What Times is it?

Rick Gladstone, New York Times, October 31:

Israel’s defense minister said Tuesday that the country had interpreted Iran’s conversion of some enriched uranium to fuel rods for civilian use as evidence that Iran had delayed ambitions to build a nuclear weapon. 

The assertion, by Defense Minister Ehud Barak in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, amounted to the first explanation from him as to why he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu softened their position in September over the possibility of a military strike to thwart what they called Iran’s drive toward imminent nuclear weapons capability.

Funny, because some people knew about it three weeks ago. Of course Amos Harel got the story not from Barak but from "senior Israeli defense officials"—that's where that pesky Red Line went. Of double course Harel got the story from Barak on "background" and has only now chosen to out himself, to the UK, who knows why. There are even suspicions, you'll be shocked to hear, that it has something to do with politics and the oncoming Israeli elections.

While Barak was dancing in London, Netanyahu was prancing in France, of course, getting François Hollande (who I fear is somewhat out of his depth on this subject) to sign on to the ever escalating demands for a more severe sanctions regime. For some reason the Times has nothing to say about this trip. (No, I don't think it's a conspiracy of any sort, we New Yorkers have a lot of different stuff on our minds at the moment. But they are really not covering that whole scene very well.)

Meanwhile, as the story of Iran's nuclear weapons is every day more clearly a frivolous story about Israeli politics and not about Iran at all, the sanctions grow more and more painful for ordinary Iranians—not for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to say nothing of those who actually run the country—and are clearly harming US interests. Can we please have this discussion some time?

From Haaretz.

Schrödinger's foreign policy

Schrödinger's cat T-shirt, from Zazzle.ca.

Here's one of those observer's paradox moments, caught just as it was happening last night, beginning with a startling Twitter exchange:

Yes, God forbid: RT @lrozen WH denies NYT story: "It’s not true that US & Iran have agreed to 1-on-1 talks or any meeting after US election"
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 20, 2012

Meaning, of course this Times story must be wrong, because although Obama has repeatedly asserted that he would agree to bilateral talks with Iran, we all know he can't mean it, since he is actually a fiendish and unregenerate warmonger.

But when I looked at the Times story, that's not at all how I saw it. In the first place, they didn't seem to think the denial was very significant: they dropped it into the sixth paragraph of a pretty long piece, like a police crowd estimate or some other untrustworthy factoid that has to be included, without comment (Ryan Cooper must feel the same; he doesn't even mention the denial; Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Liberman prays that the denial is true). In other words, they treated the denial as an inevitable pro forma element of the story and stood by the story itself.

The White House denied that a final agreement had been reached. “It’s not true that the United States and Iran have agreed to one-on-one talks or any meeting after the American elections,” Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said Saturday evening. He added, however, that the administration was open to such talks, and has “said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally.”

Reports of the agreement have circulated among a small group of diplomats involved with Iran.

(Emptywheel notes that the story first appeared without the sixth paragraph, which was inserted after the White House denial was published in various other places; the wording "until after the American elections" suggests to her that the negotiations have in fact already begun, with Secretary of State Clinton in the lead.)

And then the Times story isn't, after all, that the US and Iran are going to have direct bilateral talks on the nuclear issue—it's that certain unidentified US officials say they will, so that the immediate question is: why are they saying so? And it's easier to come up with an answer if you stipulate that what they are saying is more or less true.

Because why exactly would they be lying about it? If they're working for the president's agenda, are they trying to set it up as an item for Monday's debate? Because peace with Iran is such an irresistible vote-getter in Colorado and Virginia? That's hard to believe. Then again, another denial-denier, Anshel Pfeffer for Haaretz, proposes exactly that:

If indeed the report is accurate, despite the administration's denial (which came with the intriguing caveat that the Americans "have said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally"), the winners and losers in the high-stakes nuclear showdown are already clear.

