Hezbollah's "Lebanonization"

MEPEI
December 09

Manuela Paraipan: Why is the Lebanonization of Hezbollah a chimera?

Tony Badran: This is a rather timely question with the recent unveiling of Hezbollah's so-called new political manifesto.

The conventional wisdom and the dominant interpretation of this document, in the media, is that it signals the "Lebanonization" of the Islamist group and its "evolution" away from Islamist rhetoric and other maximalist positions. In many ways, this is merely a recycling of the old argument put forth by Augustus Richard Norton and others starting in the late 1990s. Both the old theory and its current reincarnation miss the mark, and in fact have been thoroughly discredited and disproved by events.

Manuela Paraipan: How so?

Tony Badran: The Lebanonization theory is an amalgam of various misreadings of Hezbollah.

It was stipulated in the late '90s that Hezbollah was merely concerned with purely Lebanese goals, namely the liberation of southern Lebanon, and that once Israel withdrew, Hezbollah would close shop. Indeed, Norton wrote in 1998 that Hezbollah was "preparing for life after resistance."

Very clearly, this has been shown to be wrong.

Hezbollah today has dissociated its armed status from an Israeli withdrawal from the disputed Shebaa Farms, and has linked it to Israel's very existence: so long as Israel exists, Hezbollah's reasoning goes, it will constitute a threat to Lebanon, a threat that can only be countered by its continued armed status. At the same time, Hezbollah’s manifesto includes the “liberation” of Jerusalem, which the organization describes as a “religious duty.” This duty carries great peril for Lebanon.

In order to support this argument of a purely Lebanese outlook for Hezbollah, its proponents went to great lengths to dissociate the group from any acts of global terrorism. One argument was that since the group had Shiite support and maintained "social networks," that somehow meant that it can no longer be dubbed a terrorist group.

(Read full interview)

Tony Badran is a research fellow with the Center for Terrorism Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He has the blog Across the Bay.

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Before the Rockets Start to Explode

Tony Badran
Across the Bay
25 May '10

(Tony Badran does a great service in isolating this particular item from the two-part article. Unfortunately the analysis in part-one leaves you wishing the portion below had been the entire article. Ben-Yishai still looks back at the withdrawal from Lebanon as having been technically, as opposed to inherently flawed. Similiarly prevalent, after years of rocket attacks, the same misconception concerning the Gaza evacuation.)

Ron Ben-Yishai in Ynet today:

At this time, Hezbollah serves as Iran’s long strategic arm, aimed at deterring Israel from attacking Tehran’s nuclear program by threatening the Jewish State’s military and civilian home front. For the Syrians, Hezbollah constitutes an important component in its war plan, and therefore Damascus arms it with whatever it possesses. In Syrian eyes, the group’s aim is to pulverize the Israeli home front, while splitting the IDF’s offensive effort between Lebanon and Syria, thereby also preventing an outflanking operation on the west that would target Syria’s defensive posture in the Golan.

Related article: The Solution Is in Damascus and Tehran

For that reason, a solution to the Lebanese problem cannot be found in Baalbek, in Beirut, or in Hezbollah’s fear of other ethnic groups in Lebanon. The root of the Lebanese problem is in Damascus and Tehran, and this is where Israel should be seeking a solution, with American help. If possible, this should be done via the combination of military deterrence and effective international pressure. Yet should this fail, the other option is a well-planned military campaign, which will be launched before the rockets start to explode in our territory.

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Gaza and the Golan Heights: Iran’s Two-Front Strategy - by Tony Badran

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it recently, “if there needs to be” conflict with Iran, “it is better now than later.”

Tony Badran..
Tablet Magazine..
09 July '18..

Israel is about to face two active fronts on its borders: one in Gaza, and the other in the Golan Heights. As factions in Gaza fired rockets at Israel, an offensive of the alliance backing the Assad regime was underway in southern Syria, which is likely to reach the Golan soon. While this might appear as random coincidence, it’s more by design: The escalating attacks from Gaza should be seen as part of a coordinated Iranian strategy.

After the outbreak of the Syrian war, the Iranians eyed establishing southern Syria as yet another active front on Israel’s borders. This is a red line for Jerusalem. Consequently, over the past year especially, the Israeli Air Force has been bombing Iran’s military infrastructure in Syria at will. Russia’s presence in Syria has not translated into protection for Iran and the forces it commands in the war-torn country. And the Iranians have had no effective answer to Israel’s intelligence dominance and military superiority in Syria. The feeble rocket attack on the Golan Heights in May underscored this point.

That, however, doesn’t mean the Iranians are folding. Tehran might not be about to sacrifice its holdings in Lebanon by heating up the Lebanese front against Israel, which would lead to Jerusalem devastating Hezbollah’s home base. But there is another, less costly options to turn the heat on Israel: Gaza.

