically requested it.

In yet another example where Levitt’s sources have misinformed him, Israel did not withdraw from southern Lebanon in 2000 for the sake of upholding international law — such as UN Security Council Resolution 425 — as asserted by the author. Rather, it followed the Israeli government’s recognition of its army’s total defeat faced with the determination, tenacity, and effectiveness of IRL attacks in the region. Another example in the recent past that the author doesn’t get quite right is his confident assertion that Hezbollah organized in 2006 an attack and abduction of Israeli soldiers on Israeli territory “and dragged both Israel and Lebanon into a war neither State wanted.” Aside from the fact that the alleged violation by the IRL of Israeli sovereignty remains a source of debate — only Israel maintains that the attack took place on its territory; Hezbollah, the Lebanese army and the UN peacekeeping force there (UNIFIL) have maintained it took place within Lebanon’s borders — Israel had made plans for a large-scale offensive against its northern neighbor four months before and had meanwhile been waiting for a pretext to launch it under a claim of self-defense, as admitted by the then-Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, in March 2007.[1]

In the same way, one can’t simply take at face value Levitt’s version of the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires’ Jewish cultural center. At that time, the Argentine government maintained close relations with Tel Aviv; the Mossad indeed participated in the investigation that ultimately blamed Hezbollah, a conclusion embraced by Levitt. But the book unfortunately overlooks the fact that 18 years later, the Argentine government, having altered its foreign policy, agreed with Tehran to conduct a joint investigation. Nor does he note a more recent wrinkle from just last July when the former Argentine Interior Minister, Carlos Corach was accused of having supplied the explosives used in the attack, as reported by the World Jewish Congress. In other words, Levitt fails to take account of the flexibility that can sometimes influence judicial processes according to the political preferences of governments. Nor does he cite any serious critiques of the initial and subsequent investigations of the bombing by journalists, including Gareth Porter as in his 2008 Nation article or his more recent discovery that the 2006 indictment of top Iranian leaders for allegedly ordering the bombing relied virtually entirely on the testimony of the formerly-armed Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-E-Khalq (MEK). None of this means that Hezbollah is innocent of the bombing; it only demonstrates Levitt’s uncritical acceptance of and lack of curiosity about the “official” version, as recounted to him by his preferred intelligence sources.

The same selectivity brings him to place too much confidence in journalistic accounts about Hezbollah and Lebanese politics — some of which are susceptible to a number of interpretations or hypotheses, while others lack coherence. For example, media stories based on alleged leaks from the international commission investigating the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, as presented in 2009 by the German weekly, Der Spiegel, and in 2010 by the Canadian television channel, CBC, were widely criticized — even by anti-Hezbollah forces who were in the majority at the time — for inconsistencies and inaccuracies. The indictment filed in 2011, which charged four alleged members of Hezbollah with the crime, is, according to the prosecutor himself, Daniel Bellemare, based on inferences and circumstantial — rather than direct — evidence. With the trial now getting underway, moreover, it appears that the SIM cards which, according to the commission, were used to plan and organize the assassination and subsequently to identify the perpetrators, belonged at the time — and still even today — to ordinary citizens who obtained them before the assassination.

While recognizing that Hezbollah is an organization that considers violence part of its strategic “toolbox,” one can’t but regret Levitt’s lack of basic knowledge and analytic rigor, not to mention his sensationalism and apparent ignorance of nearly 30 years of important studies that have focused on the modus operandi of this key actor on the Middle Eastern geo-political stage. If the book had been written by a seasoned and experienced regional specialist fluent in Arabic and fully conversant in the region’s culture, habits and customs, its basic thesis — that Hezbollah has been responsible for dozens of actual and planned attacks against western targets and remains today one of the West’s major threats — might be more convincing.

