Fall Out In The Mediterranean

Military, strategic and diplomatic co-operation between Turkey and Israel was accorded high priority by both countries.

For almost 500 years, Istanbul was the capital city of a great empire. From here on the Bosphorus, the Ottomans ruled much of southeast Europe, Western Asia and North Africa.

For centuries, the Ottoman rulers were custodians on the places in Jerusalem sacred to Muslims, Christians and Jews. 

In 1922, the Ottoman sultanate was formally abolished and a year later Turkey became a secular republic with Kemal Ataturk as its president.

Turkish-Jewish ties strengthened when Turkey recognised the State of Israel in 1949 - the first mainly Muslim nation to do so. The relationship developed over the next half a century, with strong military and trade links.

Ofra Bengio, from Tel Aviv University, says: "The fact that Turkey was willing to have a relationship with Israel had to do with its relationship with the West and the fear of the Soviet Union. And Israel was part of the West."

But changes in the geopolitics of the region have led Turkey to rediscover its historical ties to the Arab world.

"The areas where we are going to produce gas has nothing to do with Turkey. And yes we look very much forward to being less dependent on imports and hopefully returning to exporters." - Brigadier-General Yossi Kupperwasser, Israeli ministry of strategic affairs

Relations between Turkey and Israel began to sour after the 2008–09 war on Gaza and the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid, in which nine Turks were killed.

Turkey's burgeoning economic interests in the Arab world and its support for the Palestinians is causing a clash between the two allies.

"Turkey's relationship with Israel is indexed to the Palestinian question. And then we have 1,400 people killed by the Israeli forces in attacks on Gaza, so many of them civilians," explains Hugh Pope, from the International Crisis Group. "He [Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan] could't take it anymore. This [to sour ties] was not a Turkish decision."

In addition to that, the discovery and drilling of natural gas reserves off the coast of Cyprus is exacerbating tensions between these two key US allies as they manoeuvre for control of the gas and natural resources in the eastern Mediterranean.

So could this falling out increase tensions in the region? Or can the relationship that has been historically important for both Turks and Jews be restored?

The Real Reason Why The US Fears Iranian Nukes

GOP Senator Lindsey Graham Echoes A Long Line Of US policymakers: Iran Must Not Be Allowed To Deter US Aggression

By Glenn Greenwald,

In the Washington Post today, Richard Cohen expresses surprise that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "starting to make some sense" and "wax rationally". Cohen specifically cites this statement from the Iranian president last week:

"Let's even imagine that we have an atomic weapon, a nuclear weapon. What would we do with it? What intelligent person would fight 5,000 American bombs with one bomb?"

Numerous Iranian leaders, including Ahmadinejad, have long made the same point. And it's a point so obvious it should not even need to be made. No rational person takes seriously the claim that Iran, even if it did obtain a nuclear weapon, would commit instant and guaranteed national suicide by using it to attack a nation that has a huge nuclear stockpile, which happens to include both the US and Israel. One can locate nothing in the actions of Iran's regime that even suggests irrationality on that level, let alone suicidal impulses.

The latest person to unwittingly reveal the real reason for viewing an Iranian nuclear capacity as unacceptable was GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the US's most reliable and bloodthirsty warmongers.

Graham praised President Obama for threatening Iran with war over nuclear weapons, decreed that "the Iranian people should be willing to suffer now for a better future," and then – he explained the real reason Iranian nuclear weapons should be feared:

"They have two goals: one, regime survival. The best way for the regime surviving, in their mind, is having a nuclear weapon, because when you have a nuclear weapon, nobody attacks you."

Graham added that the second regime goal is "influence", that "people listen to you" when you have a nuclear weapon. In other words, we cannot let Iran acquire nuclear weapons because if they get them, we can no longer attack them when we want to and can no longer bully them in their own region.

Graham's answer is consistent with what various American policy elites have said over the years about America's enemies generally and Iran specifically: the true threat of nuclear proliferation is that it can deter American aggression. Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute and the New American Century Project has long been crystal clear that this is the real reason for opposing Iranian nuclear capability[my emphasis]:

"When their missiles are tipped with warheads carrying nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, even weak regional powers have a credible deterrent regardless of the balance of conventional forces … In the post cold war era, America and its allies, rather than the Soviet Union, have become the primary objects of deterrence and it is states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea who most wish to develop deterrent capabilities."

He added:

"The surest deterrent to American action is a functioning nuclear arsenal …

"To be sure, the prospect of a nuclear Iran is a nightmare. But it is less a nightmare because of the high likelihood that Tehran would employ its weapons or pass them on to terrorist groups – although that is not beyond the realm of possibility – and more because of the constraining effect it threatens to impose upon US strategy for the greater Middle East. The danger is that Iran will 'extend' its deterrence, either directly or de facto, to a variety of states and other actors throughout the region. This would be an ironic echo of the extended deterrence thought to apply to US allies during the cold war."

As Jonathan Schwarz has extensively documented, this is what US policy elites have said over and over. In 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned:

"Several of these [small enemy nations] are intensely hostile to the United States and are arming to deter us from bringing our conventional or nuclear power to bear in a regional crisis."

In 2002, State Department official Philip Zelikow said that if Iraq were permitted to keep its WMDs, "they now can deter us from attacking them, because they really can retaliate against us." In 2008, Democratic Senator Chuck Robb and GOP Senator Dan Coates wrote an incredibly hawkish Washington Post op-ed all but demanding an attack on Iran, and wrote:

"[A]n Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear weapons capability would be strategically untenable. It would threaten U.S. national security … While a nuclear attack is the worst-case scenario, Iran would not need to employ a nuclear arsenal to threaten US interests. Simply obtaining the ability to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon would effectively give Iran a nuclear deterrent."

