General Suleimani

 'Qassem Suleimani is the one who has been exporting malign activities throughout the Middle East for some time now. He’s absolutely responsible for killing many Americans, in fact I would say the last two years I was there the majority of our casualties came from his surrogates, not Sunni or Al Qaeda.'

Thus spake Army Chief of Staff General Odierno about Iran's Revolutionary Guard General - Qods Force Commander  General Qassem Suleimani.

Suleimani, now 57, was in his early 20s when he joined Iran's forces in the war Saddam launched against the country in 1980 – a conflict that became the longest conventional war of the last century and which left more than a million dead on both sides in its eight bloody years. Afterwards he was deployed to Iran's eastern border, fighting drug smugglers from Afghanistan. In 1998, he was appointed commander of the Quds (Jerusalem) force.

The Quds Force is the special forces external wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, responsible for supporting terrorist proxies across the Middle East. It reports directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Estimated to be several thousand strong, the Quds force carries out a range of highly sensitive functions: intelligence, special operations, arms smuggling and political action – anything that constitutes protecting the revolution or attacking its enemies, Israel foremost among them. "It combines the functions of MI6, the SAS and DfID," a British official quipped. "It is Iran's long arm – everywhere."

Suleimani was also pictured last year with the son of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah military commander whose assassination in Damascus in 2008 was widely blamed on Israel's Mossad secret service.

Experts agree that is hard to overestimate Suleimani's role in Iraq. "At times of crisis Suleimani is the supreme puppeteer," said Prof Toby Dodge of the London School of Economics. "He is almost like a Scarlet Pimpernel. He is everywhere and he's nowhere. He can be blamed for everything. Suleimani is doing in Baghdad what he did in Damascus – giving advice and help to an ally in trouble, Maliki in this case."

On July 24, one week before Secretary of State John Kerry testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee and faced questions about the newly struck nuclear deal, Suleimani arrived in Moscow for meetings with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and President Vladimir Putin. It was not immediately clear what the Iranian leader discussed, but the revelation comes as the United Nations and European Union arms embargo against Iran is slated to be lifted in five years as part of the comprehensive nuclear agreement announced in July from Vienna.

Kinda make ya wonder why this cat is still breathing...

WoW!

WoW - the Watchers Council- it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.

Every week these cats hook up each other with hot hits and big phazed cookies to peruse and then vote on their individual fancy catchers.

Thusly sans further adieu (or a don"t)

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 1/3 votes!–Joshuapundit–Donkey Kong Politics – The Democrat Field
• Second place with 2 votes–VA Right! – UPDATED: The Truth on Bush and the Economic Collapse of 2008 and Political Lies
• Third place with 1 2/3 votes–The Noisy Room – Louis Farrakhan – “We Must Rise Up & Kill Those Who Kill Us” [Video]
• Fourth place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –The Right Planet – The Neo-Darwinist Probability Problem
• Fourth place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Puma By Design – State Dept Accused of ‘Disinformation’ Campaign; Falsely Claimed Top Israelis Officials Back Iran Deal
• Fourth place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Bookworm Room – Animal Lovers Encourage Murder In Revenge For A Lion’s Death
• Fifth place with 2/3 votes –The Independent Sentinel – EPA Regs Will Close Hundreds of Coal Plants, Block New Ones, Increase Costs 80%
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 votes –The Razor – On Cecil the Lion and Planned Parenthood Videos
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 votes –Nice Deb – Nigerian Human Rights Activist Blasts Obama; Says Bush Did More For Africa
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 votes –Don Surber – Camille Paglia — frenemy of conservatives
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 votes –The Glittering Eye –Fitting the Policy to the Problem

Non-Council Winners 

First place with 2 2/3 votes! –David P. Goldman – Will Israel Save America? submitted by Joshuapundit

