Writing on the Wall for Assad's Military?

Very interesting report in today's NYTimes about the mounting toll on the Syrian military's most sophisticated weapons, especially helicopter gunships.  This may be compelling Assad to make increased use of fixed-wing aircraft.

Perhaps even more worrying to Mr. Assad, his military has come to rely more heavily on equipment designed for a major battle with a foreign enemy, namely Israel, rather than a protracted civil conflict with his own people. Close observers of his military say Syria is having trouble keeping its sophisticated and maintenance-intensive weapons functioning.

 

The strain is likely to grow more acute as the government depends on helicopter gunships to extend its reach to parts of the country rendered impassable to logistics convoys and even armored vehicles by the rebels’ improvised bombs.

 

Analysts said Syria’s fleet of Mi-25 Hind-D attack helicopters, which numbered 36 at the start of the conflict, is insufficient to hold back rebels as the number of fronts, from Aleppo and Idlib in the north to the suburbs of Damascus in the south and Hama and Homs in the center of the country, continues to proliferate.

 

Maintenance technicians are struggling to keep the machines aloft in an intense campaign and in the searing heat and sand associated with summer desert war. Estimates are that only half his fleet can be used at a given time, with some helicopters cannibalized for spare parts and Mr. Assad dependent on supplies from Russia.

 

“This army is going to start breaking,” said Jeffrey White, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst now studying Syria for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Not the whole thing at once, but pieces of it will break.”

 

Mr. White said that by his estimates the Syrian military suffered nearly 1,100 soldiers killed in July, and is losing more soldiers and officers to defections. The loyalties of many commanders and units are suspect, he added, and months of sustained combat are no doubt taking a heavy toll on tanks and aircraft in a military that he said “was never known for maintenance.”

 

Defections of government troops and seizures of armaments are also a growing problem. Rebels in Aleppo claim to have control of a total of 14 T-72 and T-55 tanks and many indirect-fire weapons, including artillery pieces as well as mortars.

 

“The tanks are driven by our members, and their specialty is driving tanks, that’s what they did before they defected,” said Bashir al-Haji, a Free Syrian Army commander in Aleppo. “The tanks and artillery are important in our fight because they enable us to shell the regime from a distance.”

 

More potent arms for the rebels and the strain on helicopters may help explain why the Syrian military recently began using L-39 trainer jets in and around Aleppo, Syria’s most heavily populated city.

 

Another explanation for the appearance of jets “is that the Syrian military is fighting for Aleppo without enough artillery tubes,” said Joseph Holliday, a former American intelligence officer who covers the war for the Institute for the Study of War, in Washington.

 

At a glance, and for now, the government’s helicopter fleet is an imposing force. Highly maneuverable and able to carry several types of munitions, including free-fall bombs, it allows Mr. Assad’s military to roam above the Syrian countryside, seeking targets beyond the ready reach of its ground units.

 

Rebel commanders routinely say that what they most need are antiaircraft weapons to thwart government aircraft, especially helicopters.

 

But even if the rebels have no missiles these aircraft are almost certainly a dwindling asset, arms specialists who follow the Syrian conflict say. An American government official who covers the war said that fewer than 20 of these aircraft were likely available to the Assad government on any given day, out of the 36 in the fleet.

 

Mr. Holliday, the former American intelligence officer, put the estimate of working Hind-Ds even lower. “Assessing a max of 15 operational,” he wrote by e-mail.

 

All of this begs the questions:

• At what point does some ally of the rebels begin to supply them with Stinger-type missiles - the kind of weapon that proved the great equalizer for Afghan mujahideen in their 1980s fight against Soviet occupiers.
• At what point, if ever, will Russia try to resupply Assad with sophisticated helicopters?  Evidence of that would surely force Mr. Obama's hand in terms of expanding US assistance to the rebels to include more than "non-lethal" forms.

