I wonder if Ahmadinejad ran to the well and asked Mahdi "WTF?"
Posted on 10/07/2007 5:19:04 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
A meticulously planned, brilliantly executed surgical strike by Israeli jets on a nuclear installation in Syria on 6 September may have saved the world from a devastating threat. The only problem is that no one outside a tight-lipped knot of top Israeli and American officials knows precisely what that threat involved.
Even more curious is that far from pushing the Syrians and Israelis to war, both seem determined to put a lid on the affair. One month after the event, the absence of hard information leads inexorably to the conclusion that the implications must have been enormous.
That was confirmed to The Spectator by a very senior British ministerial source: ‘If people had known how close we came to world war three that day there’d have been mass panic. Never mind the floods or foot-and-mouth — Gordon really would have been dealing with the bloody Book of Revelation and Armageddon.’
According to American sources, Israeli intelligence tracked a North Korean vessel carrying a cargo of nuclear material labelled ‘cement’ as it travelled halfway across the world. On 3 September the ship docked at the Syrian port of Tartous and the Israelis continued following the cargo as it was transported to the small town of Dayr as Zawr, near the Turkish border in north-eastern Syria.
The destination was not a complete surprise. It had already been the subject of intense surveillance by an Israeli Ofek spy satellite, and within hours a band of elite Israeli commandos had secretly crossed into Syria and headed for the town. Soil samples and other material they collected there were returned to Israel. Sure enough, they indicated that the cargo was nuclear.
Three days after the North Korean consignment arrived, the final phase of Operation Orchard was launched. With prior approval from Washington, Israeli F151 jets were scrambled and, minutes later, the installation and its newly arrived contents were destroyed.
So secret were the operational details of the mission that even the pilots who were assigned to provide air cover for the strike jets had not been briefed on it until they were airborne. In the event, they were not needed: built-in stealth technology and electronic warfare systems were sophisticated enough to ‘blind’ Syria’s Russian-made anti-aircraft systems.
What was in the consignment that led the Israelis to mount an attack which could easily have spiralled into an all-out regional war? It could not have been a transfer of chemical or biological weapons; Syria is already known to possess the most abundant stockpiles in the region. Nor could it have been missile delivery systems; Syria had previously acquired substantial quantities from North Korea. The only possible explanation is that the consignment was nuclear.
The scale of the potential threat — and the intelligence methods that were used to follow the transfer — explain the dense mist of official secrecy that shrouds the event. There have been no official briefings, no winks or nudges, from any of the scores of people who must have been involved in the preparation, analysis, decision-making and execution of the operation. Even when Israelis now offer a firm ‘no comment’, it is strictly off the record. The secrecy is itself significant.
Israel is a small country. In some respects, it resembles an extended, if chaotic, family. Word gets around fast. Israelis have lived on the edge for so long they have become addicted to the news. Israel’s media is far too robust and its politicians far too leaky to allow secrets to remain secret for long. Even in the face of an increasingly archaic military censor, Israeli journalists have found ways to publish and, if necessary, be damned.
The only conceivable explanation for this unprecedented silence is that the event was so huge, and the implications for Israeli national security so great, that no one has dared break the rule of omertà. The Arab world has remained conspicuously — and significantly — silent. So, too, have American officials, who might have been expected to ramp up the incident as proof of their warnings about the dangers of rogue states and WMDs. The opposite is true. George Bush stonewalled persistent questions at a press conference last week with the blunt statement: ‘I’m not going to comment on the matter.’ Meanwhile the Americans have carried on dealing with the North Koreans as if nothing has changed.
The Syrian response, when it eventually came, was more forthcoming but no more helpful. First out of the blocks was Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Ja’afari, who happily announced that nothing had been bombed in Syria and nothing had been damaged.
