Aim for the bull's eye, or at least the center

Noah Pollak
JPost Op-Ed
22 November 09

The writer is a graduate student at Yale University and a contributor to Commentary Magazine's blog, Contentions. Formerly, he was assistant editor of the Shalem Center's Azure magazine.

Two recent events focus the mind on the growing failure of Israeli grand strategy: the UN's endorsement of the Goldstone Report and the capture of the Francop cargo ship, laden with arms destined for Hizbullah.

From 1948 until 1973, Israel's enemies fought conflicts that largely adhered to the traditional doctrines of combat. Wars had start and end dates, soldiers wore uniforms, and armies fought on behalf of states. Every time, however, they lost - often humiliatingly.

After the Yom Kippur War in 1973 the United States sought to preempt this constant conflict by forming an alliance that gave the Jewish state a conspicuous military advantage over any regional challenger. The Arabs got the message: Egypt and Jordan eventually sued for peace, and Israel's other enemies have not launched a conventional war since.

But those foes have not stopped fighting. Today, Syria and Iran - the so-called "resistance bloc" - pursue a new strategy of building up the capabilities of terrorist militias who fight in their place.

Despite the tactical defeat groups such as Hamas and Hizbullah have suffered on the battlefield, the larger strategy has been working. It allows Iran and Syria to take credit in the region for antagonizing Israel without risking retaliation on their soil; it detaches conflict from regime security, reducing the disincentive for war; and it forces battles into densely-populated civilian areas, undermining the IDF's military superiority and ensuring civilian destruction which today's media and NGOs - an increasingly meaningless distinction - blame on Israel, not on the terrorist groups who start the wars.

(Read full article)
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Iran and Hizballah: Significance of the Francop Interception

Jeffrey White
The Washington Institute for NEP
PolicyWatch #1600
12 November 09

PolicyWatch #1600 is the first of a two-part series examining recent military developments involving Hizballah and Hamas. The second part will focus on Hamas's acquisition of long-range (60 km/37.5 mile) artillery rockets.

On November 3, 2009, Israeli naval forces intercepted an Antigua-flagged cargo ship approximately 100 miles off Israel's coast. The ship, the Francop, was brought to the port of Ashdod and searched, leading to the discovery of some 500 tons of weapons reportedly from Iran. Israeli officials believe the cargo was bound for Hizballah via Syria. While Iran has been sending arms to Hizballah through Syria for years, this case has important military and political implications.

Iranian arms supplies underwrite Hizballah's political position in Lebanon, increase the risk for a conflict with Israel, and ensure that any such conflict will be more intense and lengthier than if Hizballah lacked such support. This most recent affair also shows Iran's willingness to risk embarrassing exposure in its support for Hizballah, even as it engages in sensitive negotiations with the international community over its nuclear program. This underlines the strategic nature of the Iran-Hizballah relationship and the importance Iran attaches to Hizballah as a component of its own deterrent arm.

The Francop's Cargo

The Francop was seized after being stopped, boarded, and searched by Israeli naval commandos supported by surface naval units. The preliminary search revealed arms hidden in commercial cargo containers. According to the shipping documents, the cargo was originally loaded in Bandar Abbas, Iran, brought by another ship to the Egyptian port of Damietta, and then transloaded to the Francop, with an ultimate destination of Latakia, Syria. This destination was confirmed by Syria's foreign minister, although he denied that the shipment included arms. Neither the ship's crew nor the Egyptian authorities apparently had any knowledge of the cargo's nature.

Following the preliminary search, the Israelis escorted the Francop to the port of Ashdod, where a complete search revealed the full extent of the arms shipment. Labels on the shipping containers and shipping documents, as well as markings on ammunition crates and the ammunition itself, established a clear link to various Iranian government organizations, including the Iranian state shipping line and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

This was a large and important shipment involving up to 500 tons of weapons stored in thirty-six containers. Reports and video from the Israeli military have indicated the presence of the following weapons:

2,800 artillery rockets (122 and 107 mm)

9,000 mortar shells (60, 81, and 120 mm)