• Second place *t* with 2 votes –Megan Fox/PJ Lifestyle –Rebecca Watson: ‘Planned Parenthood Is Not Selling Baby Parts, You F*cking Idiots’ submitted by Nice Deb
• Second place *t* with 2 votes –Sultan Knish – A Tour of Our Decadent Civilization submitted by Rhymes With Right
• Third place with 1 2/3 votes –Victor Davis Hanson/NRO–Israeli Preemptive Action, Western Reaction submitted by Bookworm Room
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –Kathleen Parker/WAPO – The Tipping Point On Planned Parenthood submitted by Don Surber
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –Daniel Greenfield/FrontPage–Obama*Goes Nuclear* on Iran Deal Opponents submitted by The Noisy Room
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Real Clear Defense – Russia’s New Aerospace Forces submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Reps Tom Cotten And Mike Pompeo/WSJ – Release The Secret Iran Deals submitted by The Watcher
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Jonah Goldberg – Ready for Hillary? submitted by The Watcher
• Sixth place with 1/3 vote –Reason.Com – Camille Paglia: Emma Sulkowicz’s Feminism Is About ‘Perpetually Lugging Around Bad Memories’ submitted by The Razor
• Sixth place with 1/3 vote –Seraphic Secret – Bringing Ariel Home submitted by The Watcher

See you next week!

Despot Hunter

Who will be the next dictator in the dock? Two names immediately come to  mind: “Yahia Jammeh,” a military man who has been in power in Gambia since 1994, and “of course Robert Mugabe,” in Zimbabwe, the oldest African dictator

Meet the cat that tracks down supreme leaders!

Tacked to the world map that covers one of the walls of his office, on the 34^th floor of the Empire State Building, in New York, are pictures of his prey: Augusto Pinochet (Chile); Jean-Claude Duvalier (Haiti), Alfredo Stroessner (Paraguay), Pol Pot (Cambodia), Suharto (Indonesia), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Omar al-Bashir (Sudan) — a who's who of warlords, generals, tyrants, rais, dear leaders, number one comrades that, beyond their ideological differences, have all oppressed and massacred their fellow countrymen.

The Problem With Egypt...

Pyramidland!

The military under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s leadership is seeking to rebuild the Nasserist bully state, which was itself in many ways a reconstruction of Muhammad Ali’s version of the same. Maybe it will be a case of third time lucky, but that is unlikely, and not only because military state building has twice failed. The constraints on military state building in 2015 are much greater and the opportunities much fewer than in 1952, to say nothing of 1805. Projection of Egyptian power into the region is not only far more difficult, but as polls show, now opposed by the majority of Egyptians, at least as regards sending expeditionary forces into either Libya or Yemen.   

Assertion of a breast-beating independence à la Nasser is similarly difficult for Sisi when the national economy is kept afloat by the Saudis, Emiratis, and Kuwaitis. Flirting with Moscow now seems weak rather than bold. Rumors of discontent with Sisi’s leadership within the military grow as the economy flounders and the political system remains in deep freeze. There is and can be no equivalent to the Nasserist ideological agenda. The officer republic has so hollowed out civilian state institutions that they barely function.  

In way over its head, the military is simultaneously trying to manage the economy, reconstruct the political system, conduct a counterinsurgency campaign, modernize its own forces, and devise a consistent foreign policy, all without substantial civilian input….Visibly in charge of the state, the economy, public security, and indeed, everything, the military will be held to account for the ever more evident shortcomings. As state decay under military tutelage progresses, onetime terrorists are morphing into insurgents, claiming to be inspired by the Islamic State’s dream of establishing an alternative to the Egyptian state, an unthinkable proposition even for the radical jihadis of the 1990s, to say nothing of the Muslim Brothers.  

More than two centuries of Egyptian state building is now under threat. External support for the Egyptian military only perpetuates the inappropriate model it has perpetrated, further encouraging it to dismiss civilians and to pursue rents rather than to attempt to build a state based on a ruler-ruled relationship that both generates economic surplus and legitimates its extraction.  

The relationship between the Egyptian military and state is turned on its head, with the latter reporting to the former rather than vice versa. The task facing Egypt is thus to reverse this relationship and so terminate once and for all the national myth of military as state builder.

30,000 Pound Bomb

Bombs Away!

For all of the debate and politicking surrounding the Iran nuclear deal, there does seem to be consensus on one question — the absence of a deal increases the likelihood of military conflict with Iran. Walking away from a deal negotiated in good faith with America’s allies would, by many accounts, make it difficult to find a peaceful, diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear problem.

But there’s a much bigger weapon in the American arsenal that could be used to stop Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon. It’s a 30,000-pound bomb. Such a weapon would be necessary to penetrate Iran’s enrichment facility at Fordo.This nuclear enrichment facility was a closely kept secret by the Iranians until satellite imagery shed light on it in 2009. This facility is built deep inside a mountain in order to make it impenetrable to airstrikes, as the Iranians presumably knew any nuclear weapons program would be targeted militarily by the international community.