[Obama] began his first term promising to engage the Iranians diplomatically, and though the talks will only begin after the elections, at least he can point to some sort of progress. The specific timing of the leak, on the eve of the third and final presidential debate which is to deal with foreign policy issues is rather suggestive.... Naturally, this is already being spun as an achievement for the administration – finally overcoming Iran's opposition to direct talks.

Other winners, in this view, would include Ayatollah Khamenei, the Israeli security establishment which thinks Binyamin Netanyahu's Iran policy is dangerously insane, and Ehud Barak, currently positioning himself to replace Netanyahu; losers would be Netanyahu himself, his American-Adelsonian surrogate Willard Mitt Romney, who thinks the president of the United States is a proconsul of the Israeli Empire, and Lady Catherine Ashton, the ineffective chief of the European Union and the P5 + 1 talks. To which I would add Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is clearly not going to get any credit for this development with Iranian voters (because we constantly forget that Iran is in its weird way a democracy, and that the Ayatollah probably hates Ahmadinejad as much as he does any of the country's pesky liberals).

So we'd be looking at a very carefully planned leak functioning as an October surprise for Adelson, Netanyahu, and poor Willard. Assuming that the American war fatigue extends to wars that haven't even properly started yet, and that Aipac's or Likud's hold over our politics has really diminished over the past four years. What I don't get is how it works: doesn't Obama have to repeat the denial at the foreign policy debate? If it's officially untrue, how exactly do the Democrats use it?

For that we'll have to wait and see. But to respond automatically, as Greenwald does, on the basis of the assumption that Obama is an agent of Empire and everything he does must be interpreted in that light, is just as short-sighted, if not as stupid, as Drs. D'Souza and Gingrich assuming Obama is an agent of the Mau-Mau party bent on destroying King Leopold and so forth. Nobody's locked into position, but what they say has a relationship, however complex, with what they mean, and the way we watch the situation affects how it develops.

Image by Ooklah at DeviantArt.

Later that afternoon:
Richard Silverstein cites a new Brookings poll according to which a majority of Americans, 53%, would prefer to take a neutral view in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran, as against 12% who would encourage it and 29% who would oppose. So maybe we're ready to make that deal.

The Mysterious Affair of the Leaping Red Line

Haaretz's intrepid security reporter Amos Harel (via Richard Silverstein) reports a shocking-shocking finding:

[Israeli] defense sources say Israel has received additional information that reinforces the IAEA's conclusion that Iran is using enriched uranium for medical purposes.

The report, which the Israeli intelligence community considers highly reliable, states that on a number of occasions in the recent past, Iran has allocated uranium enriched to 20 percent for another purpose: the manufacture of fuel rods for a research reactor in Tehran, where isotopes can be manufactured for cancer treatment. 

Wonder what that additional information might be? Maybe they read it in the New York Times on September 27? No, what's most likely is that the angel Gabriel whispered it into the prime minister's ear.

The Red Line. By Lozha at Deviant Art.

That's what made the red line jump, you see. One day the red line was practically right here, and it looked as if Netanyahu and Barak were going to have to go bomb Iran all by themselves by Halloween, and the next day it had slid way back down to next June or so, and Netanyahu was able to assure President Obama that there would be no bombing until after everybody's elections were over. Whew, that was a close one!

In other words, Netanyahu was having a hard time explaining why he had decided not to have this war, after months of screaming about how necessary it was, and people were starting to talk: and what they were starting to say was that Obama made him do it, and we can't have that! So instead Netanyahu told a story about how how he scared the Iranians into depriving themselves of all that 20% uranium.

But what really happened, I figure (because it's what I've been saying all along), is that the Iranians were telling the truth in the first place. They aren't building a nuclear weapon. And that's the measure of how desperate Netanyahu is to save face, that he needed to speak something like the truth.

Red Line, by Gene Davis, 1952 . From Wikipaintings.