20,000 fragmentation grenades

600,000 7.62-mm rounds for infantry weapons

3,000 106-mm rounds (for recoilless rifles)
Not found, or at least not reported, were larger and longer-range types of artillery rockets, such as the Fajr-3 and Fajr-5, and advanced types of antitank missiles, such as the AT-5 and AT-14. Apparently, no munitions types that would result in a significant upgrade of Hizballah's military capability, such as surface-to-surface or surface-to-air missiles, were discovered.
(Continue reading...)
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The mullahs' big week

Caroline Glick
carolineglick.com
06 November 09

At first glance, this past week seems like a week that Iran's mullahs would very much like to forget. Early Wednesday morning, IDF naval commandos boarded the merchant ship Francop and diverted it to the naval base at Ashdod. There the IDF displayed its cargo of 3,000 rockets and various and other sundry ordnance useful only to terror forces.

The Francop originated in Iran and was intercepted en route to Iran's Hizbullah proxy force in Lebanon via Iran's Arab toady Syria.

As Israel's political leadership noted, this shipment constitutes hard proof that Iran is actively sponsoring terrorist armies in Lebanon, and doing so in full breach of binding UN Security Council resolutions. The commando raid also exposed the depth of Syria's collusion with Iran in arming Hizbullah. After Israel's seizure of the Francop, voices claiming that Syria is but a bit player in the terror game can be laughed off the international stage.

Israel's interception of the Francop came a week after Yemeni forces seized an Iranian ship transporting armor-piercing weapons to Houthi Shi'ite rebels in northern Yemen. As Saudi Arabia's Al-Watan reported over the weekend, Iranian Revolutionary Guards are training Houthi rebels in Eritrea and sponsoring their insurgency against the Yemini regime.

Earlier in October, the Hansa India, which sailed from Iran to Germany, fell under suspicion as it made its way to Syria. It was diverted from Egypt to Malta, where its cargo of bullets and industrial materials intended for weapons production was removed.

On Wednesday morning, just as Israel was announcing the capture of the Francop, scores of thousands of Iranians in cities throughout the country took advantage of the regime's planned demonstrations celebrating the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the US Embassy in Teheran to protest against the regime. These regime opponents willingly placed themselves in front of the batons, tear gas cannons and guns of Iranian regime goons to protest June's stolen presidential election and to call for the overthrow of the mullahs' regime of tyranny and its replacement with a democracy.

The protesters turned regime supporters' calls for "Death to America," and "Death to Israel" into big, deadly jokes by calling out, "Death to the Dictator" (that is, supreme ruler Ali Khamenei) and "Death to Russia."

Far from embracing the regime's 30-year war against the US and the nation-state based international system, representatives of the "Green Revolution" asked the US to forgive Iran for taking 52 US Embassy personnel hostage in 1979.

Back in Israel, for the past two weeks some 1,400 US military personnel have been deployed throughout the country for the biennial Juniper Cobra missile defense exercise with the IDF. Although Juniper Cobra is a routine maneuver, this year's exercise was unprecedented in size and scope. Observers claim that there have never been so many American generals in Israel at one time.

No previous Israeli-American joint exercise has been conducted with such a high profile. And Israeli leaders did not hesitate to name the enemy in this year's exercise. This year's Juniper Cobra exercise, they said, was part of the two nations' preparations for a joint response to a potential Iranian strike against Israel. The obvious message Israel and the US hoped to transmit to Teheran was that the strategic alliance between the two countries remains strong.

ALL IN all then, on the surface, this past week seemed like a horrible week for the mullahs. But appearances can be deceiving. Unfortunately and counterintuitively, the past week has been one of the best weeks the mullahs have had for a long, long time. Certainly, it was the best week the Iranian regime has had since it falsified the results of the June 12 presidential elections.
(Full article)
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NY Times Misses Iranian Connection

Honest Reporting/Backspin
05 November 09

NY Times readers can be forgiven for not believing Iran is connected to arms boat seized en route to Syria. Reporter Myra Noveck writes:

News reports quoted the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, and other officials saying the ship had been carrying the arms from Iran to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, but officials released no evidence to support those claims.