(Continue to Full Article)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Look at who holds the South Lebanon trigger

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
03 August '10

(This was written and posted by Tony Badran just before the LAF border attack. In general, he is very on topic, and this is excellent background material as to what may or may not develop. Y.)

On the eve of last Friday’s mini-Arab summit in Lebanon, the United States quietly, but noticeably, renewed a 2007 Executive Order designating parties deemed to be undermining Lebanese sovereignty.

The renewal was a welcome reminder of the problems overshadowed by the photo-op in Baabda that included President Michel Sleiman, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. However, it did not compensate for the lack of active American involvement in Lebanon’s affairs, nor its substitution with an “over the horizon” policy allowing local and regional actors to take the lead in addressing initiatives potentially damaging to Washington’s interests.

In his message to Congress about the renewal of EO 13441, President Barack Obama identified the major source of Lebanon’s destabilization and the undermining of its sovereignty: continued arms smuggling to Hezbollah, including, of course, that carried out by Syria. This helped refocus the issue amid all the surreal statements about Syria’s role in safeguarding Lebanon’s stability at the Baabda summit.

This clarification also served to refocus, at least conceptually, the priorities of US policy toward Syria and Lebanon. Syria is, understandably, nowhere near the top of the list of the Obama administration’s main concerns. However, this has led to ill-advised steps, one being the introduction of myriad American interlocutors with Damascus, which has led to a muddling of policy priorities.

(Read full article)

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Is the U.S. About to Dump Syria?

Michael J. Totten
Contentions/Commentary
20 September 09

Hussain Abdul-Hussain reports in Kuwait’s Arabic-language daily Al Rai that the Obama administration has quietly decided not to return an ambassador to Syria as promised. He quotes unnamed officials who say president Bashar Assad is blackmailing the United States and its neighbors while conceding nothing in negotiations.

“Assad had started to count the American eggs in his basket before offering anything in return,” said an administration official, according to Tony Badran’s translation from Arabic. “Assad fires a rocket here or there [in south Lebanon] and expects us to run to him. . . . This kind of security blackmail no longer works on the United States.”

Syrian blackmail, though, has been working for decades. Bashar Assad’s government, like that of his late father, Hafez Assad, is an extortionist gangster regime that demands—and usually gets—the diplomatic equivalent of protection money. “The basic line is ‘Do what we want or we will kill you,’ ” said Barry Rubin, author of The Truth about Syria. “Yet at the same time they hold out the bait of great progress if only their demands are met. They play the West at times like a master fisherman reeling in his victim.”

There’s a case to be made, albeit a weak one, for buying off rogue regimes if they’ll behave. The biggest problem with bribing the Syrians, aside from the fact that it encourages more blackmail later, is that Assad won’t even hold up his end of the deal. “The Syrians,” Lebanese blogger Mustapha explained on his blog Beirut Spring, “try to sell, for a high price, water for fires they cause themselves, then they don’t deliver.”

No matter what the Syrian government is offered—normal relations, a looser sanctions regime, trade agreements—it has never rolled back support for international terrorist organizations. Syria refuses to hold peace talks with Israel or close down the local branches of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Assad won’t stop obstructing the formation of a new Lebanese government nor will he shut down his terrorist pipeline into Iraq.

Lebanese politicians and journalists have been under siege by Syrian assassins and car bombers since 2005. Iraqis have been blown apart by Syrian-supported suicide-bombers since 2003. And Israelis have been under assault by terrorist groups backed by Damascus since the Assad regime came to power decades ago. “This is how Syria negotiates,” Lee Smith wrote in 2007 after Syrian agents blew up a bus on Mount Lebanon, “with its knife on the table and dripping with blood.”

“The impediment to real change in the Syrian regime’s behavior in a manner that would satisfy American decision-makers is structural and systemic,” wrote Tony Badran in NOW Lebanon. “Syria cannot abandon its support for violence and subversion, or its alliance with Iran, because those are the only tools allowing it to bolster its relevance above its political weight.”

Indeed, Assad and his father have made Syria an indispensable nation in the Middle East, despite its utter dearth of economic and military power, by exporting terrorism and suicide murder to neighboring countries. Henry Kissinger’s famous formulation, “No war without Egypt, no peace without Syria,” would be negated at once if Assad ceased and desisted his support for Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iraqi terrorist groups. Syria would become just another failed Soviet-style state with no more geopolitical power than Yemen.

The Obama administration has been a bit more accommodating of Assad than it should have been, but the same can be said for every American administration in recent decades. Barry Rubin warned about this possibility long before Barack Obama was even elected. “The next U.S. president might try to engage Syria and spend a year or so finding out that it doesn’t work,” he told me in 2007.

Bashar Assad does not play well with others, and he never has. Neither did his father. The Syrians, according to a U.S. official quoted by Abdul-Hussain, “don’t know the difference between normalizing relations and behaving like they’ve defeated the US in a world war.”

