-------------------------------------------------------- To: "mer" <•••@••.•••> From: "MER - Mid-East Realities - MiddleEast.Org" <•••@••.•••> Subject: IRAN on Guard as PALESTINANS Face Civil War Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 16:59:29 -0500 <http://www.MiddleEast.Org> News, Views, & Analysis Governments, Lobbies, & the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know The most honest, most comprehensive, and most mobilizing news and analysis on the Middle East always comes from MER. It is indispensable!" Robert Silverman - Salamanca, Spain IRAN on GUARD Palestinian Civil War Looms MER - Washington - 18 January: In Palestine the Israelis -- with still increasing American help and support and having successfully assassinated the senior credible leaders including Ahmed Yassin and Yasser Arafat -- are now quite literally forcing Abu Mazen to end the Intifada and acquiesce to Israeli dictate. The likely result if Abu Mazen attempts to fully comply is the Palestinian Civil War the Israelis have been manuevering for some time to bring about, regardless of all the verbal smokescreens designed to obfuscate the actual realities of the situation. 13 Palestinians killed this weekend 17 January 2005 - The Palestine Monitor: Thirteen Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip this weekend in a rash of Israeli violence, including a Palestinian mother and her son who were shot by snipers while on their roof. According to an eyewitness, Israeli soldiers attacked Palestinian homes in the Khan Younis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday. Shells were fired at a family's home, and its roof began to burn. The family and fire brigade managed to put out the fire, and then Feda Aram, 50, her husband Suleiman, 54, their son Abdullah, and other relatives went to the roof to see what damage had been done. They were surprised by a hail of Israeli sniper fire, which killed Feda and her son, severely injured Suleiman, and moderately injured other family members. These Israeli offensives come at a time when prospects for peace are hopeful but tenuous. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced on Sunday that he was authorizing his forces to hit Gaza, a mostly civilian area, "with no restrictions," i.e. without the restraints imposed by national or international law. The Palestinian leadership has called for a halt to attacks on Israel by Palestinian militants. But government-sanctioned Israeli attacks against Palestinian non-combatants make newly-elected Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas's task of negotiating with and reigning in Palestinian militants much more difficult. But in a sense Palestine is now a sideshow, for no real two-state solution is any longer possible west of the Jordan and most certainly Ariel Sharon has not spent a lifetime vanquishing and killing the Palestinians only to turn around now when he has them everywhere surrounded, cowering, and bleeding. Now, in the aftermath of 9/11 and the new American/Israeli crusade to remake the Middle East as they want it, the whole region is in play and at stake. On one side are the forces aligned with the American Empire, technologically and militarily vastly superior to their opponents. Much of Europe and other U.S. clients in the world remain in uneasy alliance with the Americans despite stylistic and policy differences. On the other side is now an uneasy but extraordinarily determined coalition of Muslim-inspired fighters hardened by religious zeal coupled with Arab nationalists together fighting desperately to throw off the new shackles of what they see as re-imposed colonialism and imperialism -- now constantly termed 'freedom' and 'democracy' by the American President who continues to assert God choose him and guides him. The firepower plus the huge technological and financial advantage available to the Americans is far beyond anything the world has ever seen. Yet already, rather amazing to many observers, is how much opposition the 'insurgents' have been able to muster against the colonial invading armies regardless of all their disadvantages. With the Arab world still largely co-opted and in the ruling hands of American-backed 'client regimes' and CIA-taught police states, regional power has shifted to Iran whose 1979 revolution continues to shake the very foundations of Western control of the vast and rich region. While the much in the news Palestinian situation is manipulated by Washington largely for public relations reasons in coordination with the Israelis, the growing power of Iran -- in a new embryonic alliance with China as well as with Russia -- is what the U.S. and Israel have decided they must suppress and cripple one way or another. Indeed the situation with Iran is getting more and more dangerous by the week with an explosion possible now at any time. Top Iranian political and military leaders have already gone public with threats to devastatingly counter-attack against Israel or even 'pre-empt' against American troops in the region. They have vowed not to let happen to them what has been done to Iraq. Already the public threatening -- not to even mention all that is going on behind-the-scenes out of view -- is of a very unusual and extraordinarily dangerous kind. Think back just a few years now. For quite some time the U.S. insisted that the 'decision to attack' Iraq had not yet been taken. The U.S. went loudly to the Security Council with that message in 2002, then again with Colin Powell in 2003 -- though all the while preparations for invading and occupying Iraq were covertly underway. Then, shortly after the Iraq invasion began, non other than Ariel Sharon in Israel publicly and