West of Eden: I told you so

I love this bit of sophisticated language abuse, picked up by the Times the other day:

Yuval Steinitz, the finance minister, was recently recorded at a closed meeting of his Likud Party activists saying that while “media is important in a democracy,” the Israeli media for the most part favor the left over Likud.

“Beyond that,” he continued, “the media has lost its respect for one small, simple word: ‘truth.’ There is no more respect for the word truth.”

Especially when the minister uses it, eh? And respecting it means if the minister says it's true, you don't ask a lot of impertinent questions. Because it's just the word you're supposed to worry about, not the thing itself.

The Blindfolding of Truth, an Allegory. Byam Shaw, ca. 1909. From The Textile Blog.

The big story in Israel, now that the war with Iran is being postponed till—well, till whenever they need to start seeing it in the newspapers again, has been the tiff between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who have given each other back their respective rings and may be casually dating other ministers, ZOMG.

It seems that Barak was chatting with the Americans behind Netanyahu's back, while Israeli elections are swimming back into the picture, this time rumored for February (the vote has to take place by October 2013 at the latest). Netanyahu's big vulnerability with his voters is that he may have frightened them by being so hostile to Obama; they've finally realized that in one month Obama is likely to get reelected—Mr. Adelson can't buy 'em as effectively over here as he can there—and they are scared he'll want to punish them somehow for having such an unspeakable head of government. As if.

So Barak went to America, according to the Times:

On Wednesday, Mr. Netanyahu’s loyalists accused the defense minister of using his recent trip to the United States to differentiate himself from the prime minister and move away from the recent friction with the Obama administration.

“As far as I know, yes, he distanced himself in an attempt to make political gains,” Yisrael Katz, the minister of transportation, told Israel Radio.

Mr. Katz was echoing remarks attributed to Mr. Netanyahu from a closed meeting on Tuesday. Mr. Netanyahu was quoted in the Israeli news media as saying that Mr. Barak had deliberately exacerbated the tensions between the prime minister and Washington in an attempt to make himself look like the moderate who can repair relations. 

In response, Mr. Barak’s office issued a statement saying that the defense minister “works to strengthen relations with the United States and at their heart, the security relationship.”

Then Saturday night the PM, says Haaretz (which has recently installed one of those stupid subscription walls, so I now have to limit myself to 10 articles per month), called the DM in to demand an explanation of this démarche.

Full cooperation between the prime minister and the defense minister is necessary for the security of the citizens of Israel," Netanyahu will tell Barak, sources close to the prime minister's said before the meeting. Netanyahu, they added, will also request of Barak that such remarks will not reoccur during Barak's term as minister in his cabinet.

In response, a source close to Barak said that "no one reprimands the defense minister, not even the prime minister."

The source added that Barak is convinced his actions are contributing to the Israeli government, its relations with the U.S. and to Israel's security. "Barak will continue to act according to his understanding in Israel and abroad," he said.

They'd so longed for a little war they could call their own, you see; until it was really the only thing that was keeping them together, and then inevitably after the miscarriage...

Meanwhile, that drone that invaded Israel Saturday remains a remarkable mystery, in that nobody really knows where it came from, or who it belongs to: the IDF didn't spot it over the Mediterranean until it was practically in Gaza, and when they got around to taking it out they blew it to smithereens instead of knocking it down whole so they could have a look.

Assuming it was an Iranian drone sent from a Hezbollah camp in Lebanon, that was an awfully long flight for it to remain undetected, and it is also a matter of some surprise that, according to the reliable Richard Silverstein, it was able to spend 20 minutes in Israel's own airspace before getting shot down about 18 miles from Dimona, and the Negev Nuclear Research Center, where practically all of the actually existing WMDs of the region come from. What kind of shape has the IDF gotten into, while the PM and DM were running around chasing each other's shadows?