One week later, Syria’s Vice-President, Farouk a-Shara, agreed that there had, after all, been an attack — on the Arab Centre for the Studies (sic) of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD). Brandishing a photograph of the Arab League-run plant, he declared triumphantly: ‘This is the picture, you can see it, and it proves that everything that was said about this attack was wrong.’
Well, perhaps not everything. The following day, ACSAD issued a statement denying that its centre had been targeted: ‘Leaks in the Zionist media concerning this ACSAD station are total inventions and lies,’ it thundered, adding that a tour of the centre was being organised for the media.
On Monday, Syria’s President, Bashar Assad, offered his first observations of the attack. The target, he told the BBC disingenuously, was an unused military building. And he followed that with vows to retaliate, ‘maybe politically, maybe in other ways’.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post noted that the United States had accumulated a growing body of evidence over the past six months — and particularly in the month leading up to the attack — that North Korea was co-operating with Syria on developing a nuclear facility. The evidence, according to the paper, included ‘dramatic satellite imagery that led some US officials to believe the facility could be used to produce material for nuclear weapons’. Even within America’s intelligence community, access to that imagery was restricted to just a handful of individuals on the instructions of America’s National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley.
Why are all sides so reluctant to clarify the details of this extraordinary event? ‘In the Middle East,’ noted Bret Stephens, a senior editorial executive at the Wall Street Journal and an acute observer of the region, ‘that only happens when the interests of prudence and the demands of shame happen to coincide’. He suggested that the ‘least unlikely’ explanation is a partial reprise of the Israeli air strike which destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.
Another of the ‘least unlikely’ possibilities is that Syria was planning to supply its terrorist clients with ‘dirty’ bombs, which would have threatened major cities throughout the world. Terrorism is a growth industry in Syria and it is only natural that, emboldened by its Iranian ally, the Syrian regime should seek to remain the market leader by supplying the ultimate weapon to Hezbollah, Hamas and a plethora of Palestinian rejectionist groups who have been given house-room in Damascus.
The Syrians have good reason to up the ante now. The Alawite regime of Bashar Assad is facing a slew of tough questions in the coming months — most particularly over its alleged role in the murder of the former Lebanese leader, Rafiq Hariri, and its active support for the insurgency in Iraq. Either of these issues could threaten the survival of the regime. How tempting, then, to create a counter-threat that might cause Washington and others to pull their horns in — and perhaps even permit a limited Syrian return to Lebanon?
But that does not explain why the consignment was apparently too large to be sent by air. Look deeper and you find an array of other highly plausible explanations. The North Koreans, under intense international pressure, might have chosen to ‘park’ a significant stockpile of nuclear material in Syria in the expectation of retrieving it when the heat was off. They might also have outsourced part of their nuclear development programme — paying the Syrians to enrich their uranium — while an international team of experts continued inspecting and disabling North Korea’s own nuclear facilities. The shipment might even — and this is well within the ‘least unlikely’ explanations — have been intended to assist Syria’s own nuclear weapons programme, which has been on the cards since the mid-1980s.
Apart from averting the threat that was developing at Dayr as Zawr, Israel’s strategic position has been strengthened by the raid. Firstly, it has — as Major General Amos Yadlin, the head of Israel’s military intelligence, noted — ‘restored its deterrence’, which was damaged by its inept handling of the war in the Lebanon last year. Secondly, it has reminded Damascus that Israel knows what it is up to and is capable of striking anywhere within its territory.
Equally, Iran has been put on notice that Israel will not tolerate any nuclear threat. Washington, too, has been reminded that Israel’s intelligence is often a better guide than its own in the region, a crucial point given the divisions between the Israeli and American intelligence assessments about the development of the Iranian bomb. Hezbollah, the Iranian/Syrian proxy force, has also been put on notice that the air-defence system it boasted would alter the strategic balance in the region is impotent in the face of Israeli technology.