loudly proclaimed that after Iraq must soon come Iran. Whether the Iranians have sufficiently secret and hardened weapons facilities, and whether or not they have at this time sufficient deterrent weapons capabilities of the chemical and biological kind, is unknown. The betting in Washington and in Israel seems to be that now is the time to strike and take control, before they do. They may be right about that. But even so the kind of military attack that would be needed to neutralize and disarm Iran would be like none other before. And the possible tsunami-like wave of political, economic, and military ramifications that might flow from such an expansion of the American/Israeli crusade might also be like none other before; potentially sweeping the world into a real World War III if not "just" a lingering lower-grade world-wide conflagation with no end in sight. Beyond devasting more of the Middle East such a wave of aftershocks could very well further drain the U.S. of its resources, it's energies, and it's remaining credibility; and further isolate Israel until some day in the future when Arab and Muslim revenge would become possible. Bottom line: There are substantial unforseen ramifications likely to what the American Neocons and their Israeli allies have planned; far far greater and more dangerous than what has so far resulted from the Invasion of Iraq and the defeat of the Palestinians. _______________________________________ Now US ponders attack on Iran Hardliners in Pentagon ready to neutralise 'nuclear threat' posed by Tehran Julian Borger in Washington and Ian Traynor <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>The Guardian Tuesday January 18, 2005 - President Bush's second inauguration on Thursday will provide the signal for an intense and urgent debate in Washington over whether or when to extend the "global war on terror" to Iran, according to officials and foreign policy analysts in Washington. That debate is being driven by "neo-conservatives" at the Pentagon who emerged from the post-election Bush reshuffle unscathed, despite their involvement in collecting misleading intelligence on Iraq's weapons in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. Washington has stood aside from recent European negotiations with Iran and Pentagon hardliners are convinced that the current European-brokered deal suspending nuclear enrichment and intensifying weapons inspections is unenforceable and will collapse in months. Only the credible threat, and if necessary the use, of air and special operations attacks against Iran's suspected nuclear facilities will stop the ruling clerics in Tehran acquiring warheads, many in the administration argue. Moderates, who are far fewer in the second Bush administration than the first, insist that if Iran does have a secret weapons programme, it is likely to be dispersed and buried in places almost certainly unknown to US intelligence. The potential for Iranian retaliation inside Iraq and elsewhere is so great, the argument runs, that there is in effect no military option. A senior administration official involved in developing Iran policy rejected that argument. "It is not as simple as that," he told the Guardian at a recent foreign policy forum in Washington. "It is not a straightforward problem but at some point the costs of doing nothing may just become too high. In Iran you have the intersection of nuclear weapons and proven ties to terrorism. That is what we are looking at now." The New Yorker reported this week that the Pentagon has already sent special operations teams into Iran to locate possible nuclear weapons sites. The report by Seymour Hersh, a veteran investigative journalist, was played down by the White House and the Pentagon, with comments that stopped short of an outright denial. "The Iranian regime's apparent nuclear ambitions and its demonstrated support for terrorist organisations is a global challenge that deserves much more serious treatment than Seymour Hersh provides," Lawrence DiRita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday: "Mr Hersh's article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed." However, the Guardian has learned the Pentagon was recently contemplating the infiltration of members of the Iranian rebel group, Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) over the Iraq-Iran border, to collect intelligence. The group, based at Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad, was under the protection of Saddam Hussein, and is under US guard while Washington decides on its strategy. The MEK has been declared a terrorist group by the state department, but a former Farsi-speaking CIA officer said he had been asked by neo-conservatives in the Pentagon to travel to Iraq to oversee "MEK cross-border operations". He refused, and does not know if those operations have begun. "They are bringing a lot of the old war-horses from the Reagan and Iran-contra days into a sort of kitchen cabinet outside the government to write up policy papers on Iran," the former officer said. He said the policy discussion was being overseen by Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defence for policy who was one of the principal advocates of the Iraq war. The Pentagon did not return calls for comment on the issue yesterday. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Mr Feith's Office of Special Plans also used like-minded experts on contract from outside the government, to serve as consultants helping the Pentagon counter the more cautious positions of the state department and the CIA. Crazy "They think in Iran you can just go in and hit the facilities and destabilise the government. They believe they can get rid of a few crazy mullahs and bring in the young guys who like Gap jeans, all the world's problems are solved. I think it's delusional," the former CIA officer said. However, others believe that at a minimum military strikes could set back Iran's nuclear programme several years. Reuel Marc Gerecht, another former CIA officer who is now a leading neo-conservative voice on Iran at the American Enterprise Institute, said: "It would certainly delay [the programme] and it can be done again. It's not a one-time affair. I would be shocked if a military strike could not delay the programme." Mr Gerecht said the internal debate in the administration was only just beginning. "This administration does not really have an Iran policy," he said. "Iraq has been a fairly consuming endeavour, but it's getting now towards the point where people are going to focus on [Iran] hard and have a great debate." That debate could be brought to a head in the next few months. Diplomats and officials in Vienna following the Iranian nuclear saga at the International Atomic Energy Agency expect the Iran dispute to re-erupt by the middle of this year, predicting a breakdown of the diplomatic track the EU troika of Britain, Germany and France are pursuing with Tehran. The Iran-EU agreement, reached in November, was aimed at getting Iran to abandon the manufacture of nuclear fuel which can be further refined to bomb-grade. Now the Iranians are feeding suspicion by continuing to process uranium concentrate into gaseous form, a breach "not of the letter but of the spirit of the agreement," said one European diplomat. Opinions differ widely over how long it would take Iran to produce a deliverable nuclear warhead, and some analysts believe that Iranian scientists have encountered serious technical difficulties. "The Israelis believe that by 2007, the Iranians could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. Some of us believe it could be the end of this decade," said David Albright, a nuclear weapons expert at the Institute for Science and International Security. A recent war-game carried out by retired military officers, intelligence officials and diplomats for the Atlantic Monthly, came to the conclusion that there were no feasible military options and if negotiations and the threat of sanctions fail, the US might have to accept Iran as a nuclear power. However, Sam Gardiner, a retired air force colonel who led the war-game, acknowledged that the Bush administration might not come to the same conclusion. "Everything you hear about the planning for Iraq suggests logic may not be the basis for the decision," he said. Mr Gerecht, who took part in the war-game but dissented from the conclusion, believes the Bush White House, still mired in Iraq, has yet to make up its mind. "The bureaucracy will come down on the side of doing nothing. The real issue is: will the president and the vice president disagree with them? If I were a betting man, I'd bet the US will not use pre-emptive force. However, I would not want to bet a lot." _______________________________________ U.S. Is Punishing 8 Chinese Firms for Aiding Iran By DAVID E. SANGER NYTimes - 18 January -- WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 - The Bush administration imposed penalties this month against some of China's largest companies for aiding Iran's efforts to improve its ballistic missiles. The move is part of an effort by the White House and American intelligence agencies to identify and slow important elements of Iran's weapons programs. The White House made no public announcement of the penalties, and the State Department placed a one-page notice on page 133 of The Federal Register early this month listing eight Chinese companies affected. The notice kept classified the nature of the technology they had exported. Since the Federal Register announcement, the penalties have been noted on some Web sites that concentrate on China and proliferation issues. President Bush has repeatedly praised China for its help in seeking a diplomatic end to the North Korean nuclear standoff. Some officials in the administration speculated in the past week that the decision not to publicize the penalties might have been part of an effort not to jeopardize Chinese cooperation at a critical moment in the administration's effort to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table. China has repeatedly vowed to curb its sales of missile technology, starting with an agreement with the first Bush administration in 1992, and expanded with the Clinton administration in 2000. But two of the largest companies cited in the State Department's list, China Great Wall Industry Corporation and China North Industry Corporation, known as Norinco, have been repeatedly penalized for more than a decade; each is closely linked to the Chinese military. A third company on the penalties list, the China Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation, or Catic, is one of the country's largest producers of military aircraft and was accused of diverting to military use sophisticated machine tools bought from McDonnell Douglas. Eighteen months ago, a senior State Department official, Paula A. DeSutter, referred to several of the companies as part of China's "serial proliferator problem," and told a Congressional commission on relations between the United States and China that although the Chinese government had often repeated its opposition to missile proliferation, "the reality has been quite different." In the 1990's, Republicans in Congress began a series of investigations into China's efforts to obtain American nuclear technology and to export missile and nuclear expertise to Pakistan, Iran and possibly