US's Hypocritical Annoyance with Russia over Syria

Rami Khouri writes at The Daily Star about the increasingly evident inexorability of Assad's demise in Syria.  Whether Syria can survive as a unitary state in the wake of that demise is, of course, a different matter altogether.  Katie Paul at Foreign Affairs has written of the coastal region around Tartus as a possible Alawite refuge;  but Josh Landis at his Syria Comment blog is of the view that a separate Alawi state carved out of Syria is not in the offing.  Meanwhile, Roula Khalaf at Financial Times notes the growing regional concern about the fallout from Syria's fall-apart.

But I'm especially struck by Khouri's harpooning of the US for its hypocrisy in the UN Security Council as regards Russia's veto of UN action against Assad:

Everything going on at the U.N. Security Council is now irrelevant, and has been for about a month, for the center of gravity of this political struggle shifted some time ago to military developments inside Syria. U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice’s protestations against the Russian and Chinese vetoes of resolutions to pressure Syria are pathetic gibberish, given the much worse track record of the United States in vetoing resolutions that seek to force Israel to comply with international law and morality. The U.S. and Russia at the U.N. are acting like children, with their self-serving hypocrisy and selfishness. We just have to accept that the Security Council does not function when the superpowers shift into infantile mode, and talk nonsense. We should keep our gaze instead on more important things, like developments inside Syria.

 

This leads me to conclude that the bigger story that links Syria with the other Arab uprisings and recent Middle Eastern developments is that the will and actions of indigenous Arabs, Iranians and Turks will always have a greater impact than anything done by powers abroad. The striking inability of the Americans, Russians and their assorted allies to shape events in Syria follow similar serial failures in recent decades in their attempts to promote Arab-Israeli peace, democratic transformations, economic trajectories or other such strategic issues.

 

Only when local people across the Middle East took matters into their own hands did conditions change, and history resume. The sentiments of ordinary people such as those in Bab al-Hawa, Midan, Deir al-Zor and Deraa are far more significant that the pronouncements of the world’s powers. The sooner we learn this lesson, the better off we will all be.

 

The colonial era may finally be drawing to a close.

Inshallah.

Do Today's Bombings in Iraq Portend New Civil War?

As reported by AP via Time on-line.

Most of the recent bombings in Iraq have targeted Shiites, and al-Qaeda in Iraq has claimed responsibility.  The ones today in Mahmudiya, however, targeted Sunni.  

Who were the perpetators?  Will this be a one-off deal?  Or is this an example of local Iraqi Shiites sending a warning to Sunnis who might be feeling restive with coming Sunni ascendancy in Syria as Assad's Alawi-based regime is inexorably pushed out?

A New Spyware Named "Mahdi"?

Reported at Wired.  Of the 800 known targets, almost half are in Iran - but Israel has its share of targets as well.

Clinton says Iran's proposals are "Non-Starter"

As reported at CNN, with an oh-so-sweet picture of a beaming, bubbly, positively resplendent US Sec of State shaking the hand of a smiling, significantly more gravitas-bearing Israeli president Shimon Peres. 

Hillary's statement comes during her visit to Israel, where, following a string of American emissaries who preceded her, she undoubtedly threatened, cajoled, and pleaded (h/t to Richard Burton's song in Camelot - which was titled, ironically enough, How to Handle a Woman) with Netanyahu et al to not bomb Iran.  And especially, not bomb Iran before the November election.  I wonder if Mitt will have any suggestions for Bibi on that score when he comes to pay homage visit him.

But the timing of this picture, and Hillary's statement, is woeful.  One could easily make the argument - indeed, some will make the argument - that it's the US that's doing Israel's dance while Bibi calls the tune.

More worrying . . . the US is giving Iran no room to negotiate.  The Iranian diplomat who stated that the US is offering peanuts and wants diamonds in exchange is spot-on.