Another Israeli institution that's not as fierce as it used to be is the daily press: Maariv seems to have escaped getting closed down at the last minute this week with an emergency loan from its controlling shareholders, but it and Haaretz are both in serious financial trouble. The New York Times says that

the economics of the print media have been skewed by the arrival five years ago of Israel Hayom, a free national newspaper owned by Sheldon Adelson, a conservative American billionaire who is a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel Hayom, viewed as pro-Netanyahu, now claims the widest distribution of any Hebrew newspaper on weekdays. Public television and radio have also come under tighter state control.

Oops, there's that pesky Mr. Adelson again. If you click the link you get to Israel Hayom's English-language website, which looks more devoted to Willard Mitt Romney than to Netanyahu. Is he more Murdoch or more Berlusconi?

Frank McAndrew, Knox College.

Not too far away, the Turkish army went on shelling across the Syrian border for the sixth day in a row, and Prime Minister Abdullah Gul told reporters,

"The worst-case scenarios are taking place right now in Syria ... Our government is in constant consultation with the Turkish military. Whatever is needed is being done immediately as you see, and it will continue to be done....

"There will be a change, a transition sooner or later ... It is a must for the international community to take effective action before Syria turns into a bigger wreck and further blood is shed, that is our main wish."

Oh, and Barak and Netanyahu have made up, sort of, speaking of Israel Hayom, issuing a joint communiqué to the effect that

"the prime minister and defense minister have agreed to continue cooperating on the security challenges Israel faces."

The message continued: "the defense minister is in agreement with the prime minister on all matters relating to Israel's response to the Iranian threat, as well as managing Israel's relationship with the United States, under the prime minister's leadership."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have put their feud behind them. Photo by Yoav Ari Dudkevitch.

Persian blinds

Updated 10/14

FurReal Friends butterscotch pony.

Heard on the BBC this morning a remarkable story about the blogger Richard Silverstein having been leaked a secret document from someone in Israeli security circles detailing the order of operations in an upcoming Israeli strike against Iran. A cyber attack destroys all the country's communications and compromises their electrical grid, planes come to bomb all the nuclear facilities, cruise missiles are used to assassinate all the top echelon of nuclear officials. Equipment and strategies that have never been tested will all work in seamless coordination with each other, Iran will be unable even to respond, Israelis will suffer nothing more than maybe a little whiplash. And you'll get a pony, if you're extra good. You can read an English version at the blog, Tikun Olam, and it's pretty scary; as Silverstein says,

This is Shock and Awe, Israel-style. It is Bibi’s effort to persuade high-level Israeli officials that Israel can prosecute a pure technology war that involves relatively few human beings (Israeli, that is) who may be put in harm’s way, and will certainly cost few lives of IDF personnel.

Bibi’s sleight of hand here involves no mention whatsoever of an Iranian counter-attack against Israel. The presumption must be that the bells and whistles of all those marvelous new weapons systems will decapitate Iran’s war-making ability and render it paralyzed. The likelihood of this actually happening is nearly nil.

There will be those who will dispute the authenticity of this document. I’m convinced it is what my source claims, based on his prior track record and the level of specificity offered in the document. It references cities by name and the facilities they contain. It names new weapons systems including one Israel supposedly hasn’t even shared with the U.S.

No, it’s real. Or I should say that while it’s real, it is the product of the Israeli dream factory which manufactures threats and then creates fabulist military strategies to address them. The dream factory always breaks the hearts of the families of those whose members fall victim to it. It never produces the result it promises, nor will it do so here.

Then, in the comments, a startling twist: a different version of what appears to be the same document, in Hebrew, appeared on the Israeli web portal Fresh a few days ago as a work of fiction, by "an old friend of the Forum who wishes to remain anonymous" and with all information "based on foreign sources and open only" (this is Google Translate, you really don't have to trust me). It seems to have rather less technical detail than Silverstein's and a good deal more wish fulfillment, down to an elaborate reconstruction of how Hezbollah will behave.