President Obama’s conciliatory nature meant a temporary rapprochement with Syria was likely, if not inevitable. Assad’s nature all but ensures it won’t last.

Related: The Syrian Paradox

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Badran - Turkey’s foreign policy shift

Tony Badran
Levant in Focus
JPost
09 September '11


http://blogs.jpost.com/content/turkey%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-shift

If there’s been an immutable rule in Middle Eastern power politics, it’s that whenever the region’s populist leaders, nationalist or Islamist, wish to make a bid for regional leadership, they reliably use Israel as a proxy theater.

On a certain level, this rule helps explain Turkey’s latest row with Israel. However, in the Turkish case, there is another element at play: a series of failures in Ankara’s foreign policy, especially in Syria, which has struck at the heart of the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) doctrine of “zero problems with neighbors.” The escalation with Israel, therefore, can be read as an attempt to compensate for this failure. With continued US passivity and retrenchment, Turkey’s game could quickly become a dangerous affair.

From the outset, the uprising in Syria presented Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a critical challenge, as it risked unraveling the Turkish premier’s signature policy.

Until Washington’s recent shift toward a policy of regime change in Syria, the US and Europe had both deferred to Turkey when dealing with Damascus. Behind this decision to give Ankara the lead was the popular conviction that it possessed strong influence over the Syrian regime as a result of the policy of engagement that Erdogan had pursued with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

Early on in the Syrian crisis, however, it became apparent to Turkish analysts that there was a fundamental flaw at the core of the AKP’s doctrine. The hype behind Turkish influence was built around its vaunted “soft power” and the appeal of the so-called “Turkish model.”

Turkish academic Soli Ozel took exception and told TIME in April that “It has become apparent that [Turkey] has little influence… This is the point where Turkish foreign policy hits the wall.”

Undeterred, Erdogan’s foreign policy adviser, Ibrahim Kalin, contested critics, arguing that, far from proving a failure, the AKP’s policy “has… deepened Turkey’s soft power capacity in the Arab world.” Other defenders of the policy similarly argued that it was precisely this policy that now enabled Ankara to consult with Damascus and to advise Assad to carry out reforms.

Six months into the uprising, and countless Turkish “ultimatums” later, it became rather obvious that Turkey’s supposed “soft power capacity” had been an abject flop. Not only were Erdogan and his Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu—the architect of the “zero problems” policy—repeatedly snubbed and embarrassed, but also, Syria and its Iranian ally had gone on the offensive—and for that they found an opening in Turkey’s Kurdish problem.

The army’s regime

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
17 February '11
Posted before Shabbat

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=241354

When commenting on Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, President Obama spoke about the Egyptian people’s “hunger for change,” which “bent the arc of history toward justice.” Perhaps. But for now, Egypt’s military will continue to run the show. The feel-good references to the American civil rights movement mask a worrying uncertainty over how the policies upheld by Egypt for the last three decades might now change, profoundly impacting US interests. While most observers are focusing on the Muslim Brotherhood as the agent of such potential change, it is the Egyptian military, and the course it decides to chart, that will be of the utmost consequence.

It was interesting to see how Western jubilation over the Egyptian revolution was shared – albeit for very different reasons – by the Iranian alliance system. The so-called “Resistance Axis” painted the events in Egypt and President Mubarak’s resignation with the brush of Egypt’s return as a “confrontation state,” joining in “resistance” against Israel.

At the Hezbollah-organized festival of “Egyptian Arabism and the path of Resistance,” the tone was delirious as self-professed resisters and rejectionists began discussing the reopening of the “southern front,” and calling on Egypt to “follow the model of the Resistance” and restore its leadership position in the “nationalist jihad” against Israel.

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah had called on the Egyptian military to join the people in embracing Resistance during the 2009 war in Gaza. This was in line with the Iranian doctrine of distinguishing between the region’s peoples and regimes, painting the former as natural and willing supporters of resistance, hindered only by oppressive pro-Western governments.

Of course, despite Mubarak’s departure, there has been no actual regime change in Egypt. The system has been dominated by the military for decades and looks poised to remain so. Therefore, the notion that, merely as a result of Mubarak’s resignation, the Egyptian military is on the verge of embracing the people’s allegedly natural resistance ethos, is overstated.

All propaganda aside, however, one must still seriously consider what the posture of the new Egyptian government will be toward its relationship with Israel – a main pillar of the US order in the eastern Mediterranean.

When Hezbollah needs to hide behind the LAF

...But the fact that Hezbollah is apparently reluctant at this stage to take direct action again Israel underscores how far its room to maneuver has shrunk, and, therefore, how much its value as a deterrent for Iran has dropped. Instead, Tehran now has to rely on the White House reining in Israel, and Hezbollah needs to hide behind the LAF.

Tony Badran..
NOW..
19 December '13..