[1] See L’Orient-Le Jour, 9 March, 2007, a version of which is unfortunately unavailable online. See also this article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, 21 August, 2006.

by Mitchell Plitnick

US Secretary of State John Kerry was shuttling between Jordan and Saudi Arabia on Sunday, shoring up support for his efforts to find some kind of framework for negotiations that Israel and the Palestinian Authority could both sign on to. But back in Israel, the difficulties Kerry faces [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Mitchell Plitnick

US Secretary of State John Kerry was shuttling between Jordan and Saudi Arabia on Sunday, shoring up support for his efforts to find some kind of framework for negotiations that Israel and the Palestinian Authority could both sign on to. But back in Israel, the difficulties Kerry faces became even more apparent.

First, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman stated that, while he believed the deal Kerry envisions is the best Israel is likely to get, he would not support any peace deal that did not involve transferring Arab towns in Israel to the Palestinian Authority. In other words, Lieberman is insisting on a condition he has long held that forces the expulsion from Israel of some significant number of its Arab citizens. That is something that even the United States will find difficult to endorse, although most in Congress probably would have no problem with it (as long as AIPAC pushes them in that direction). The PA is not going to accept that condition, so Lieberman is basically putting a poison pill inside conciliatory language.

By the end of the day, Yuval Steinitz, a far right wing member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud coalition and Minister of Intelligence, Strategic Affairs and International Relations, stated that Israel could not accept anything less than a sole Israeli military presence for an indefinite period in the Jordan Valley, a clear non-starter. Steinitz made this statement despite the insistence of the former head of the Mossad that the Jordan Valley was not a vital security concern or Israel, so one has to wonder about the motivation for Israel’s insistence on this point.

And in between, Steinitz set off a row in a cabinet meeting by presenting the latest update of the so-called “Palestinian Incitement Index,” and claiming it is proof that the current negotiations are futile. Minister of Justice and lead Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians Tzipi Livni took umbrage at that, and must have been even more convinced of her own irrelevance when the Prime Minister, though stopping short of agreeing with Steinitz that the talks were futile, agreed with him that the report reflected hatred of not only Israel but of Jews in general and that this was why the talks were not succeeding.

The report in question was recently compiled, according to the Israeli media, but the conclusions seem to be virtually identical to the one that was issued one year ago and is available in powerpoint format at the Prime Minister’s web site. Most of that report is simply a rehash of familiar Israeli claims, with some threadbare innuendo mixed in with a few examples of youth contributions to school Facebook pages that do reflect some very objectionable images and statements that are clearly anti-Semitic. It is the greatest stretch of argument to claim that this report (compiled by the Netanyahu government itself) can amount to the “core reason that peace is unattainable” as Netanyahu has repeatedly claim.

The link above takes you to the report, which you can judge for yourself. There is no doubt that some of the images and messages are offensive, even classically anti-Semitic, and, as a Jew, this author was certainly bothered by them. But nothing there indicates to my eyes anything like the pattern of indoctrination of hate that the Netanyahu government has claimed.

On a personal note, as a Jew who has been the victim of anti-Semitic violence in my youth, I am highly sensitive to such images as the objectionable ones in the report. I hope that more thoughtful members of the Palestinian community will intervene against such images and the ideas they reflect. But they are not indicative of some massive conspiracy among the Palestinians to indoctrinate youth into a culture of hate. As the Israeli peace activist (and former Irgun militant) Uri Avnery has pointed out, Israel, with its killings, closures, denial of rights, destruction of homes, confiscations of land and other activities, does this quite adequately all by itself. Conflict breeds hate of the other, and the effect is visible for Israelis as well as Palestinians.

It is precisely to stop that very cycle of suffering that the occupation needs to end and Palestinian rights and security, hand in hand with Israeli rights and security, need to be firmly and equally established and protected. Unfortunately, that is still not the approach the United States is taking.