But Fordo is not completely impenetrable. There is one nation that possesses one weapon with the capacity to crack the mountain facility.

That nation is the United States of America. That weapon is the massive ordnance penetrator. At 30,000 pounds, it is six times the size of the largest bunker-busting bombs that existed prior to its development. It’s more than 20 feet long, nearly 3 feet wide, and delivers a 5,000-pound warhead.

The massive ordnance penetrator is so large it can only be dropped by the United States’ massive strategic long-range bombers, the B-52 Stratofortress, and the B-2 Spirit. Even if the United States didn’t have the only military with the massive ordnance penetrator, it is the only country that could use it.

The weapon is capable of penetrating several dozen feet of concrete before detonating deep underground with a, well, massive explosion.

Palestine Versus Allies And Survival

Ah - the olde Ghost of something something Palestine trumps nation state theory again!

Last week, Dore Gold, the director general of Israel’s foreign ministry, raised eyebrows across the political world when he remarked of Iran: “What we have is a regime on a roll that is trying to conquer the Middle East, and it’s not Israel talking, that is our Sunni Arab neighbours – and you know what? I’ll use another expression – that is our Sunni Arab allies talking.”

Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned Arab states against “talking with Israel and even negotiating with it”. This may have “disastrous results”, he blustered.

Israel cannot have diplomatic progress, let alone anything approaching an alliance, with the Arab world as long as millions of Palestinians remain non-citizens in their own land, with no realistic prospect for freedom. In particular, Israel cannot successfully engage with the Arab states while it is conducting an aggressive settlement project, gobbling up Palestinian land in violation of black-letter international law.

Jordan and Egypt made peace with Israel in their own interests, and those agreements are rock-solid. But Arab states in the Gulf region don’t share the same imperatives. Limited progress might be possible in specific areas. Israel might be able to cooperate with Qatar on reconstruction in Gaza, or with Saudi Arabia on Palestinian national reconciliation and relations between Hamas and Fatah. But despite the diversity in their policies none of the Gulf states will be prepared to enter into anything remotely resembling an alliance with Israel, despite the threat of Iranian hegemony, as long as the occupation continues with no end in sight.

Israelis often debate the cost of the occupation. The fact that it precludes them from building strong working relationships with Arab states with whom they share powerful strategic concerns needs to be factored in as a very high cost indeed.

Imagine a reality in which Mr Gold was completely accurate in referring to Israel’s “Sunni Arab allies”, and what that would mean for Israel’s regional interests and long-term security. And now return to today’s diplomatic reality, in which no matter how much Israel and many of the Arab states agree on the threat posed by Iran’s and the urgent need to counter it, there is a strict limit to how far they can coordinate, largely because of Israel’s own indefensible policies towards the Palestinians. The cost is clear, and prohibitive.

So it looks like Skippy Ibish is making a pretty far fetched point. In the face of Gulf States regimes possible downfall by wicked Persians, the sad old tale of Palestine trumps evberything including their survival.

Retaliation

How would Iran respond in the event of Israeli airstrikes on Tehran’s nuclear enrichment and research facilities? Would Iranian retaliation really be that devastating to the United States and its allies?

1.  Use Diplomatic Channels at the United Nations

For understandable reasons, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu genuinely believes that the Islamic Republic of Iran is run by a collection of unreasonable, unconstrained, irrational men who are too deceptive and/or crazy to deal with. Yet if past history is any guide, the first response from the Iranian Government is likely to be a full-court press at the United Nations against Israel and a formal complaint to the United Nations Security Council, the General Assembly, and the Human Rights Council that Israel’s aggression is a violation of their national sovereignty and a direct infringement of Article 2 in the United Nations Charter.

Using diplomatic channels would be an especially appealing option for President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif—both of whom have devoted their tenure to improving Tehran’s image in the eyes of the world.

A formal Iranian complaint would be dead-on-arrival once it hits the desk of the Security Council, but it would nonetheless serve its intended purpose: demonstrate to the developing world (Russia and China in particular) that the Iranian Government is a responsible power whose sovereignty was targeted by the aggressive actions of another state without sufficient cause. The objective, therefore, is not to actually pass a resolution in favor of Iran, but rather to embarrass Israel and depict it as a belligerent to a wide swath of the global community.