Meanwhile, a senior Israeli analyst told us this week that the most disturbing aspect of the affair from a global perspective is the willingness of states to share their technologies and their weapons of mass destruction. ‘I do not believe that the former Soviet Union shared its WMD technology,’ he said. ‘And they were careful to limit the range of the Scud missiles they were prepared to sell. Since the end of the Cold War, though, we know the Russians significantly exceeded those limits when selling missile technology to Iran.’
But the floodgates were opened wide by the renegade Pakistan nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is revered in Pakistan as the Father of the Islamic Bomb. Khan established a virtual supermarket of nuclear technologies, parts and plans which operated for more than a decade on a global stage. After his operation was shut down in 2004, Khan admitted transferring technology and parts to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Proliferation experts are convinced they know the identities of at least three of his many other clients: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
In addition to selling nuclear-related knowhow, the Khan network is also believed to have provided Syria with centrifuges for producing enriched uranium. In 2003, concern about Syria’s nuclear ambitions was heightened when an experimental American electronic eavesdropping device picked up distinctive signals indicating that the Syrians had not only acquired the centrifuges but were actually operating them.
If Israel’s military strike on Dayr as Zawr last month was surgical, so, too, was its handling of the aftermath. The only certainty in the fog of cover-up is that something big happened on 6 September — something very big. At the very least, it illustrates that WMD and rogue states pose the single greatest threat to world peace. We may have escaped from this incident without war, but if Iran is allowed to continue down the nuclear path, it is hard to believe that we will be so lucky again.
Reading comprehension alert: The article actually mentions "least UNlikely" events, not "least likely".
Russia had to know the security system sold to Syria and Iran was crap. How could they not?
Ahhhh. And therein lies the conundrum. How can one fight a successful WOT if you don't know who or what is coming across your wide open borders?
I’m honestly not too concerned about Hillary in the White House as far as this sort of thing is concerned. She loves power and loves herself, and has no interest in getting nuked or having to take up long-term residence in a bunker. She’s as smart as she is unscrupulous, and she’ll do what’s needed in the international security arena. However, she’d be a domestic policy disaster and an overall ethical disaster, so I view keeping her out of the WH as a top priority — just not for international security reasons. President Bush is already reportedly cluing her in on the reasons he’s taking the positions he’s taking, and she’s backing off any serious opposition to his foreign policy actions.
Kerry and Gore would have been a whole different story. They’re both as stupid as they are unscrupulous, and could screw up things like this with truly earth-shattering consequences. Edwards may technically be smart, but I think he’s so thoroughly obsessed with idiotic things that he’d be prone to taking his eye off the ball with equally disastrous consequences. Obama is too weak to matter. In the unlikely event that he wins the WH, the Hillary machine will actually be running things.
He's trying to make it sound like that would be a bad thing.
It only makes sense if it were low level nuclear material that would require much additional processing to make into a bomb. By letting it reach the intended destination, you get a twofer.
I doubt if it were a warhead, they would have let the ship sail, much less go anywhere.
Syria already has the components for a nuclear warhead. In the facility that we have satellite photos of and that the Israeli’s bombed. We watched the Russians take the stuff there just prior to our liberation of Iraq from Saddam.
What they didn’t have was the means to launch it and reach England, France, the US,and especially Israel without getting shot down (an ICBM with evasive capabilities).
This is what NK likely supplied. This is what NK has been testing. (remember Lil Kim’s missile tests a few months ago?????)
“God bless Israel”
I was moved to speak those words to an IDF JAG officer and her husband at the Judge Advocate General School in 2005.
They looked at each other, smiled, then said to me,
“God bless America!”
:^)
P.S. We didn’t stop them at sea because,
If we did, what would we find?
A Missile. An ICBM. So what.
No law against having those. It didn’t have a nuke mounted on it.
We would have ended up with a major diplomatic blunder on our hands, and no chance to do a darn thing about it. (we being US and Israel).
So. Now you know. A FR exclusive.
PPS.
This is the big ‘threat’ that Ahm-a-jackhead has been sputtering off about for the past few months.