That Associated Press story displaying a graph alleged to be part of an Iranian computer simulation of a nuclear explosion — likely leaked by Israel with the intention of reinforcing the media narrative of covert Iranian work on nuclear weapons – raises serious questions about the International Atomic [...]]]> via Lobe Log

That Associated Press story displaying a graph alleged to be part of an Iranian computer simulation of a nuclear explosion — likely leaked by Israel with the intention of reinforcing the media narrative of covert Iranian work on nuclear weapons – raises serious questions about the International Atomic Energy Association’s (IAEA) claim that it has credible evidence of such modeling work by Iran.

The graph of the relationship between energy and power shown in the AP story has now been revealed to contain absurdly large errors indicating its fraudulence.

Those revelations indicate, in turn, that the IAEA based its publication of detailed allegations of nuclear weapons-related Iranian computer modeling on evidence that should have been rejected as having no credibility.

Former senior IAEA inspector Robert Kelley, who has challenged the accuracy of IAEA reporting on Iran, told Lobe Log in an e-mail that “It’s clear the graph has nothing to do with a nuclear bomb.”

“The pretty, symmetrical bell shaped curve at the bottom is not typical of a nuclear explosion but of some more idealized natural phenomena or mathematical equation,” he said. “Clearly it is a student example of how to perform integrals to which someone has attached some meaningless numbers.”

Nuclear physicists Yousaf Butt and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress also pointed out that the graph depicted by AP is not only so rudimentary and crude that it could have been done by an undergraduate student, but is based on a fundamental error of mind-numbing proportions.

The graph shown in the AP story plots two curves, one of energy versus time, the other of power output versus time. But Butt and Dalnoki-Veress noted that the two curves are inconsistent. The peak level of power shown in the graph, they said, is nearly a million times too high.

After a quick look at the graph, the head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Cal State Sacramento, Dr. Hossein Partovi, observed, “[T]he total energy is more than four orders of magnitude (forty thousand times) smaller than the total integrated power that it must equal!” Essentially, the mismatch between the level of total energy and total power on the graph is “more than four orders of magnitude”, which Partovi explained means that the level of energy is 40,000 times too small in relation to the level of power.

One alert reader of the account of the debunking of the graph at the Mondoweiss blog cited further evidence supporting Kelley’s observation that the graph shown by AP was based on an another graph that had nothing to do with nuclear explosions.

The reader noted that the notation “kT” shown after “energy” on the right hand scale of the graph does not stand for “kilotons” as Jahn suggested, but “Boltzmann constant” (k) multiplied by temperature (T). The unit of tons, on the other hand, is always abbreviated with a lower case “t”, he pointed out, so kilotons would be denoted as “kt”.

The reader also stated that the “kT” product is used in physics as a scaling factor for energy values in molecular-scale systems, such as a microsecond laser pulse.

The evidence thus suggests that someone took a graph related to an entirely different problem and made changes to show a computer simulation of a 50 kiloton explosion. The dotted line on the graph leads the eye directly to the number 50 on the right-hand energy scale, which would lead most viewers to believe that it is the result of modeling a 50 kiloton nuclear explosion.

The graph was obviously not done by a real Iranian scientist — much less someone working in a top secret nuclear weapons research program — but by an amateur trying to simulate a graph that would be viewed, at least by non-specialists, as something a scientist might have drawn.

Although AP reporter George Jahn wrote that officials who provided the diagram did so “only on condition that they and their country not be named”, the country behind the graph is not much of a mystery.

Blogger Richard Silverstein has reported that a “highly-placed Israeli source” told him the diagram “was stolen by the Mossad from an Iranian computer” using one of the various malware programs deployed against Iran.

Whether one chooses to rely on Silverstein’s reporting or not, it is clear that the graph is part of a longer stream of suspicious documents supposedly obtained by Israeli intelligence from inside Iran’s nuclear program and then given to the IAEA over the past few years.

Former IAEA Secretary General Mohammed ElBaradei refers in his memoirs to documents provided by Israel in 2009 “purportedly showing that Iran had continued with nuclear weapons studies until at least 2007.” ElBaradei adds that the Agency’s “technical experts” had “raised numerous questions about the documents’ authenticity”, and suggested that US intelligence “did not buy the “evidence” put forward by Israel” in its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.