Lebanon came close to instigating a conflict with Israel on Sunday when a member of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) shot and killed an Israeli sergeant in his car near the border at Rosh Hanikra. The Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon held the Lebanese government and the LAF responsible, while the LAF command quickly declared that the shooting was an “individual behavior” by the Lebanese soldier.

Despite the LAF’s statement, however, the circumstances behind the shooting remain unclear. As it occurred a few days after the assassination of senior Hezbollah commander Hassan al-Laqis, observers in Beirut, including pro-Hezbollah journalists, suspected the attack was retaliation for the killing of the Hezbollah commander, which the group blamed on Israel. If indeed this was an operation on behalf of Hezbollah, then it was also likely the Party and Iran testing Washington’s ability and willingness, post-Geneva, to restrain Israel.

Using the LAF for that purpose is ideal. For one, Hezbollah understands that US policy in Lebanon, at this point, is essentially narrowed down to supporting the LAF as the representative institution of the state. What’s more, Hezbollah has carefully noted that the US government has implicitly endorsed, and at times explicitly praised, operations conducted by the LAF Directorate of Intelligence – which is closely aligned with Hezbollah – against Sunni areas. And when Hezbollah elements deployed alongside the LAF in the battle against the followers of Ahmad al-Assir in June, some US officials downplayed reports about Hezbollah’s participation in what was, in effect, a joint operation. All in all, what Hezbollah concluded was that the US regarded Sunni extremism as the primary, indeed only, issue, and therefore turned a blind eye to the synergy between the LAF and Hezbollah under the pretext that it preserved Lebanon’s stability.

With all that in mind, if the US was willing to overlook so much with the LAF, then, Hezbollah could well have reasoned, would it really back a forceful Israeli response to an incident such as Sunday’s? And all the more so if it can be said that the soldier went rogue. In addition, Hezbollah knew that a frightened Lebanese acting prime minister and the LAF command would plead desperately with the US to restrain Israel.

And indeed, after the shooting, when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) mobilized along the border, Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Miqati, as reported in An-Nahar, called the US ambassador to ask that Washington pressure Israel not to launch a retaliatory attack, and to convince it that the Lebanese soldier acted alone. Tellingly, official Lebanese sources who spoke to the newspaper relayed their conviction that “any major Israeli confrontation with Hezbollah would require prior US approval, which is something President Barack Obama will not allow.” In other words, the prevalent thinking among Hezbollah and its allies in the acting government is that the US détente with Iran can be used as leverage against Israel.

The Lebanon Arm of the Iranian State

Tony Badran..
NOW..
28 February '13..

The recent death of Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF) senior officer Hassan Shateri, alias Hessam Khoshnevis, has cast the spotlight on the direct role the IRGC plays in overseeing Hezbollah’s affairs. While Shateri operated in Lebanon under civilian cover, the revelation of his real identity was met with a general sense of surprise. But the presence in Lebanon of IRGC commanders of such stature is hardly novel. IRGC involvement is pervasive in multiple areas of Hezbollah operations, and has been so since the group’s inception. The increased visibility of the IRGC’s hand, however, should refocus the discussion on the nature and mission of Hezbollah, and serve as a corrective to media and academic characterizations of the group.

Even though the IRGC’s presence in Lebanon became more visible since 2006, and even more so following the 2008 assassination of Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyah, it has nonetheless been longstanding. In fact, Shateri’s assassination brings us back full circle to 1981, when Mohammad Saleh Hosseini, another senior IRGC commander based in Lebanon with the cover of a “political adviser,” was ambushed and gunned down in Beirut by unknown assailants (possibly Iraqi intelligence) while driving his car. Quds Force operatives have long used such diplomatic cover in their overseas operations.

One reason many were surprised to learn of Shateri’s true identity can be attributed to years of willful self-deluding coverage of Hezbollah in academe and the media. The mantra of Hezbollah as a nationalist Lebanese resistance group became so entrenched that it led many analysts to minimize or deny the party’s subservience to Iran. Hezbollah experts dismissed as “anachronistic” the argument that the Party of God was an extension of Iranian regime structures, such as the IRGC. These prevailing views regarding Hezbollah as an autonomous “sub-state actor” had blinded many to a fact made clear in the 2006 war: Hezbollah is an extension of a state apparatus, and that state is Iran.

Hizbullah on the homefront

Caroline Glick
carolineglick.com
18 May '10

Last week Lebanese commentator Tony Badran published an article on the Now Lebanon Web site discussing the Iranian way of war. In "The shape of things to come," he discussed the significance of the breakup of a Hizbullah cell in Kuwait and the deportation of Hizbullah agents from Bahrain. Badran explained that like the Hizbullah ring arrested last year in Egypt, the Hizbullah cells in Persian Gulf states demonstrate how Iran uses Hizbullah to extend its regional power.

Badran noted that Iran's cultivation of fifth columnists in target countries through Hizbullah puts paid to the notion that it will be possible to contain a nuclear Iran. Armed with both nuclear weapons and armed agents in states throughout the region, Iran will be well positioned to bend all regional states to its will.