other nations. At the time, they sharply criticized the Clinton administration, accusing it of playing down Chinese offenses. Bush administration officials, when asked about the penalties over the past week, said nothing was particularly notable about the latest violations and that no evidence suggested that China's leadership was aware of the sales. One senior American official said the transactions took place "within the past year or 18 months," or well after the last American penalties were announced on Chinese sales to Iran, in July 2003. American officials said the list of exports to Iran was classified, but they described them as high-performance metals and components that are banned under the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000 because they could aid the country's efforts to extend the range of its missile fleet. It was unclear whether some of the technology was "dual use," meaning that it could be used for civilian or military purposes. Iran's efforts to develop longer-distance missiles that are capable of ever larger payloads are increasingly of concern among intelligence officials. American officials have charged that Iran is trying to develop nuclear warheads, which its leadership denies. "We suspect that the Iranians also have the Chinese bomb design," a former senior American official said several months ago, referring to a design that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, acquired from China, sold to Libya and was suspected of peddling elsewhere. "What everyone is looking for is the missile that matches up with the design." American intelligence agencies are focusing much energy, officials say, on identifying major sites for Iran's nuclear and missile programs. That information is collected, in part, to plan for possible military strikes, though President Bush has repeatedly said he is focusing on diplomacy to disarm Iran. Still, Mr. Bush has also repeatedly said he would never summarily rule out any option in a crisis. In an interview broadcast Monday night by NBC News, when asked about using military action in Iran, he said, "I hope we can solve it diplomatically, but I will never take any option off the table." <http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact>In an article in The New Yorker this week, titled "The Coming Wars," Seymour M. Hersh reports that "the administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer." He continued: "Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids." Administration officials said intelligence agencies had long worked to identify those sites, but they denied that more consideration was being given to striking those sites. "That's not the plan," a senior official said. "In fact, a lot of energy is going into trying to keep the Israelis from getting ideas along those lines." For now, some of the American intelligence is being provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency to spur it to conduct investigations in Iran. Last week, inspectors visited one such military site, called Parchin, where the United States says work may be under way to develop a nuclear warhead. Although the agency took soil samples to determine whether nuclear materials had been present at the site, it has no jurisdiction over missile work, or any authority to enforce the Missile Technology Control Regime, a voluntary international agreement that regulates the sale of missile components and designs. Many of Iran's missiles are based on North Korean designs, and one North Korean company, Paeksan Associated Corporation, was penalized, with the eight Chinese companies. The penalties bar the companies from doing business with the United States government, and prevent them from obtaining export licenses allowing them to buy controlled technologies from American companies. Some of the penalized Chinese companies do little or no business with the United States, but Norinco, a maker of handguns and assault weapons, does millions of dollars of business here, and other companies are constantly in search of American technology. Some American businesses have argued that the penalties are often self-defeating, contributing to the huge trade gap with China but doing little to deter Chinese companies from exporting nuclear, chemical or missile technology to nuclear aspirants like Iran. A senior administration official, asked about the penalties, said Monday in an interview that the Chinese "are moving in the right direction generally" on proliferation and have stopped some exports to North Korea, including a chemical that could be used in reprocessing spent nuclear fuel into weapons. But the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the subject included intelligence matters, said that "while they are helping us on North Korea, they have not been as helpful on Iran," perhaps because of China's ever expanding need for oil and other energy sources. President Bush, the official said, was trying to make the point to Chinese officials that their companies "are not going to be able to sustain the patterns of trade needed for strong economic growth and continued inward investment" in China if they are repeatedly penalized for aiding Iran. But evidence is slight that previous penalties have seriously impeded the growth of the Chinese companies. In her testimony to the China commission, Ms. DeSutter, the senior State Department official, argued that Beijing's nonproliferation commitments of 1992, 1994, 1998, 2000 and, most recently, a specific set of export control rules issued by China in 2002 "occurred only under the imminent threat, or in response to the actual imposition, of sanctions." 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