Jahn’s story indicates that this and similar graphs were the basis for the IAEA’s publishing charges by two unnamed states that Iran had done computer modeling that the agency said could only have been about nuclear weapons.

Jahn cites a “senior diplomat who is considered neutral on the issue” as confirming that the graph accompanying his story was one of “a series of Iranian computer-generated models provided to the IAEA by the intelligences services of member nations.”

Those “computer generated models” were discussed in the November 2011 report, which referred to “[i]nformation provided to the Agency by two Member States relating to modelling [sic] studies alleged to have been conducted in 2008 and 2009 by Iran….”  The unnamed member states were alleging that the Iranian studies “involved the modelling [sic] of spherical geometries, consisting of components of the core of an HEU nuclear device subjected to shock compression, for their neutronic behaviour at high density, and a determination of the subsequent nuclear explosive yield.”

Nothing in that description of the alleged modeling is documented by the type of graph shown by the AP story.

The IAEA report concludes by saying, “The information also identifies models said to have been used in those studies and the results of these calculations, which the Agency has seen.”

In other words, the only evidence that the IAEA had actually seen was the graphs of the alleged computer modeling, of which the graph shown in the AP story is alleged to be an example. But the fact that data on that graph has been credibly shown to be off by four orders of magnitude suggests that the Israeli claim of Iranian computer modeling of “components of the core of an HEU nuclear device subjected to shock compression” was completely fabricated.

Former IAEA Inspector Kelley also told Lobe Log that “We can only hope that the claim that the IAEA has relied on this crude hoax is false. Otherwise their credibility has been shattered.”

- Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Laura Rozen’s recent interview with former Mossad director Efraim Halevy focuses heavily on diplomatic options for the US, Israel and Iran in the impasse over the Iranian nuclear program. Halevy, like former Mossad director Meir Dagan and a number of past and present US and Israeli national security officials, opposes preventive [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Laura Rozen’s recent interview with former Mossad director Efraim Halevy focuses heavily on diplomatic options for the US, Israel and Iran in the impasse over the Iranian nuclear program. Halevy, like former Mossad director Meir Dagan and a number of past and present US and Israeli national security officials, opposes preventive military action against Iran because he fears it will lead to the collapse of the international sanctions regime, a regional war and only embolden Iran to build and deploy nuclear weapons as a deterrent in the years following the attack.

Particularly interesting is Halevy’s description of Obama and Romney’s approach to the Iran issue.

Obama has placed emphasis on negotiations. In this current election for the US presidency, his hands are tied. He cannot proceed, because he cannot appear soft on Israel’s security.

Negotiating with Iran is perceived as a sign of beginning to forsake Israel. That is where I think the basic difference is between Romney and Obama. What Romney is doing is mortally destroying any chance of a resolution without war. Therefore when [he recently] said, he doesn’t think there should be a war with Iran, this does not ring true. It is not consistent with other things he has said. […]

Meir Dagan, the former director of Israel’s Mossad, has received a liver transplant in Belarus. Reports from the Israeli press that have now made their way into western media sources state that Belarus’ president, Alexander Lukashenko, announced at a press conference on Oct. 16 that the operation had taken place [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Meir Dagan, the former director of Israel’s Mossad, has received a liver transplant in Belarus. Reports from the Israeli press that have now made their way into western media sources state that Belarus’ president, Alexander Lukashenko, announced at a press conference on Oct. 16 that the operation had taken place ten days earlier and had been completed successfully.

Dagan has been among the most outspoken opponents of an Israeli military strike on Iran in Israel’s intelligence community. During a March 2012 interview with CBS’s Sixty Minutes he told Lesley Stahl that an Israeli attack on Iran would not only trigger a regional war, it would be ineffective. Hardly a dove, Dagan much prefers that a war against Iran be launched by the US, and believes that sabotage and other efforts to effect regime change in Iran can stave off Iranian nuclear capability until the US is ready to take action.

