Category Archives: Russia

IAEA Just Gave up on Iran Nuclear Verification

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Oh my, Barack Obama lied…..not only in verbal form but in written form. Now other world leaders, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, France, Israel and more will indeed have some forceful response to Barack Obama.

Then there is the issue of releasing the billions in frozen funds back to Iran and the further lifting of sanctions. But the biggest questions are still not answered: Exactly where is Iran with their nuclear weapons program, does it continue unimpeded and what with other threatened countries do now?

 this deal provides the best possible defense against Iran’s ability to pursue a nuclear weapon covertly — that is, in secret.  International inspectors will have unprecedented access not only to Iranian nuclear facilities, but to the entire supply chain that supports Iran’s nuclear program — from uranium mills that provide the raw materials, to the centrifuge production and storage facilities that support the program.  If Iran cheats, the world will know it.  If we see something suspicious, we will inspect it.  Iran’s past efforts to weaponize its program will be addressed.  With this deal, Iran will face more inspections than any other country in the world. (the full Barack Obama statement here as posted on the White House website)

President Obama sold his nuclear deal with Iran with promises that the accord would be based on “unprecedented verification,” and this week we were reminded of how much that promise was worth. Witness the latest report on Iran’s nuclear program from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The IAEA is the U.N. outfit that is supposed to monitor Iran’s compliance with the agreement, which requires Tehran to answer the agency’s questions on its past nuclear work in order to obtain sanctions relief. On Wednesday the agency produced its “final assessment”—the finality here having mostly to do with the U.N. nuclear watchdog giving up hope of ever getting straight answers.

Hence we learn that “Iran did not provide any clarification” regarding experiments the agency believes it conducted on testing components of nuclear components at its military facility at Parchin. “The information available to the Agency, including the results of the sampling analysis and the satellite imagery, does not support Iran’s statements on the purpose of the building,” says the report. “The Agency assesses that the extensive activities undertaken by Iran since February 2012 at the particular location of interest to the Agency seriously undermined the Agency’s ability to conduct effective verification.”

This seems to be A-OK with the Obama Administration, which made clear it’s prepared to accept any amount of Iranian stonewalling in order to move ahead with sanctions relief. “We had not expected a full confession, nor did we need one,” an unnamed senior Administration official told the Journal. One wonders why they even bothered with the charade.

Still, the report is illuminating on several points, above all its conclusion that Tehran continued to work on nuclear weapons research until 2009. That further discredits the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which claimed Iran’s weapons program had ceased in 2003, and which effectively ended any chance that the Bush Administration would use military force against Iran’s nuclear sites.

It should also inspire some humility about the quality of Western intelligence regarding closed and hostile regimes such as Iran’s. A 2014 report from the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board noted that at “levels associated with small or nascent [nuclear] programs, key observables are easily masked.” Yet the Administration keeps insisting that Iran’s nondisclosures don’t matter because the U.S. has “perfect knowledge” of what the mullahs are up to, as John Kerry claimed last summer.

The larger point is that the nuclear deal has already become a case of Iran pretending not to cheat while the West pretends not to notice. That may succeed in bringing the agreement into force, but it offers no confidence that Iran won’t eventually build its weapon.

Dabiq, Syria: Cubs and Pearls

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Cubs and Pearls: A generational war, there is no end.

Dabiq is the sophisticated online magazine for Islamic State. What is Dabiq?

Dabiq

TheGuardian: Dabiq is a small, rather nondescript town in northern Syria, close by the border with Turkey. It’s more of a large village really, with just a few thousand inhabitants.

And it is of limited strategic interest. Not far south, in the sprawling city of Aleppo, where battle rages, Bashar al-Assad continues to drop his untargeted barrel bombs on its Sunni population, thus rallying more and more jihadis to the black flag. Yet it is Dabiq after which Islamic State (Isis) names its glossy recruiting magazine. For this is the place where the world will come to an end.

Like Judaism and Christianity – and strongly influenced by them – Islam has a powerful eschatological strain. It anticipates the end of the world and a final historical confrontation between good and evil, after which human life is set to be miraculously transformed. And according to one reading of Islamic tradition (hadith), the place where this final malahim (apocalypse) will happen is – of all places – Dabiq. This is where the Muslim and Christian armies will finally face each other and the Crusaders will be destroyed. And this is why Dabiq is the name on the lips of Isis recruiting sergeants.

It is worth noting that Isis is extremely selective in its use of hadith. For instance, other parts of the tradition have it that Jesus, dressed in yellow robes, will return east of Damascus and will join forces with the Islamic messiah, the Mahdi, in a battle against the false messiah, the Dajjal. After the death of the Mahdi, it is the Muslim Jesus who will rule the Earth. This hadith is less useful to Isis, though its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, looks to many observers to be trying to style himself as the Mahdi.

The Battle of Marj Dābiq (Arabic: مرج دابق‎, meaning “the meadow of Dābiq”; Turkish: Mercidabık Muharebesi) was a decisive military clash in Middle Eastern history, fought on 24 August 1516, near the town of Dabiq, 44 km north of Aleppo, Syria.[1] The battle was part of the Ottoman–Mamluk War (1516–17) between the Ottoman Empire and the Mamluk Sultanate, which ended ultimately in an Ottoman victory, the conquest of most of the Middle East by the Ottoman Empire, and the end of the Mamluk Sultanate. The Ottoman Empire’s victory in this battle gave it control of the entire region of Syria.