US security guarantees will be worthless. Living under the threat of the Iranian bomb, neighboring states will be unable to take steps to curb Iranian agents subverting their governments from within their sovereign territory.

For Israel, the threat is obviously more acute. Whereas states like Kuwait and Bahrain will be able to suffer through an Iranian Middle Eastern hegemony, Israel will have no such luxury. Iran has made clear that in an Iranian-ruled Middle East, there will be no room for Israel. And so Israel must act soon to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

But then there is the homefront.

With each passing day, it becomes more and more apparent that as is the case in Kuwait, Bahrain and Egypt, through Hizbullah, Iran has established cells of sympathizers among Israeli Arabs. This means that as Israel prepares to strike Iran, it must minimize Iran's ability to retaliate from fifth column bases inside the country.

(Read full article)

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Lee Smith - Embroiled

Lee Smith
tabletmag.com
24 August '11


http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/75952/embroiled/


With the Arab Spring shaking the Middle East’s status quo, a new regional order is being born. As the recent attacks in Eilat and Be’er Sheva show, Israel is likely to pay a price.

The relative quiet that Israel has enjoyed during the turmoil of the Arab Spring could not last for long. It came to an end last Thursday with the terror attacks close to Eilat, near the border with the Sinai, that killed eight Israelis and wounded dozens of others. Subsequently, a rocket fired from Gaza struck a home in Be’er Sheva, leaving another Israeli dead. In the aftermath of the Eilat attack, the first attack in Israel from the Egyptian border in four decades, Israeli forces pursuing terrorists in Egyptian uniforms mistakenly killed two real Egyptian police officers, raising tensions between Cairo and Jerusalem.

For six months, from North Africa and the Levant to the Persian Gulf, Arab masses toppled Arab regimes while Arab tribes and sects squared off against each other in internecine warfare. Now Israel, which has nothing to do with the intra-Arab conflict that instigated and shaped the events of the Arab Spring, has been dragged into a mess that shows no signs of ending soon.

If many Western analysts were a little too eager to overlook the anti-Israel—as well as anti-American—sentiment on display at Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising, their implicit interpretation was nonetheless accurate: Israel was not the central issue driving the protest movement that brought down Hosni Mubarak. The Arab Spring isn’t about Israel; it’s about the Arabs.

But the focus has returned to the Jewish state. The method employed is tawreet, an Arabic word that means embroiling. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Brookings Institution scholar Michael Doran explained its strategic value: “You embroil someone by goading him to take actions against a third party that will result in political effects beneficial to you.” Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, for instance, was a master of embroilment, using various Palestinian factions to attack Israel in order to create conditions that were domestically and regionally advantageous for himself.

Right now, as Doran told me in a phone interview, “it is in the interest of many actors in the region to heighten tension with Israel.” Among these actors, there’s Hamas, the Iranian-sponsored outfit that rules Gaza and seems to have more control than Egyptian security does over the porous Gaza-Egyptian border. But the perpetrators of the recent terror attacks on Israel also enjoyed some level of assistance from elements of Egypt’s security and military establishment. Egyptian Islamist factions may also have an interest in stoking the flames with Israel in order to position themselves as champions of “resistance” in the post-Mubarak political era.

Syria, America and Israel's strategic clarity

Tony Badran..
NOW Lebanon/FDD..
09 May '13..

It was perhaps fitting that the multiple Israeli strikes in Damascus last week followed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s address from Tehran. Nasrallah had warned last Tuesday that the “resistance” was ready to face any Israeli assault and would emerge victorious in any confrontation. Instead, Nasrallah returned from Tehran just in time to witness Israel destroy multiple consignments of Iranian ballistic missiles intended for his group. The Israeli raids provide much needed strategic clarity to the conflict in Syria, throwing into sharp relief two basic points: Israel is not about to let the balance of power with Iran change. In addition, Iran’s ability to strike back has been shown to be decidedly limited.

There’s been some confusion in some of the media commentary as to the purpose and meaning of Israel’s aerial attack in Syria. However, the targets – long-range rockets and ballistic missiles storage sites – are enough of a clue to understand Israel’s objective. The Israeli government’s calculus is rather clear: It will not allow the transfer of Iranian strategic weapons to Hezbollah. In other words, in contrast with the Obama administration, Israel is thinking about the regional balance of power – which is being fought out in Syria – in strategic terms.

Former Mossad operations officer Michael Ross further pressed this point to me in an email. The Israeli Air Force attack, he wrote, “underscores how differently the dynamics of the Syrian conflict are perceived by the Israelis and the rest of the world.” The Obama administration, for instance, has found it politically expedient to emphasize that its primary preoccupation is with the rise of Sunni extremists and the possibility of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons “falling into the wrong hands,” namely those same Sunni extremist groups.