Why would a prominent Israeli, a citizen of a country whose medical system is renowned  for its sophisticated and cutting edge medical research and groundbreaking innovations in liver transplants, choose to surreptitiously go to a third world European backwater, which boasts that it now ranks 53rd out of 190 countries in the world,  for lifesaving treatment?

According to the Jerusalem Post:

“Lukashenko said that surgeons in several countries, including the US, Germany and Sweden, had refused to operate on the patient after learning of his former career as a spymaster, though he didn’t mention Dagan by name. The president added that doctors in these countries had recommended the Belarusian Transplant Center as the best place for the man to undergo his operation.”

Y-Net, the English language news site of the Israeli Daily, Yediot Acharonot, offered no grounds for the refusal, but cited sources close Dagan who claimed “Sweden was never asked to operate and the US did not fulfill criteria for the transplant”. UPI, citing Y-Net as its source, says ”because of his condition, Dagan was found to be unsuitable for a transplant in the United States.”

Based on details provided to Al-Monitor by Israeli journalist Yossi Melman, Laura Rozen reports that Dagan had gone to Sloane Kettering hospital in New York two months earlier hoping to find a compatible organ but could not. “He returned to Israel and his health was deteriorating,” Melman said.

“Dagan’s illness, cancer, was known for a couple of months to a small group of confidants and colleagues and me, but it was decided for reasons of not invading his privacy not to report it,”  Yossi Melman told Al-Monitor by email Tuesday. “Tonight the Belarus President Alexander Lukaschenko revealed it in a press conference trying to gain for himself and his pariah regime.”

Although Israel is among the most medically advanced countries in the world, organ transplants are subject to intense bureaucracy. At least part of that bureaucracy stems from religious concerns of many orthodox Jews about desecrating a human body after death by autopsy or organ removal. Defining “death” has also proven to be a religious obstacle, since once the standards of total brain death and respiratory death have been fully satisfied according to Jewish law, certain organs cease to be viable. Despite efforts to boost the number of available organs for transplants by promising would-be donors a slot at the top of the donor list should they need a transplant,  only 12% of Israelis are registered organ donors. Bloomberg News reports that desperate Israelis are among the biggest clients for organ transplants abroad, which are often acquired by respectable hospitals from black market sources.

The US has a waiting list of nearly 17,000 patients for liver transplants, about 10,000 of whom have been awaiting a donor for more than a year. Whenever a prominent person like Steve Jobs receives a transplant, the question of  “jumping the list” arises. It is more likely that Dagan would have been asked to wait his turn, rather than turned down because of his prominent role in Israel’s intelligence community, as Lukashenko claimed.

This, however, does little to address the question of “Why Belarus?”

Belarus, against which the EU renewed its sanctions the other day for persistent human rights violations, has much less stringent criteria for consent of organ donors than Israel, the US, and most western countries. These lower standards of consent allow it to promote “medical tourism” and advertise the ease and economy of organ transplants performed in Belarus. According to the website MedTravel Belarus:

Transplantation of organs taken from cadaveric donor is forbidden in many countries of the world and this is a reason for considerable increase of the list of those who need this operation because the amount of donors decreases significantly.

The problem of the removal of cadaveric organs is primarily related to the issues of legal and ethical qualities. For example, in the USA and many European countries, the principle of “consent of the requested” works, this means that the usage of a person’s organs without his legally formalized permission is forbidden, so the doctor is not entitled to do the removal. A presumption of consent to the removal of organs works in our country so the law permits the removal of cadaveric organs, but on condition that the deceased person during his lifetime, or his relatives have not expressed their opposition to it.

That is why Belarusian clinics are so popular among people all over the world. The transplantations of bone marrow, kidney, heart, liver are performed in our country, tissue transplantations and stem cells transplantations are performed as well. It also should be taken into consideration that the prices for this type of medical service in our country are much lower than in other countries.