Jeffrey Goldberg's Chutzpah on Hezbollah - and Iran

At The Atlantic today, former IDF interrogator Jeffrey Goldberg reports from Israel (based on a report in Haaretz by  Amos Harel) that

International law enforcement agencies have broken-up yet another alleged plot against an Israeli target, arresting an apparent Hezbollah operative in Cyprus who was there to identify suitable targets for terrorist attacks. According to press reports, the operative was particularly interested in Israeli airliners.

The post is titled "Iran's War Against Israel and Jews."  Goldberg's assumption is that in anything and everything it does, Hezbollah takes its orders from Iran.  One can make a case for that, to be sure, but one might also note that the interests and motives of Lebanon's Shii Arabs (of whom Hezbollah is the principal political representative) are not exactly the same as those of Iran's leadership.  (Goldberg might do well to have a look at Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr's Shi'ite Lebanon: Transnational Religion and the Making of National Identities).  That a Hezbollah agent might indeed have been scouting out El Al airliners for terror bombing is hideous indeed, but let's be mindful that Goldberg (and Israel, for which he's been carrying water for years) is here targetting Iran, not Hezbollah.

Goldberg saves the real corker for the end, where he quotes from Harel's article that:

Interestingly, Israeli leaders have significantly lowered the volume of their own threats against Iran recently. But at a time when Israel’s dilemma on Iran has been boiled down to a four-word slogan, “bomb or be bombed,” a third scenario must also be considered: A poorly-thought-out Iranian move, in the Persian Gulf or elsewhere, could ignite a conflict even before anyone decides to attack its nuclear facilities.

A poorly thought out Iranian move as prime instigator for a Persian Gulf war?!  This, after Israel's role in purveying the Stuxnet worm into Iran's computers? After Israel's role in assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists inside Iran?!  After so many months of Netanyahu, Barak et al. threatening to launch airstrikes againt Iran's nuclear facilties (and in the meantime labeling Ahmadinejad as the new Hitler only awaiting his opportunity to inflict a new Holocaust, mostly because of a speech widely mistranslated as stating that Iran was going to "wipe Israel off the map")?!

The fact of the matter is that both sides - but Israel most recently - have committed acts against the other that can be legitimately construed as acts of war.  Add to that the increasing pressure from US naval forces in the Persian Gulf: more aircraft carriers on station, a floating base for Special Ops attacks, sea-drones to destroy any mines that the Iranian navy might lay in the Straits of Hormuz.  And don't forget the recently ramped-up economic sanctions that the US and its pals have used to cripple Iran's economy and immiserate its people.

Humongous pressure is being piled on Iran.  One senses that Israel and the US are just waiting for that "just twitch and I'll blow you to Mars" moment.

Let's be real.  Goldberg and his ilk are laying the ground for blaming the victims for their own devastation.

The Romney Foreign-Policy Team

As described - and skewered - by Adam Smith at Foreign Policy.  A brief excerpt: 

 

Out of Romney's 24 special advisors on foreign policy, 17 served in the Bush-Cheney administration. If Romney were to win, it's likely that many of these people would serve in his administration in some capacity -- a frightening prospect given the legacy of this particular group. The last time they were in government, it was disastrous.

 

For example, one of Romney's top surrogates on the campaign trail is John Bolton, who served as President George W. Bush's ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton embodies the reckless neoconservative thinking that was largely responsible for getting us into Iraq under false pretenses. Today, he openly roots for diplomacy with Iran to fail and is all-too-eager to send our men and women in uniform into war. Last year, for instance, Bolton said that, "It would be in our interest to overthrow this regime in Syria."

 

The idea of Bolton and other Bush-Cheney officials serving in a Romney administration should be a scary prospect for all Americans.

 

Critics might object that employing former Bush staffers does not necessarily mean implementing all of their advice. But voters can only judge candidates by what they say they will do if in office, and the recklessness of Dick Cheney is clearly reflected in the foreign policies that Romney has advocated so far on the campaign trail.