Abraham Ortelius - Tvrcici imperii descriptio.jpg

 

The Ottoman–Mamluk War of 1516–1517 was the second major conflict between the Egypt-based Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire, which led to the fall of the Mamluk Sultanate and the incorporation of the Levant, Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula as provinces of the Ottoman Empire.[1] The war transformed the Ottoman Empire from a realm at the margins of the Islamic world, mainly located in Anatolia and the Balkans, to a huge empire encompassing the traditional lands of Islam, including the cities of Mecca, Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo. It continued to be ruled however from Constantinople

Russian Threats Mount, Include Propaganda Machine

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‘Nothing is real, anything is possible’: Inside Putin’s propaganda machine

 

State Official: Russian Nuclear-Armed Drone Sub Threatens US

Moscow questioned on secret drone program

FreeBeacon: Russia’s development of a nuclear-armed drone submarine capable of inflicting widespread damage on U.S. coasts poses a serious threat, a senior State Department official testified on Tuesday.

Rose Gottemoeller, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, told a House hearing that she has raised the issue with the Russians.

“I know we are concerned about it; of course we are concerned about it as threat to the United States,” Gottemoeller said under questioning from Rep. Mike Turner.

The undersecretary, who is the key policymaker for arms control issues, said the system would be a greater threat if “widely put into operation.”

The comment prompted Turner to reply: “One would probably be sufficiently troubling.”

“I think it is a troubling system, sir,” Gottemoeller said. Much more here.

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Putin’s False Narrative

ISW: President Vladimir Putin is actively misinforming his domestic audience and the international community about Russia’s first military intervention outside the former Soviet Union since Afghanistan. Putin has created a false narrative about the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) to disguise the true objectives behind Russia’s intervention Syria and is using this narrative to manipulate the international community. Putin encapsulated this false narrative in his UN speech calling for an alternate international coalition against ISIS on September 28, two days before the start of Russia’s air campaign in Syria.  Russia intervened in Syria on September 30 not to defeat ISIS, but rather to curb U.S. influence in the Middle East and to project Russian military power into the region to a historically unprecedented degree.
Russia’s air campaign is focused on targeting Syrian armed opposition groups fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad rather than ISIS. Russia has grounded the rhetoric surrounding its military intervention in Syria in the immediate domestic terror threat posed by ISIS. ISIS includes an estimated 7,000 foreign fighters from the former Soviet Union and declared its own governorate in Russia’s restive North Caucasus region. Moscow does view ISIS as a legitimate security concern, but the dissonance between Russia’s claimed objectives and its actual behavior reveals that Russia uses anti-ISIS rhetoric as a pretext to pursue its larger strategic objectives. Russia seeks to preserve the Syrian regime and diminish the influence wielded by the U.S. and its regional allies, which support the Syrian opposition. Regime preservation in Damascus is a core Russian objective that enables Russia to cement its foothold in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean Sea while simultaneously expanding its influence through partnerships with Iran and the Iranian network of regional proxies. Putin is leveraging disinformation in order to obfuscate his true objectives in Syria and thereby manipulate the U.S. and regional actors into inadvertently helping Russia achieve its goals.

Meet the Bravery in Syria

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The Pentagon and Joint Chiefs Chairman is in full opposition with the White House that Islamic State is contained.

WashingtonTimes: The nation’s top military officer on Tuesday said the U.S. has “not contained” the Islamic State, contradicting President Obama’s reassuring remarks last month just before the terrorist attacks in Paris.

“We have not contained ISIS,” Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers at a House Armed Services Committee hearing, referring to the terror group by its acronym, The Hill reported.

Gen. Dunford said the Islamic State has been “tactically” contained in areas in Iraq and Syria since 2010, but said “strategically they have spread since 2010.”

He said the terror group poses a threat beyond Iraq and Syria, to countries such as Egypt, Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon and Jordan, The Hill reported.

Gen. Dunford gave his testimony alongside Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, who announced Tuesday that the U.S. will expand its special operations force in Iraq and Syria to help fight militants.

In part from HuffPo: “We crossed the border at 3 a.m.,” Saleh said in an interview with The Huffington Post last week. He remembers the time for a reason: It was the moment he attained relative safety for himself and his family. Crossing into Turkey meant they had successfully outrun the Syrian army’s airstrikes. Saleh never imagined it would one day be his job to run back toward the bombing.

But three years after he escaped from Syria, that’s exactly what this former electronics merchant is doing. Saleh left his family in Turkey and returned to Syria to become a member of the White Helmets, a group of local volunteers who carry out search-and-rescue operations amid the country’s increasing violence and mounting destruction.

The White Helmets, also known as the Syrian Civil Defence, are apolitical, refusing to align themselves with any one group or military faction. Founding members of the White Helmets were trained by the Red Cross, and the Syria Campaign, a nonprofit registered in the U.K., helps coordinate fundraising efforts for the group.

“We work with everybody to help everybody,” Saleh said. Not concerned with the allegiances of the bombers or of those bombed, their focus is saving lives — and they routinely put their own lives on the line to do it.

“When we hear the sound of an airplane, we respond quickly. We ask civilians where the bombing took place. We ask the neighbors if they know if there is still anybody under the destruction,” Saleh explained. “Sometimes we’re able to rescue lives, when we have the proper equipment. And sometimes we can’t.”

In the three years since the start of the Syrian civil war, an estimated 191,000 lives have been lost, according to a United Nations report released in August — although the report noted that the real number is likely higher.