However, these are not Israel’s strategic priorities regarding Syria, Ross explained. “While the issues of ascendant jihadism and chemical weapons are important,” he wrote, “the absolute top priority of the Israeli government – and by extension the intelligence community and the military – is the prevention of a first strike weapons capability that threatens Israel’s population centers from reaching the hands of Hezbollah.”

A Dramatic Reversal, a Radical Rupture

...The 1979 Islamic revolution added another revisionist actor intent on undermining the pro-American order. Iran presented itself as the leader of an alternative system, and developed an alliance network of its own, the so-called “resistance axis.” With training, funding, and arms from Tehran, this axis actively worked to subvert America’s Arab allies and waged war on Israel. The US still continued to see itself, and was likewise regarded, as the leader of the alliance of status quo states in confrontation with the revisionist resistance axis. Until now, that is.

Tony Badran..
NOW Lebanon..
04 December '13..

President Obama is overseeing a radical rupture with past American policy in the Middle East. Now that it has been confirmed that Washington has been secretly negotiating with the Iranians for a year, deliberately cutting out its allies, it has become apparent that the White House is determined to extract the US from the region and upend the American order that has been in place for decades. In the process, the Obama administration is building up Iran at the expense of historical partners.

Throughout the Cold War, the US saw itself as the leader of an alliance in the region in opposition to the revolutionary states in the Soviet orbit. US policy was geared not toward coexistence with Soviet influence and its revolutionary satellites, but rather toward rolling them back. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once explained, the “priority was to get the Soviets out of the Middle East.”

The 1979 Islamic revolution added another revisionist actor intent on undermining the pro-American order. Iran presented itself as the leader of an alternative system, and developed an alliance network of its own, the so-called “resistance axis.” With training, funding, and arms from Tehran, this axis actively worked to subvert America’s Arab allies and waged war on Israel. The US still continued to see itself, and was likewise regarded, as the leader of the alliance of status quo states in confrontation with the revisionist resistance axis.

Until now, that is. Under Obama, this paradigm has seemingly ended. Obama is apparently unconcerned with the careful maintenance of allies. For instance, consider the fact the White House kept its allies in the dark about its secret talks with the Iranians, and even maneuvered to box in various allies, like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and France, and to limit their maneuverability. Then there’s Syria. Instead of leading the pro-US bloc to roll back the Iranian axis, Obama doggedly shot down his allies’ concerns and dismissed their entreaties for US-led action.

But, as is now evident, this was not merely a matter of poor alliance maintenance. We now understand that Obama’s decisions in Syria over the last two and a half years were all geared toward the deal with Iran. Obama was pursuing a specific vision – a new regional configuration. The sales pitch is that the new framework puts in place a balanced structure of stakeholders, including Iran, thereby stabilizing the region. This in turn would enable Obama to achieve his principal objective of extracting the US from the Middle East.

However, this lofty picture, which is being marketed by the White House’s sympathizers in the media, will bear no resemblance to how things will unfold in reality – how they’re already playing out. That’s because Obama is pursuing a course that radically runs counter to historical US policy. Whereas in the past the US led and consolidated a bloc of allied status quo states against revisionist actors, Obama is now forcing the lead revisionist state down the throat of US allies.

Barack Obama can still avoid the Syria trap

Tony Badran
Now Lebanon
23 February '10

The Obama administration last week made a major diplomatic opening to Syria. It dispatched Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns to Damascus for talks, thereby elevating the level of diplomatic contact and further making good on a pledge to engage with countries that George W. Bush’s administration shunned.

Administration officials leaked to the media, on background, that the Burns visit was intended to “isolate Iran” by wooing Damascus away from Tehran and other allies, particularly Hezbollah and Hamas.

This strategy will not work. Indeed, it may be no strategy at all. Despite its eagerness to engage with Syria, the United States must avoid giving too much up until the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, makes verifiable and substantial concessions on key Washington demands, not least surrendering Syrian support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Otherwise, Assad may dictate the avenues, conditions and aims of the engagement process.

Why Syria, and why now? The Obama administration’s efforts to open a dialogue with Iran have been ineffective. To undermine Iran’s nuclear program, the administration must contemplate actions that will exacerbate relations with Tehran and might endanger the US withdrawal from Iraq and surge in Afghanistan. The administration has always regarded Arab-Israeli settlements as necessary to temper regional animosities. However, given its failure to restart Palestinian-Israeli talks, Washington believes the only alternative is to advance on the Syrian track.

Obama, as The New York Times has reported, also hopes to “benefit from a global perception” that he has “reached out to North Korea, Cuba and even Syria.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argues that the resumption of high-level contacts with Syria has proven the administration’s “willingness to engage.” But this begs the question: Which audience is Washington trying to impress? And how would these impressions actually further American interests in the Middle East?

Important actors in the region are unnerved by the fact that the administration appears incapable of hearing the most pressing concerns of its anxious allies.