Heh. AP detailed that evidence:

Open crates from a cargo ship seized Wednesday by Israel revealed dark green missiles inside. Containers from the vessel bore writing in English that said "I.R. Iranian Shipping Lines Group." . . . .

Some of the weapons were hidden in the Francop's containers behind stacked bags of polyethylene labeled in English "NPC National Petrochemical Company," and the flame logo used by both the company and the Iranian Petroleum Ministry . . . .

The Francop's containers were carefully unloaded on army forklifts to avoid accidental detonation. Some of the containers had the initials "I.R.I.S.L.'' printed on one side and the fuller title, "I.R. (Islamic Republic of) Iran Shipping Lines Group" on the other. Explosives experts and dog-sniffing units examined the haul.

The Israeli military said cargo certificates showed the ship departed an Iranian port for Syria, from where the weapons would be transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The military did not show the documents, and Syria denied the vessel was carrying weapons.

The AP story is on the NYT's web site. Good thing the Gray Lady's not experimenting with dropping AP content this week.

UPDATE: I see The Guardian and The Independent made similar mistakes.

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Shipped in Plain Sight

J.E. Dyer
Contentions/Commentary
05 November 09

As the tale of the “New Karine A” develops, one alarm bell it sets off concerns the ease with which the arms transshipment was brought off in plain sight. The ship the Israelis caught with the arms was M/V Francop, a freighter operated by Cyprus-based United Feeder Services. The crew onboard didn’t know what they were carrying, and didn’t carry it from Iran anyway: they picked their cargo up in Damietta, Egypt. The Israelis had tracked Francop from Beirut to Damietta and knew the cargo was loaded there. That means the arms themselves were shipped from Iran to Egypt by other means. Sounds like a story we’ve heard before about Port Sudan and overland convoys to Gaza, right?

Not really. The port of Damietta is neither a remote spot in the desert nor a sleepy Sudanese port. It’s one of Egypt’s premier seaports, located on the Mediterranean near the entrance to the Suez Canal. Damietta has some distinctive claims to fame: it’s in a heavily promoted Egyptian free-trade zone and is operated by DIPCO, an international consortium of private maritime-service companies whose pathbreaking development project at Damietta serves as a model for a global trend toward the private development and operation of ports.

Private administration of customs and cargo verification, the functions that might detect arms shipments, is not unusual. But under these conditions, transshipments of cargo through free-trade zones — shipments offloaded only to await further transportation to another country — are especially likely to receive a hand wave. The port operator’s priority is to tally containers and assess fees, not to break open containers and inspect their contents. Damietta’s convenient location in the eastern Mediterranean means that transshipments represent a large majority of its container traffic. Most of what stops there is merely waiting onward transportation and interests neither Egypt nor the port-services operator.

A big shipment from Iran, meanwhile, would raise no eyebrows in Damietta. Iran’s state shipping line, IRISL, was one of the first shipping companies to contract with DIPCO for services in Damietta, and two of IRISL’s subsidiaries make regular stops there. Containers bearing the IRISL logo are routinely present.

It would be hard to dream up a set of circumstances more conducive to perfunctory supervision of cargo. But these same circumstances represent a cash cow for Egypt. Private companies optimizing the profitability of port operations are a moneymaker, not only for growing economies but also for the Middle Eastern nations in which many of the companies (like DIPCO’s leader, Kuwait & Gulf Lines Ltd.) are based. The beneficiaries of this trend will kick hard against any inefficiency introduced by the administration of UN sanctions. Ultimately, intermediate transshipment ports aren’t going to represent effective pressure points for arms interdiction. The most effective pressure point would, as usual, be Iran itself, and that reality demands not so much administrative meticulousness as political will.

Related: Israel Navy Intercepts Iranian Shipment,

The New Karine A

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Israel Navy Intercepts Iranian Weapons en route to Hezbollah, 4 Nov 2009

The Israel Navy intercepted the "Francop" cargo ship, which was laden with roughly 500 tons of weapons hidden amongst civilian cargo. The 36 weapons containers were sent from Iran and meant for the Hezbollah terrorist organization in Lebanon. For further information on how the interception occurred and what was uncovered.