In other words, Belarus is not bound by some of the bio-ethical constraints on transplants that apply in the US and Israel, and much of Europe. MedTravel Belarus claims that 70 liver transplants have been performed in the country since 2010.

While Dagan has devoted most of his career in the Mossad to countering “the Iranian threat” to Israel, Belarus –formerly part of the Soviet Union, and now part of the successor Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) — is one of the very few European countries with whom Iran maintains good relations. In late June, Iran and Belarus co-sponsored an “International Conference on Modern Application of Nanotechnology” in Minsk. Ironically, Belarus, which apparently was Dagan’s best and perhaps only hope for obtaining a liver transplant, has been accused of aiding Iran in missile development and in evading western sanctions against its nuclear program:

Diplomats told Reuters on condition of anonymity that Belarus is beginning to act as a kind of middleman to help secure the Iranians access to Russian technology.

“Belarus is becoming a key element in Iran’s efforts to develop its SSM (surface-to-surface missile) and nuclear capabilities, especially with regard to navigation and guidance products, which are defined as dual-use,” a diplomat said.

Politics, indeed, makes for some strange bedfellows.

By Richard Sale

I believe that delisting the Mujahadeen-e Khalq (MEK) from the US foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list is in every way reprehensible. I realize that all US public officials, especially the president, are involved in systems of necessity and that without satisfying those necessities, their hold on power wouldn’t [...]]]> via Lobe Log

By Richard Sale

I believe that delisting the Mujahadeen-e Khalq (MEK) from the US foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list is in every way reprehensible. I realize that all US public officials, especially the president, are involved in systems of necessity and that without satisfying those necessities, their hold on power wouldn’t last very long. Everyone agrees that the president is a pawn of political speculations and maneuvers, and that he is at once the citizen, the voter, the candidate, the taxpayer, as well as the ordinary, common man. But this results in a curious split of judgment, and the result is that we look on the same individual as responsible and irresponsible, depending which of these fictions we adopt, and whether we are in a juridical or an objective frame of mind.

But one has to remember certain historical facts, the first being that at the beginning of his administration, President Obama wanted to relax tensions with Iran and engage with it diplomatically while Israel continued to carry out killings of Iranian nuclear scientists using its proxies, including an armed group of Iranian dissidents, the MEK, a group that has high-level political backers in the US despite being a terrorist organization.

I have said publicly, quoting former US officials, that a number of Israeli terrorists were members of the MEK, who are paid by Israel to do targeted killings of Iranian nationals. “The MEK is being used as the assassination arm of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service,” said Vince Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counterterrorism. He also said that the MEK is in charge of executing “the motor attacks on Iranian targets chosen by Israel. They go to Israel for training, and Israel pays them.”

According to one former senior CIA official, the MEK is particularly violent. Back in the 1970s, in France, they did killings of Americans in Paris, including six or seven US Army sergeants. He added that the French “were terrified of them.”

As part of Israel’s continuing battle to hold off the Iranian nuclear program, the MEK, paid by Israel, have not only assassinated Iran’s nuclear scientists, but US officials have said they believe that a saboteur at the Natanz nuclear facility, probably an MEK member, used a memory stick to infect the machines there.

These officials said using a person on the ground would greatly increase the probability of computer infection, as opposed to passively waiting for the software to spread through the system. “Iranian double agents” would have helped to target the most vulnerable spots in the system,” said a high ranking source. In October 2010, Iran’s intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, said an unspecified number of “nuclear spies” were arrested in connection with the Stuxnet.33 virus.

It is a dismal history, but, alas, as I said, we are all slaves of necessity.

- Richard Sale was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and his entry was given a National Press Club Award for “excellence in diplomatic reporting” in 1989. He has been reporting on intelligence since 1977, most recently as UPI’s Intelligence Correspondent. Sale’s book, “Clinton’s Secret Wars,” was selected by the History and Military Book Clubs and Book of the Month 2. 