 

Romney supported the invasion of Iraq and opposed ending the war last year. In December, as Obama welcomed home our troops from Iraq after almost nine years of conflict, Romney said, "It is my view that the withdrawal of all of our troops from Iraq is unfortunate. It's more than unfortunate, I think it's tragic." Cheney echoed that sentiment, saying a few months before we ended the war in Iraq that "it would be a real tragedy if we leave too soon before they are ready to fend for themselves."

 

On Afghanistan, though Obama and all of our international coalition partners have agreed on a timetable to transfer all security responsibility to Afghan control by the end of 2014, Romney contends that we should stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, with no strategy behind his rhetoric and no plan to bring troops home. Again, Cheney has said that we don't "need to run for the exits" in Afghanistan.

 

And Romney, like Cheney, remains stuck in a Cold War mentality. Romney has called Russia our "number one geopolitical foe" -- an outlandish statement that stunned foreign policy experts across the political spectrum. When former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who served under President Bush, was asked about Romney's comments, he replied, "C'mon, Mitt, think. That isn't the case." Romney's rhetoric toward Moscow has the ring of comments Cheney made in 2008, asserting that Russia posed a "threat of tyranny, economic blackmail, and military invasion" to its neighbor, Ukraine.

Yeah, Mitt! Please, think!  Then ditch Bolton, and Cheney.

Then, go home. Jet ski.  Stay there.  Do something good for your country.

The Levy Committee: Israel's Death Spiral?

Events in Egypt and Syria - as well as Mr. Obama's hands-off stance concerning anything Netanyahu wants to do during the run-up to the November elections - are letting a major development in Israel fly mostly under Americans' radar.

I speak of the recent findings of the Israeli government's so-called Levy committee, which was convened in order to issue recommendations concerning the ongoing Jewish/Israeli occupation of the West Bank.  I commend heartily to your attention the recent op-ed from the Philadelphia Inquirer's Trudy Rubin.  She concludes:

If pre-1967 Israel becomes permanently entwined with the West Bank, it will have to choose whether to give the Palestinians full citizenship and lose the Jewish majority within Greater Israel, or deny them rights and keep them confined to cantons. Down that road lies an apartheid state.

Indeed, the real intent of the Levy report may be to pave the way for annexation of much of the West Bank. According to Ori Nir, spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, which monitors settlement expansion in the West Bank: "The big thing on the Israeli right, which is gaining momentum, is to annex all of Area C [the 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and military control]. That is the trend. The fact that the Levy committee walked toward that is important."

Given these troubled Mideast times, few would expect that Israel would accept the risk of a new Palestinian state in the short term. But unless the Jewish state keeps that prospect open - blocking new settlements and taking down those that are illegal - the two-state option will permanently vanish. Israel will find itself conjoined with West Bank Palestinians in a single, untenable state.

Israel has been steadily moving in this direction - and toward this fate - for decades - essentially ever since the rise of the Likud under Menachem Begin.  The celebrated Oslo Accords were a chimera.  The advent of an American president whose ignorance of (or complete non-chalance toward) history, combined with his hyper-evangelical Christian Zionism - I speak of course of George W. Bush - put paid to the ongoing joke that was the "peace process."

Since 2009, Mr. Obama has let himself be neutered by the realities of US electoral politics and his own determination to be "bipartisan."  As a result, he - and the US - have become feeble bystanders as an increasingly right-wing Israeli government and public have engineered what may well be the destruction of their state.

Is Designating Afghanistan a Major non-NATO Ally a Big Joke?

The short answer is yes; or at least, it's poorly considered.

Excellent essay by Nicholas Gvosdev for World Politics Review points out why:

 

Most reports indicate that this status was granted to Afghanistan to reassure the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai that the U.S. does not plan to abandon him after transferring responsibility for Afghan security to Afghan forces in 2014. But this is a troubling development, for it reveals the lack of trust Kabul has in Washington’s promises, even after months of Obama administration statements about the depth of America’s post-2014 commitment to Afghanistan.