(Read full article)
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Lebanon’s next war may also be Syria’s

Tony Badran
Now Lebanon
26 January '10

Media reports in recent days have painted dire scenarios for what is, supposedly, the inevitable conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Of particular note are persistent indicators that the next round, if or when it comes, will very likely involve Syria as well.

For quite a while now, the official position in Israel has been that the next war in Lebanon would be waged against the Lebanese state, not just against Hezbollah. The Israelis have also been warning Damascus that they would not tolerate Syria’s passing on to Hezbollah weaponry that might alter the military balance of power, namely air defense systems.

On that point, two recent reports are of interest. The first, in the Qatari daily Al-Watan a couple of weeks ago, quoted Syrian sources as saying that “there is a strategic decision taken by Damascus not to allow Israel to defeat the resistance movements.” One might have been tempted to dismiss this as rhetorical bluster, but another news report only a few days later called for a somewhat different assessment.

Speaking to the Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai al-Aam, an unnamed American official sent a shot across Syria’s bow, telling the newspaper that should Syria deliver to Hezbollah anti-aircraft missiles, “a war would doubtlessly break out, and this time Israel would strike targets in Damascus.” The official added that the Syrians, according to intelligence reports, had allowed Hezbollah fighters to train on the SA-2 anti-aircraft (AA) system on Syrian soil. Those accusations were repeated last weekend by Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Daniel Ayalon, after his meeting with Michael Williams, the United Nation’s special coordinator for Lebanon.

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Umbilically yours, says Nasrallah to Iran

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
15 June '10

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general, has carefully cultivated a personality cult, a central tenet of which is that his word is always true. However, in a speech on the recent anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Nasrallah engaged in dizzying revisionism as he explained one of Khomeini’s most problematic doctrines: the export of the Islamic Revolution.

It was in itself telling, and natural, that this was the facet of Khomeini’s legacy that Nasrallah chose to emphasize. After all, exporting revolution is what lies behind Hezbollah’s very existence. And yet to hear Nasrallah describe it, Iran’s policy was solely destined to spread universal values – “the values of the great prophets of God,” as he put it – through preaching to the oppressed of the earth, who would then be free to find inspiration in these values or not.

According to Nasrallah, “badly-intentioned people” have sought to distort Khomeini’s position by claiming that he intended to dispatch Revolutionary Guards and volunteers “in order to topple regimes and impose values and ideas.” Nasrallah’s notion that there was a rigid dichotomy between Iranian proselytizing and paramilitary activities was in striking contradiction to what Iran’s constitution itself says.

Take this passage from the document’s preamble: “The Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps [IRGC] … will be responsible not only for guarding and preserving the frontiers of the country, but also for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world (this is in accordance with the Koranic verse, ‘Prepare against them whatever force you are able to muster…’)”.

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The Islamic Revolution is still alive

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
13 July '10

The recent tension in South Lebanon, choreographed by Hezbollah against UNIFIL under the guise of spontaneous protests by villagers, has been used by the party to reassert its equation of “the Resistance, the people, and the army”— the three mutually-reinforcing pillars which, Hezbollah maintains, are alone responsible for safeguarding the country’s security. The core premise of this mantra, however, has its origins in Iran’s Islamic revolutionary doctrine.

After its military assault in May 2008 against western Beirut and the Druze-controlled mountains, followed by the Doha Accord, Hezbollah imposed this line on public discourse and the current government’s policy statement. The party has, since, elevated the formula to the status of sole acceptable blueprint for Lebanon’s so-called “defense strategy.” In a May 25 speech, Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah held that this equation was the basis of Lebanon’s strength, and he accused anyone who undermined it of “working intentionally to expose Lebanon to Israeli aggression.”

During the 1990s, the Lebanese political class robotically regurgitated Syrian-imposed slogans, and Hezbollah is reproducing the same phenomenon today with the “Resistance, people, army” mantra, thereby aborting any domestic debate about its armed status. As such, Nasrallah pointed to Michel Sleiman’s endorsement of the formulation, which the president offered on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV no less. The Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has also performed the required ritualistic profession of this mandatory article of faith.

The absence of any reference to the “state” in this formula, and its substitution with the category of “people” is not accidental. It is useful in this regard to recall a peculiar March 2007 encounter between Jumblatt, when he was still hostile to Hezbollah, with the correspondent of the Iranian Arabic-language Al-Alam TV in New York. In response to a question about Hezbollah’s 2006 “victory” against Israel, Jumblatt replied that he had publicly asked to whom Nasrallah would offer this alleged victory, then added that Nasrallah’s response was “to the Lebanese people and the Arabic and Islamic umma.” Jumblatt said that he would have preferred for the victory to be offered to the Lebanese “state,” as the state alone must have the right to take the decision of making war or peace.