News and views relevant to US mideast foreign policy for Sept. 20

“Iranian policymakers should understand that failing to limit the enrichment program will eventually trigger war”: The Security Times carries a commentary by Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank. Outlining the continuing [...]]]> via Lobe Log

News and views relevant to US mideast foreign policy for Sept. 20

“Iranian policymakers should understand that failing to limit the enrichment program will eventually trigger war”: The Security Times carries a commentary by Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank. Outlining the continuing difficulties in negotiating an agreement on Iran’s enrichment activities, Fitzpatrick notes that the lack of an agreement means that pressure will grow to take military action in the coming years:

…. Iran already is nuclear capable – now possessing all the materials and technology, requiring only a political decision – and, while unpalatable, this status has not triggered military action.

The problem is that the red line separating nuclear-capable from nuclear-armed will become less clear as Iran’s enrichment program makes further advances. At present, Iran is still months away from being able to make a successful dash to produce weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU). Because IAEA inspections take place on average twice a month, any such ‘breakout’ at declared facilities would be detected in time.

If, however, the Iranians sought to produce HEU at clandestine plants, they could not be confident the work would remain hidden. Twice already, secret enrichment plants have been exposed. Iran might judge that it could get away with such exposure, claiming, as it does today, that it does not need to follow IAEA rules about early notification of new nuclear facilities.

If this is Iran’s calculation, it could well backfire. Iran does not know how close it could come to crossing the line to weapons production before its adversaries determined it was too close. If Iran’s enrichment program continues unabated, at some point Western intelligence agencies will judge that because the uranium stockpile is too large, the technology too advanced and the hiding places too many, a dash for the bomb cannot be detected in time. The red line of weapons production will have become too blurred to serve as an effective tripwire.

“Iran’s Nuclear Program: Tehran’s Compliance with International Obligations”: The Congressional Research Service asks “Has Iran Violated the NPT?” in a new report and concludes that the matter is “unclear” though the IAEA believes Iran “has violated its safeguards agreement” and was, until at least 2003, pursuing military research as part of the program. It notes that investigations are still ongoing over claims that Iran violated the NPT’s Article II, “which state[s] that non-nuclear-weapon states-parties shall not ‘manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear  explosive devices’ or “’seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.’”

The 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate assessed in 2007 that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In response to an IAEA Board of Governors ruling that Iran had not met its disclosure (and safeguards) obligations, the Iranian press reported that “Iranian Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani said that the most recent resolution issued against Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency raises doubt about the benefit of being a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).”

“Who’s Sabotaging Iran’s Nuclear Program?”: Building off an earlier New York Times report on allegations of sabotage against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake questions if this is an act of escalation by the perpetrators:

Fereydoun Abbasi, Iran’s vice president and the chief of its nuclear-energy agency, disclosed that power lines between the holy city of Qom and the underground Fordow nuclear centrifuge facility were blown up with explosives on Aug. 17. He also said the power lines leading to Iran’s Natanz facilities were blown up as well. On the day after the power was cut off at Fordow, an inspector from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) asked to visit the facility.

The disclosure is significant. To start, it is the first piece of evidence to suggest opponents of the Iranian program are targeting the country’s electrical grid and doing so on the ground.

The US has publicly denied it is carrying out attacks on any facilities and military or civilian targets in Iran. An NBC investigative report from the summer reported that Israel, not the US, is actually orchestrating the bombings and assassinations. Rather than risk discovery of its own network in the Islamic Republic, the NBC said that the Mossad relies on members of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (PMO) to carry out these operations.

“Poll: Majority of Palestinians, Israelis say attack on Iran would result in major war”: Haaretz reports on a new poll in Israel expressing growing concern among Israeli citizens and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories that a war with Iran would “would ignite a major regional war,” though the poll also noted that a significant number of respondents do not believe a war is likely this year anyway:

According to the study’s finding, 77 percent of Israeli respondents and 82 percent of Palestinian respondents said that an Israeli attack on Iran would result in a major regional confrontation.

