Forget the Smiles: U.S. and Israel Still Divided on Iran

by Yaakov Lappin
March 25, 2013 at 5:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3642/us-israel-iran

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The U.S. President tried to set up a channel of communication with Israelis over the head of Netanyahu. The U.S. is willing to let its sanctions experiment play out, while Israel cannot wait much longer before it loses its ability to act.

President Barack Obama's visit to Israel is a welcome, long overdue outreach to the Israeli people, who have received him warmly and enthusiastically.
The bond that ties Israelis and Americans is deep, and encompasses shared values, common strategic challenges, and the closest military and intelligence cooperation to date.
The visit's timing, however, is directly linked to Iran's continued march towards a nuclear weapon, and Obama's concern over potential Israeli military action, despite attempts by the US president and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to present a united front on the Iranian threat.
The U.S. President used the visit to speak directly to Israelis, and tried to set up a channel of communication with them over the head of Netanyahu.
This is why he declined to speak at the Israeli Knesset, and urged the Israeli public to pressure Netanyahu to restart the diplomatic process with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
During the visit, Obama and Netanyahu worked hard to generate an image of warmth and friendship among one another, and tried to undo years of public and damaging clashes.
Yet it remains apparent that the two leaders remain out of sync on the most urgent and serious threat to global security: Iran's nuclear program.
The disagreement does not stem, as it once did, from differences in intelligence assessments of Iran's nuclear progress. Today, the intelligence communities of both counties agree that Iran is close to a nuclear breakout phase.
A glance at the International Atomic Energy Agency's February report reveals the disturbing fact that Iran continues to make good progress in its uranium enrichment project, while stalling for time through round after round of fruitless discussions with the international community.
Although sanctions are causing real harm to Iran's economy, and stirring up resentment among ordinary Iranians, they have not yet managed to cause Tehran to change its mind on its nuclear program.
Iran currently possesses just under 170 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20 percent (medium enriched uranium) according to the IAEA, meaning that it needs between 60 to 90 more kilograms to have enough for its first atomic weapon.
Israeli defense observers note that that final enrichment process, from medium to high enriched uranium, is the easiest and fastest phase.
Meanwhile, Iran has recently installed faster centrifuges at its Natanz uranium facility, a factor that will speed up the enrichment process. IAEA inspectors seeking access to Iran's classified Parchin military site, where a suspected nuclear trigger is being developed, have been blocked at every turn.
These developments lie at the heart of Obama's visit. Behind closed doors, it seems reasonable to assume, Obama sought to ascertain how close a potential Israeli strike might be.
He may also have sought to dissuade Netanyahu from acting alone.
Publicly, at least, Netanyahu and Obama agreed on a way to present their differences in a useful way.
During Obama's three-day visit, both leaders stressed the right of their respective countries to take military action.
Obama acknowledged Israel's right to "make its own decisions when it comes to the awesome decision to engage in any kind of military action, and Israel is differently situated than the United States."
Going even further, Obama implicitly recognized that Washington's red line for action was significantly behind that of Israel's. "I would not expect that the prime minister would make a decision about his country's security and defer that to any other country, any more than the United States would defer our decisions about what was important for our national security," he said.
This, then, is the new public American-Israeli stance. The US will not let Iran go nuclear, but is willing to let its sanctions experiment play out, while Israel, because of its more limited strike capabilities, cannot wait much longer before it loses the ability to act.
Because Israel's core defense doctrine is based on the principle of never entrusting the Jewish people's fate to others – even the best of allies - Israel may go it alone, with American approval, if Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei does not freeze his nuclear program soon.
It is far from clear whether these public stances are reflections of the positions privately held by Netanyahu and Obama.
Khamenei, for his part, wasted little time in responding to the messages coming out of Jerusalem, threatening to "annihilate Tel Aviv and Haifa" if Israel attacked his country.
Khamenei, according to Israeli intelligence estimates, does not take the threat of military action against Iran seriously at all.

Related Topics: Israel | Yaakov Lappin

Germany and Genocide - Again

by Kenneth R. Timmerman
March 25, 2013 at 4:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3643/germany-genocide

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The overwhelming majority of technical expertise, know-how, and design information of the Iraqi dictator's chemical weapons plants came from German companies. The nerve and mustard gas was produced in German-built factories in Samarra and Fallujah. The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to accept responsibility for the actions of German companies.