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Assad may be cruising for a bruising

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
02 June '10

(And now from another major player, perhaps also a "Peace Activist", somewheres buried deep inside. Never mind. Y.)

If Damascus continues to arm Hezbollah, would the Israelis strike against Syria? Despite Israel’s past track record of overlooking Syrian malfeasance, there is reason to think the equation may have changed. Bashar al-Assad’s gamble that he would be immune, therefore, may be misreading Israeli and American thinking. He may in fact be inevitably placing himself in the path of an Israeli strike against Syria.

The Israelis have already indicated that they may be conceptualizing Syria’s role differently than in the past. The head of intelligence research in the Israel Defense Forces, Yossi Baidatz, for instance, has characterized the arms transfers to Hezbollah as an organized, officially-sanctioned process, not mere “smuggling.” Thus, arming Hezbollah has become an integral part of the Syrian regime’s military strategy, offering the proper context for understanding Bashar al-Assad’s recent dubbing of Syria as a “resistance state.”

The adjustment in framing Syria’s position in this equation comes in the midst of recent media reports that once again shined the spotlight on Damascus’s growing military integration with Hezbollah.

The first report appeared on May 27 in an exclusive story in the Syrian daily Al-Watan (owned by Assad’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf), immediately following the “Liberation Day” speech by Hezbollah’s Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah. In the speech, Nasrallah threatened that, in the next war, Israel’s ports on the Mediterranean and possibly on the Red Sea would be targeted.

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How Iranian shells reach the Mideast’s seashores

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
09 February '10

The recent assassination of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai has been described as another episode in an ongoing shadow war between Israel and Islamist groups, particularly Hamas and Hezbollah. However, the Mabhouh incident also shed light on another shadowy enterprise underpinning the destabilization of the Middle East and Iran’s quest for regional hegemony, namely Tehran’s smuggling of arms.

One of the details to emerge from the Mabhouh killing was that he played a key role in smuggling “special weapons” to Gaza, and that his trip to Dubai was related to this task. Dubai has long been a hub for Iran’s arms supply efforts to the region. Last year, for instance, the Emirati authorities stopped an Iran-bound ship, the ANL Australia, which was carrying 10 containers of North Korean weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades and components for thousands of short-range rockets.

In recent years, Iranian maritime smuggling of arms has evolved exponentially in the Gulf, across to East Africa and the Red Sea, as well as in the eastern Mediterranean. The networks extend to several hotspots in the region and include Iranian allies and proxies, all of which are used as assets or levers in Iran’s efforts to advance its interests in the Middle East.

The smuggling networks span from the Bandar Abbas port in Iran, across to Yemen’s Aden and Al-Hudaydah ports, the Aseb port in Eritrea, and Sudan’s Port Sudan. The 2002 Karine-A affair, in which Israel intercepted a Palestinian vessel apparently carrying Iranian weapons for Palestinian combatants in Gaza, was a harbinger. The ship used ports in Sudan and Yemen, before heading up the Red Sea, where it was seized.

Last March, a convoy of arms smugglers was bombed, presumably by the Israel Air Force, as it drove from Sudan to Egypt, carrying what some speculated were Iranian Fajr missiles intended for Hamas. Those killed in the strike included Sudanese, Ethiopians and Eritreans, and their route was regularly used by smugglers moving weapons into Egypt. The operation exemplified the complex methods employed by Iran to move weapons into the Sinai, then into Gaza through the Rafah tunnels.

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Playing with Fire in the Levant

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
15 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

The National, a paper in the UAE, fleshes out the Scud missile story:

Although US officials contacted by The National could not completely confirm that such technology had been transferred to Hizbollah by Syria, one official privy to intelligence briefings confirmed a story previously reported in the Israeli press that in the weeks before Senator John Kerry’s visit to Damascus on April 1, Israel almost bombed what it claimed was a convoy of advanced weaponry headed from Syrian military bases to Hizbollah along the shared border with Lebanon.

“I can’t promise you that planes were actually in the air, but it was close, very close,” said the official. “The White House had to talk them down from the attack and promised that Kerry would use strong language” with the Syrian president, Bashar Assad.

When asked about the outcome of the meeting between Mr Kerry and Mr Assad on the issue, the source tartly responded: “In light of where we are now, what do you think?”

As Tony Badran points out, Bashar Assad “is known to have a penchant for brinksmanship.” In this case, he appears to have been saved from the consequences of a particularly foolish gambit by the Obama administration.

But this doesn’t mean the red line hasn’t been crossed. Syria is in fact now in more danger than the Israelis. The IDF’s Arrow missile-defense system can knock Scuds out of the sky with great reliability, so they don’t pose a tremendous a threat. What they do provide to Israel is an opportunity — and they impose a requirement. The fact that they were transferred to Hezbollah in violation of tacit but well-understood red lines gives Israel clear and credible casus belli, should hostilities break out, to expand any conflict to Syria.

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