It looks to me, in fact, as if each of these is a different redaction of some document prior to both, edited perhaps for different purposes. Silverstein, insists that this is not so: his is a translation of the original official paper, given to him to help expose how crazy Netanyahu and Barak really are. But I'd like to hear some speculation about what the other one is.

The drumbeat, meanwhile, seems to have become as intense as it was in the spring, before the formation of the Great National Unity Government that is now, of course, gone once again, apparently broken over the issue of the Haredim doing national service for a couple of years--once again Iran is reaching that threshold of something or other before which they must be stopped; or, to the more cynical, Netanyahu is reaching that threshold where he just won't be able to control himself.

Whatever it is seems keyed in timing to the US elections, whether it's his hatred for Obama, his love for his old pal Willard, or his dependence on Willard's patrons Mr. and Mrs. Adelson. I'm more convinced than ever that it's all bluff--hope it is, because if he really intends to lead his country to war on the basis of a plan as flimsy as the one Richard Silverstein describes then he is delusional and the outcome could be very horrible indeed.

A herd of Shetlands, from Horse and Man.

Update 10/14
I note somebody's been looking at this old thing. Its fearful tone (or rather Silverstein's) has become outdated now that it's quite clear that Netanyahu was bluffing, as I mostly expected. That explains, by the way, why this plan was so weird, so amateurish and incomplete: it wasn't written for the IDF, it was written for the Israeli (and maybe US) press.

West of Eden

I just learned from Wikipedia that the Latter-Day Saints hold the Garden of Eden to have been located in Jackson County, Missouri, right around Independence. After the Flood, when Noah's family ended up in Mesopotamia, they named the local rivers Tigris and Euphrates and whatnot to remind themselves of back home in America, as a later generation of Americans would name bits of the New World after Utica and Montevideo and Cairo.*

Title page of Basilius Besler's Hortus Eystettensis (1613). From the Chicago Botanic Garden website.

Also about the genius crank and sometime small-time rock idol David Rohl, who places it in eastern Iran, in the plain below the Caucasus near Tabriz, a more fragrant and evocative theory to this old helpless Orientalist (I normally manage to hold this disgracefully [jump]

*Which they obviously didn't, come to think of it; they named all these towns after places they had never been and of which they cannot have had any very precise ideas. I mean, not Plymouth or Boston perhaps, but Alexandria? Lebanon, PA?

The week in the Persian Wars

Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.

So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.

There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump]

Just the facts, Ma'am

Stately bungalows of Aurangzeb Marg. From bornrich.com.

As you know, yesterday afternoon Tal Yehoshua-Korene, who works along with her husband at the Israeli embassy in New Delhi, was riding up Aurangzeb Road on her way to picking up her children from school when the rear of the car blew up. She was badly injured, with shrapnel in the spine, and is in critical condition; her driver and two other people were hurt as well. A security camera picked up the image of a young man in leather jacket on a motorcycle riding up to the car while it was waiting at a stoplight, just a few seconds before the blast, and "placing something" on the trunk; it's thought that it must have been a bomb mounted [jump]

What Rough Beast watch

From F.A. MacKenzie, "The War in the Caucasus"

Last time we ran across General Martin Dempsey of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was emerging from talks with Israeli leaders in unusually uncommunicative mood, with no communiqués and no chitchat with the hungry waiting press, last 20 January.

Even more remarkable, no leak about what he said to the Israelis has appeared in either U.S. or Israeli news media, indicating that both sides have regarded what Dempsey said as extremely sensitive. 

[jump]

Mossad uncovers a secret

Updated 1/24

This is in the why isn't it breaking category: a story published by Haaretz on January 18 and picked up by Juan Cole a day or two later: it seems that Israeli intelligence services have come up with an estimate, to be published some time this week, that Iran has not yet decided whether to build a nuclear weapon.

That is, it's not news to everybody that Iran has not—so far—decided to build a nuclear weapon. National Intelligence Estimates [jump]