It is why he and Beshear have been so kissy-face recently.
Iran would be ‘innocent’ since the missile would come from Syria, and Iran figured that the Coalition forces would blame Iran and attack, drawing in most of the middle East, and possibly NK, China, etc.
They waited until they had the soil samples to prove it was nuclear. That’s what the story says anyway.
Well, let's see.
NK gives Syria the components they still needed to go nuclear - and they are lock step with Iran.
They are intent on wiping Israel off the map...no secret there. Ahmadinejad has repeated almost as a mantra that he will "wipe Israel off the map" and he has said he dreams of "a world without America".
Ahmadinejad is not insane, he is dedicated. He really believes his mission on earth is to carry out the actions needed for Mahdi - the promised one of the Shiites' who, since age 9, has been hiding in a well for over a thousand years, to return. They believe Mahdi will come back and they will rule the world.
Ahmadinejad, who makes regular visits to the well and drops messages to Mahdi, believes he has been chosen to get the world ready, as it were. This means widespread destruction and bloodshed. He has voiced all this many times. We find such beliefs 'unbelievable' and so we hardly hear them or dismiss them.
WE should not.
They are puffed up with their infallibility - Iran's military is one of the largest in the world. Syria and Iran also thought they had, with their new Russian detection equipment, safety from retaliation no matter what they did. They are also mad enough to do it - but now they know they are blind and that everything they do is seen...
I had a friend years ago who worked in National Safety - some 30 years ago - and even then, he said if the people on the street knew one tenth of the dangers that we have faced and that have been thwarted, we'd never sleep.
I tend to believe the writer in that if we knew how close we came ... there would've been panic.
In addition, had the mission not been conducted in secret, there would've been so many people posturing and demanding this and that - much of it in hopes to gain personal and political power - that all hell could've broken loose. Myself, I'm glad we have the grownups in the WH. GW plays a mean hand of poker. And he does not have the psychotic need, as did our former pres., to be front and center, taking the credit for every move. His objective is to get what needs to be done, done. End of story.
WE must wake up and realize that there is a culture out there that wants us all dead. The danger is real. And they are NOT people either interested in sitting down and talking things out - nor, indeed have the thought processes that we can understand...all we need to remember is, they want us - all infidels in the world - dead.
They want to win though, not lose. This incedent on sept 9 proves that israel cannot lose.
They did. And they also had a pretty good idea of what kind of future revenue stream they could depend on when upgrade time came...
And if the Israeli raid failed to destroy the target, (potentially a dirty nuke warhead or low yield nuclear device), the Syrians would have been compelled to use it quickly. Use it or lose it. That was possibly the risk of a greater 'Armageddon' type scenario. It seems odd that 20 to 40 North Koreans would be present just to handle a dirty nuclear device. They must have been doing much more then just playing with a big bomb surrounded with radioactive material.
I wonder if Ahmadinejad ran to the well and asked Mahdi "WTF?"
President Bush is already reportedly cluing her in on the reasons he’s taking the positions he’s taking, and she’s backing off any serious opposition to his foreign policy actions.
~~~~~~~~~~
I’ve been thinking about this too. You know ol’ slick willie has taken alot of heat over letting bin laden go and he really gets mad when the subject comes up. If hillary got in, I really don’t think she’d back off on the war. At least not for a few years. I think she’d find some way to show that bush is a dummy and screwed up royally and now she’s going to take care of it the right way once and for all.
It’s just a hunch.
Russia got the money, Syria and Iran got stiffed.
If the ship was from NK a known nuclear power attacking a ship flying under its flag is an act of war and NK may have made it nuclear. By waiting for the shipment to enter Syria, it made NK no longer involved and the nuclear threat off the table.
I agree if this was a bullshit attack you would have seen people in the streets chanting death to Israel. But they didnt because the Isralies took out their nuclear factories that they told the UN they did not have.
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