Halabja, Iraq – Just a few days ago, the Kurds in northern Iraq and I stood to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of one of the most barbaric war crimes since WWII: Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons to commit mass murder of his own citizens.
Within months of the March 16 attack, after a fact-finding team dispatched to interview refugees along the Turkey-Iraq border pieced together eye-witness accounts to reconstruct an accurate account of the events, the United States Senate determined that the chemical attack against the city of Halabja by the Iraqi Air Force was a "genocide."
The Halabja chemical weapons attack killed between 3,000 to 5,000 civilians, according to eyewitness accounts. It came midway in a two-year long campaign with the explicit goal of eradicating the Kurds from northern Iraq; Saddam Hussein and his henchmen called the slaughter "Anfal," a Koranic term meaning "spoils of war."
Some 4,000 Kurdish villages were bulldozed, bombed, or otherwise destroyed by the Iraqis during the "Anfal," along with 106 Assyrian Christian villages that were targeted because their inhabitants were believed to have supported the Kurdish rebellion against Saddam.
Massoud Barzani, President of the Kurdish Regional Government, told a conference in Erbil last week that of the 182,000 Kurds who disappeared during the "Anfal," researchers and families have so far only been able to discover the remains of 3,000 persons. The others, Barzani said, are still believed to be "lying in the deserts of Southern Iraq."
"The people of Kurdistan," he said, "need to be compensated, especially by many of the companies and the countries that helped the regime of Saddam Hussein to build these chemical weapons."
Just three years after the Halabja attack, I identified more than 400 Western and Third World companies that had delivered equipment, built factories, or otherwise contributed to Saddam Hussein's vast WMD infrastructure, and published many of the names of these companies in The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq in 1992.
While companies worldwide eagerly profited from building Saddam's war machine, the overwhelming majority of the technical expertise, know-how, and design information for the Iraqi dictator's chemical weapons plants came from German companies. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, none of these companies or individuals has paid any price for their role in the Kurdish genocide.
Post-World War II German governments have paid reparations to Israel for the genocide of the Jews carried out by Nazi Germany. And in 1992, the German government again chose to acknowledge guilt toward the state of Israel when it offered to provide free of charge two Dolphin-class diesel-powered submarines, worth around $650 million, to compensate Israel for Iraqi attacks using SCUD missiles that had been modified and improved by German companies.
A similar arrangement with the Kurds may be brewing today. In February, the German Minister of Transport, Building and Urban Development led a delegation of German businessmen to the Kurdish areas of Iraq to seek expanded commercial ties. According to Kurdish officials, he said that Germany had "missed an opportunity" to make amends to the Kurds for German involvement in Saddam's chemical weapons programs by not taking part in the 2003 war to liberate Iraq.
Further, last week, on March 14th, just as the Kurdish government was holding a conference in Erbil to commemorate the genocide, the German parliament held a special session in Berlin to discuss the massacre. All parties in the parliament, including the ruling Christian Democrats, called on the German government to negotiate a broad reparations agreement directly with the Kurdish Regional Government that would bypass "any third parties," including representatives of the victims. But the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel promptly rejected the resolution and refused to assume responsibility for the actions of German companies.
The horror of the Halabja attack was first revealed to the world by Iranian photographer Ahmed Nateghi, who had been embedded with an Iranian Revolutionary Guards unit fighting on the front lines with Iraq.
Several days before the chemical weapons strike, the Iranians had "liberated" the Kurdish town near the border, and had paraded through the city streets in uniform, accompanied by Iraqi civilians.
When Nateghi and a few colleagues prepared to enter Halabja on a victory tour on the afternoon of March 16, as they approached the city, they noticed aircraft dropping bombs, and further along, they came across abandoned houses and dead animals; then corpses: men and women slumped over children, whose bodies they had apparently been trying to protect, seemingly struck down by some monstrous event that sucked the life out of them.
A few days later, the Iranian regime brought in photographers and TV crews from around the world to document the murders. Because of these photographs, the world now knows what happened at Halajba.
The nerve and mustard gas used by Saddam's Air Force in Halabja was produced in German-built factories in Samarra and Fallujah. It was delivered for the most part in Spanish-made bombs, from Russian, French, and Swiss-built aircraft.
Gavi Mairone, a human rights lawyer working with the Global Justice Group -- and more than a thousand survivors and relatives of thousands more victims of the Halabja and other chemical weapons attacks -- announced on March 14th in Erbil a strategy to get justice for the victims and their families.
"The victims want to return hatred and death with compassion," he said. "They want to give the companies involved in building Saddam's chemical weapons factories an opportunity to make amends at a truth, reconciliation, and reparations conference on October 1-3 in the Hague. If they decline, we are prepared to file lawsuits against 20 companies, nine in Germany, two French, two Dutch, two Spanish, 1 Indian, 1 Japanese, and 1 American."
Mairone's firm, MM-Law of Chicago, has been working on the case for three years and has assembled more than 10,000 documents. Most of the companies have been identified in declassified documents from the U.S. and Iraqi governments.
Adalat Omar, 43, a Kurdish researcher who has spent much of the past 13 years documenting the genocide of the Kurds, used the official Iraqi government census. "I compared the list of villages in Kurdish areas from 1977, to 1987 and then to 1997, and found more than 4,000 villages that were erased from the map during the genocide."
Omar also found the orders, signed by Saddam Hussein as early as 1983, to use "special weapons" against the Kurds. Many of Omar's documents were used in the trial of Saddam Hussein by the High Iraqi Court that ultimately sentenced him to death in 2006.
"We want to make sure that the companies who profited from building chemical weapons in Iraq are never able to do this again," said Mairone. "We're looking for an end to impunity."
Kenneth Timmerman is a New York Times best-selling author, a former Congressional candidate, and president of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran. His books and articles are available at kentimmerman.com. He is also working as a consultant to MM-Law in Chicago in the Halabja case.

Related Topics: Kenneth R. Timmerman

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