Regarding the possibility of an Israeli strike without U.S. backing, 65 percent of Israelis were against such a course of action, an increase from 52 percent in June.

Also, the study found that 70 percent of Israelis did not believe Israel would strike Iran in the coming months, with only 20 percent of respondents saying they believe the Iranians’ goal is to destroy Israel.

The Israeli press also reported that US diplomats have warned their Israeli counterparts that should Israel attack Iran this year, it would jeopardize Israel’s peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt.

Ari Shavit reports on his interview with former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, one among several former Israeli intelligence and security officials who have infuriated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by making public statements against an Israeli strike on Iran. Halevy tells Shavit that his views about the threat that Iran poses to [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Ari Shavit reports on his interview with former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, one among several former Israeli intelligence and security officials who have infuriated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by making public statements against an Israeli strike on Iran. Halevy tells Shavit that his views about the threat that Iran poses to Israel are “complex”, but compared with Netanyahu’s statements, it’s strikingly apparent that Halevy wants to avoid a lone Israeli military venture with Iran:

…“I do indeed argue that a nuclear Iran does not constitute an existential threat to Israel. If one day we wake up and discover that Iran has nuclear weapons, that does not mean the start of the countdown to the end of Israel’s existence. Israel need not despair. We have deterrent capability and preventive capability. If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Israel will be able to design a true operational response that will be able to cope with that. We will be able to prevent a Hiroshima in Tel Aviv and we will prevent a Hiroshima in Tel Aviv; so we must not talk about a Hiroshima in Tel Aviv, because prophecies like that are self-fulfilling. Nor must we draw baseless analogies with the 1930s.

“The true Churchillian way is not to talk about the possibility of a second Holocaust, but to ensure that there will be no holocaust here. I was a boy in Britain during the Blitz. I remember vividly Churchill’s speeches blaring from the radio. He did not talk about the possibility that Britain might not survive. On the contrary: even in the direst straits he said that Britain would have the upper hand. He promised that whatever happened, come what may, in the end Britain would win. Anyone who purports to be Churchill needs to talk like Churchill and project self-confidence.

“I am absolutely appalled when I hear our leaders talking as though there were no Israel Defense Forces and as though there were no State of Israel and as though Auschwitz is liable to be repeated. As I see it, the message we should be conveying to the Iranians − and to ourselves − is that we will be here in any event and in any scenario for the next two thousand years.

“But we must not become confused,” Halevy continues. “A nuclear Iran is not an existential threat, but a nuclear Iran is a grave matter. Nuclear weapons in Tehran’s hands upset the regional balance and create a very serious strategic situation. Nor can we completely rule out the possibility that if Iran possesses nuclear weapons it will ultimately use them. When the danger is very great, even if the risk that it will be realized is only 10 percent, we need to treat it as a risk of 100 percent. So I am not one of those who are indifferent to the Iranian danger. Under no circumstances am I ready to accept a nuclear Iran. But I maintain that the way to prevent nuclearization is not necessarily by means of force.

To prevent a “a generations-long war”, Halevy says that Iran can be deterred from building a nuclear weapon through more international pressure aimed at further weakening and isolating it:

“There should have been cooperation with Turkey vis-à-vis Iran. There should have been action against Iran in Syria. The Russians should have been brought into the picture. If Israel had adopted a creative, active policy, and if the international community had held up to the Iranians a far richer package of threats and enticements, I think there would have been a chance to dissuade the Iranians from embarking on the dangerous road they have taken. And I believe it is not too late. The sanctions are very painful. The negotiations have not yet been exhausted. The threat of an American military option can also be more concrete. If instead of focusing on a military solution, Israel were to succeed in mobilizing the international community for complex and sophisticated political-economic action, I believe that the results might be surprising.”