2.  Redoubling support to its proxies

According to a 2013 profile in The New Yorker on Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp-Quds Force, Iran contributed $100 million to Lebanese Hezbollah every year from 2000-2006. Hundreds of millions of additional dollars have been given to the organization since that time — a consistent pool of resources that has permitted Hezbollah to stockpile a conservative estimate of 50,000 missiles in southern Lebanon in preparation for another war with Israel. Tens of millions more have been transferred to Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam brigades since the two began a reconciliation after a falling out over support for the Assad regime. “Apart from using Iranian aid to rebuild the [Hamas] tunnel network,” writes Con Coughlin of the Telegraph, “the Palestinian brigades are also replenishing their depleted stocks of medium-range missiles…”

Because Iran doesn’t share a land border with Israel, you can expect Tehran to extend its material and arms support to both of these organizations after an Israeli air campaign against its nuclear program (Iran would have more resources to do so, given the sanctions relief that it is receiving for implementing the JCPOA). Through improved technology and successful defense research with the United States, Israel has been able to render many of Hamas’ rockets ineffective. Yet even with Israel’s sophisticated anti-missile defense system, it would be difficult to counteract a coordinated attack from Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the west simultaneously. Iran, meanwhile, would still be afforded some small degree of plausible deniability.

3.  Al-Qaeda

It may seem like an incredibly odd thing for Iran to do given its Shia composition, but the country has tacitly worked with Al-Qaeda in the past—a Sunni jihadist group that has killed thousands of people just because they happened to be worshipping in the wrong way. The U.S. Treasury Department has sanctioned numerous Al-Qaeda commanders for using Iran as a staging ground to transfer fighters and money to and from South Asia and the Middle East. And the ayatollahs in Tehran have largely looked the other way when Al-Qaeda is working to target the United States or American interests.

An October 2012 notice from the Treasury Department summarizes the Al-Qaeda-Iran relationship quite well. “This [Al-Qaeda] network uses Iran as a critical transit point and operates under an agreement between al-Qa’ida and the Iranian government,” former U.S. Undersecretary of the Treasury (and now Deputy CIA Director) David Cohen writes. “Under the terms of the agreement between al-Qa’ida and Iran, al-Qa’ida must refrain from conducting any operations within Iranian territory and recruiting operatives inside Iran while keeping Iranian authorities informed of their activities. In return, the Government of Iran gave the Iran-based al-Qa’ida network freedom of operation and uninhibited ability to travel for extremists and their families.”

 

4. Make Afghanistan a living hell

If you think Afghanistan is chaotic today, it can get a lot bloodier if the IRGC-Quds Force increases its covert support to insurgent groups fighting the Afghan national security forces. Whereas Iran and the Taliban were once bitter enemies in the late 1990s (Iran was all but ready to launch military action against the Taliban in 1998 after nine Iranian diplomats were slaughtered by the movement), the two have turned into allies of convenience—if only because both consider the United States to be a major irritant in the region.

Thanks to Wikileaks, we know how extensive that cooperation has been in the past: Taliban fighters training across the border in eastern Iran; Iranian agents providing money and weapons to anti-government insurgent groups; millions of dollars in bribes given to senior Afghan government officials, among other cases. Defense Secretary Robert Gates lambasted Iran in 2010 for “playing a double game” in Afghanistan—supporting the Afghan government with cash, while at the very same time building contacts among the various Afghan insurgent factions.

At a time when the United States is closing out its fourteen-year engagement in Afghanistan, the last thing that Washington wants is an Iraq-style disintegration of that country’s security situation. Yet this is exactly what Tehran could foment in order to retaliate against an Israeli attack. Such a decision would also have the effect of jeopardizing another multi-year U.S. military engagement in a country where Americans have fought and died.

Conclusion

However Iran chooses to respond to an Israeli attack on its nuclear program, Khamenei will instruct the IRGC-QF to do its work as discreetly as possible. Any overt missile attack on an American ally in the Arab world — let alone a conventional missile attack on Israel — would prompt the U.S. armed forces to scramble the fighter jets and deploy the aircraft carriers. This is not something Iran wants and a full U.S. military operation is certainly not something that they can afford to confront.

The name of the game for Iran is to maximize the damage on Israeli and U.S. interests without provoking a conventional military assault from both nations that will degrade its military capability and potentially destroy the regime.