The status conferred on Afghanistan requires the approval of both the secretaries of defense and state, and it is not merely an honorary position casually bestowed. A country so designated is able to take part in cooperative research and development projects with the U.S. Department of Defense and purchase advanced U.S. weaponry without being subject to many of the provisions of the Arms Control Export Act. The status also allows its companies to bid on some U.S. military contracts. And while there are no legally binding provisions committing the United States to defend the territorial integrity and sovereignty of such allies, being so designated usually indicates that the country in question is vital to U.S. national interests and that its well-being is of concern to Washington.

The original major non-NATO allies, designated during the first Bush administration in 1989, were Japan, South Korea, Egypt, Israel and Australia. All are countries with critical importance either to U.S. global strategy or regional interests. In subsequent years, other countries that were seen as frontline states in the war on terror, including Pakistan, Jordan and Morocco, or that were emerging as key partners in Asia, such as the Philippines or Thailand, were added to the list. Most security experts would agree that along with the NATO allies, the major non-NATO allies form the first tier of America’s national security relationships.

Afghanistan is a strange addition to the group. With its underdeveloped economy, Afghanistan is not going to be a major partner in developing the latest fifth-generation weapons systems, as is Japan. Nor is it strategically located to act as a staging ground for U.S. land, air or naval forces, as are Bahrain, Kuwait and the Philippines. It does not have a military or intelligence establishment that is able and willing to plug gaps in U.S. capabilities, as do Jordan and Morocco, and as did Egypt under Hosni Mubarak. 

Instead, Afghanistan’s importance to the U.S. is situational, linked largely to the threat that, under the right conditions, al-Qaida might try to reconstitute its former network of assets there. But much of al-Qaida’s operational network has already shifted to more-fertile locations elsewhere in the world. And to be perfectly frank, if Afghanistan does not again become the main safe haven for an international terrorist network determined to wage war on the U.S. and its allies, the country will return to the level of attention it held in U.S. strategic planning during the 1990s: overlooked and peripheral.

Some have argued that Afghanistan needed major non-NATO ally status in order to be eligible for continued U.S. military and security assistance, but there is no evidence that current regulations were preventing the Defense Department from providing the Afghan government with the equipment and training it needs for its armed forces and police. Nor are there any indications that Congress was preparing to restrict Afghanistan’s ability to obtain future tranches of security assistance.

The reality is that the “golden ticket” of major non-NATO ally status was proffered because the United States, over the years, has eroded the currency of another term that more accurately sums up the U.S.-Afghanistan relationship: strategic partner. For the past two decades, the very concept of “strategic partnership” has been debased, with the term often bandied about as a diplomatic consolation prize when Washington has been unprepared or unwilling to contemplate closer ties. It is understandable why the United States might seek to prevent countries that are not particularly close friends from turning into foes. But “strategic partnership” has been used to describe not only the U.S. relationship with countries such as China and Russia, but also with actual potential partners such as Brazil and India. Indeed, in official U.S. diplomatic language, with the exception of a few “rogues” like North Korea or Iran, most countries are now either U.S. “allies” or “partners.”

But if that is the case, then partnership no longer indicates any sort of special or preferred relationship. This helps to explain why Georgia, for example, is not satisfied with merely being a U.S. partner, but rather continues to pursue any chance, no matter how unrealistic, of gaining entry into the NATO alliance.  

Making Afghanistan a non-NATO ally simply to signify that Washington is serious about its pledged commitments to Kabul’s security threatens to weaken the whole designation itself. More broadly, the temptation to use the status as a way to say that Washington is really serious about a particular partnership runs the risk of devaluing the designation, similar to what has happened with “strategic partnerships.” Major non-NATO ally status should not be offered to a particular government in a country that happens to be temporarily at the top of Washington’s strategic agenda -- it should be reserved for countries where there is a long-term U.S. interest and where the desire for closer strategic relations is shared by most segments of that country’s political elite. The U.S.-Japan, U.S.-South Korea and U.S.-Australia relationships endure despite changes of government. Will the U.S.-Afghanistan relationship be similarly durable once Karzai is no longer in office in Kabul? 

Having made the commitment to Afghanistan, the U.S. must now see it through, lest it further devalue major non-NATO ally status. But it is time to take stock of all of America’s alliances and partnerships to ensure that they do not devolve into polite diplomatic gestures with little substantive meaning.  

Iran and Syria: What can the US Do?

My response all along, of course, has been - don't resort to military action.  We don't have the ability, or even the requisite power, to save Syria, or to get Iran to back away from its nuclear program to the extent that Mr. Netanyahu wants us to.

Which brings me to David Ignatius' interesting WaPo essay today, "Can diplomacy succeed with Iran and Syria?"  He's very concerned about how high tensions have been ratcheted up - and especially by the fact that the Saudis have alerted some military and officials to cancel their summer leaves.  He provides kind of a status check on the current crises with Iran and Syria, and then ends with a very interesting conclusion:

The Obama administration has opted to work with international coalitions to confront Syria and Iran. This still seems like the most sensible policy. But if these multilateral efforts are failing, it will fall to the United States to devise an alternative strategy. If the United States wants to get to “yes” in these negotiations, it will have to bargain more independently and aggressively.

Is he suggesting in that last sentence that the US distance itself from Netanyahu's zero-sum stance regarding Iran's nuclear program?

I hope so.  But if he is, I wish he'd said so a lot more explicitly.

And, by the way, for a different sort of take on the Syria crisis - and why Russia and China are hanging tough alongside Assad - have a look at Michael Ignatieff's essay in the New York Review of Books blog.

WINEP (Who Else?) Pushing the US Toward War with Iran

In the WaPo, a piece by Michael Singh, "managing director" of Israel's premier US think-tank - WINEP, the Washington Institute for Never Ending Prattle Near East Policy - asserting that oil sanctions just aren't going to be enough to get Iran to move in ongoing negotiations about its nuclear program.  (Singh, of course, never entertains the possibility that a fair solution might be in reach if Israel could only move its own position - which, as it happens, offers absolutely no room for compromise.  Either Iran surrenders completely and unconditionally, or else . . . .)

The "or else" is plain to see:

Washington should bolster the credibility of its military threat. Recent steps to strengthen its force posture in the Persian Gulf are a good start. They should be accompanied by more serious statements about U.S. willingness to employ force and an end to statements exaggerating the downsides of military action. This is likely to garner attention in both Tehran and Beijing. If the alternative is military conflict in the Persian Gulf, China may see further reductions in its Iranian oil imports — which would be the most significant way to strengthen the current sanctions — as prudent.

As I posted last night (commenting on Reza Marashi's infinitely more fair-minded essay in The National Interest), continuing to push Iran to the wall - which is what Singh is advocating - can very possibly push Iran over the limit in terms of how much of the crap that US-Israel is throwing at it Iran's willing to swallow.

Pat Buchanan Asks, Why the US Obsession with Iran?

Posted at RealClearWorld, Pat Buchanan asks the question, shares his incredulity, and notes in the process Gideon Rachman's (Financial Times) observation that if the US is concerned about hostile Muslim countries with A-bombs, it ought to be looking more closely at Pakistan.

Is the US truly so scared of the Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr. Ahmadinejad, asks PB?

That PB can't bring himself to point the finger where it deserves pointing leaves me baffled.  It ought to be obvious to anyone with a brain in his head that Iran, even with nukes, is no threat to the US.  Nor is it a threat to Israel, whose military dwarfs Iran's and which possesses a mighty nuclear arsenal.

But if Netanyahu says Iran is a threat to Israel, America's Congress and Christers will insist that America go to war to defend poor outmanned and outgunned Israel.  

And our calculating smooth-operator shiny-brite president kowtows.