In other words, Iranian nuclear weapons could be used to prevent wars – ones started by the US – and that, above all, is what we must fear.

Whatever one thinks of Iran, the signal the US has sent to the world is unmistakable: 

any rational government should acquire nuclear weapons. The Iranians undoubtedly watched the US treatment of two dictators who gave up their quest for nuclear weapons – Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi – and drew the only reasoned lesson: the only way a country can protect itself from US attack, other than full-scale obeisance, is to acquire nuclear weapons. 

That is precisely why the US and Israel are so eager to ensure they do not.

Via: "The Guardian"

Israel Is Proud To Present: The Aggressor-Victim

Israelis have always loved victimization, not only when we were real victims, as often was the case in our history, but also when we were the aggressors, occupiers and abusers.

By Gideon Levy
Published 01:29 31.10.10
Latest update 01:29 31.10.10
Courtesy Of "Haaretz NewsPaper"

Once upon a time the staple piece of clothing was the blue shirt of the Labor Movement, and songwriter Mordechai Zeira sang about it: "And it's much better than all jewels." A new generation has arrived, and its shirt is darker. Today it's black and bears the legend: We are all the victims of Goldstone.

Dozens of friends of the two Givati Brigade soldiers arrived wearing these infuriating shirts at a military court a few days ago. Their friends had been convicted of overextending their authority while risking the life of an 11-year-old, and to be precise, of conduct unbecoming of soldiers. The soldiers received the scandalous support of senior officers, and the two convicted men have become heroes.

Israel is proud to present: The aggressor-vicitim. History has known crueler and even longer occupations than the Israeli one, and there have been much worse attacks on civilian populations than Operation Cast Lead. But there has never been an occupier who presented himself like that, as a victim.

From the days of Golda Meir, who said we will never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to hurt their children, to the combatants who shot and wept, we have set, courtesy of the Givati troops, a new record of Israeli chutzpah: We are all the victims of Goldstone.

The victimhood, it turns out, belongs not to an 11-year-old child whose life was put at risk and who has been suffering from insomnia ever since, but the soldiers who ordered him to check for explosives, in clear contradiction of a ruling by the Supreme Court.

Not the Samouni family, 21 of whose members were butchered when the same Givati Brigade, under the same commander, bombed the house into which the soldiers ordered the family, but the brigade commander, Ilan Malka, whose conduct is now being investigated, shamefully late. And certainly not the residents of Gaza, who experienced Cast Lead with its hardships, horrors, destruction and war crimes, but the soldiers, who share responsibility with the commanders and politicians.

We've always loved victimization, not only when we were real victims, as often was the case in our history, but also when we were the aggressors, occupiers and abusers. And we don't only cast ourselves as victims, but as the only victims. But observe our perception of our wrongdoing. It started with denial, then changed to suppression, then to shamelessness, then to dehumanization and demonization, until we arrived at the current stage: A pride parade.

The soldiers taking pictures of themselves dancing with prisoners and posing with corpses are proud of what they do. They upload the footage onto the Web, for all to see, and friends of the two Givati troops are equally proud of what their mates have done. They're proud of the conduct of people who broke the law. Their solidarity may be understandable, but it's much more difficult to understand the support of their brigade commander, Col. Moni Katz, and Maj. Gen. (res. ) Uzi Dayan.

What are they saying - that the soldiers acted correctly? That they should not be punished? That they are victims? In that case, we have little to claim from the soldiers, who were only acting according to the spirit emanating from their superiors. But most difficult to understand is the widespread public support for the two. Just like the Nahariya policeman convicted of placing bombs to injure suspected mobsters, they are local heroes and national victims to many.

Do we really want to be proud of the soldiers ordering children to risk their lives, in violation of the law? Is this how we want the army to behave? Will Israeli public opinion never accept that war has rules and that if Israeli soldiers break them, they must be punished? True, they may have been carrying out orders, they may have been jaded and exhausted after three weeks of the assault on Gaza, as the court has heard. But casting them as victims testifies to the chaos overtaking Israel.

So we should go back to basics. The victims of Cast Lead are the 1.5 million residents of Gaza. The "victims" of the Goldstone report are not the two convicts, but their own victims. The shirts worn by their friends in court are proof that these basic truths have been blurred and distorted beyond recognition.

Our Exclusive Right To Self-Defense

Rattling The Cage

By LARRY DERFNER
Oct 7, 2009 22:47
Updated Oct 8, 2009 9:25
Courtesy Of The Jerusalem Post

Virtually all of Israel is now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report, against any attempt to blame us over the war in Gaza. We've honed our message to a sharp point and, inspired by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's performance at the UN, we're delivering it with just the right tone of outrage:

How dare anyone deny us the right to self-defense! How dare anyone deny us the right to fight back against terrorism!

Very nice. Puts everyone else on the defensive. The right to self-defense is up there with motherhood and apple pie - who's going to come out against it, especially for us, for Israel, for the Jews, for the people of the Holocaust?

The right to self-defense - perfect.

But I'd like to ask: Do the Palestinians also have the right to self-defense?

We probably wouldn't admit it out loud, but in our heads we would say - again, in one voice - "No!"

This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We're entitled to do whatever the hell we want to the Palestinians because, by definition, whatever we do to them is self-defense. They, however, are not entitled to lift a finger against us because, by definition, whatever they do to us is terrorism.

That's the way it's always been, that's the way it was in Operation Cast Lead.

AND THERE are no limits on our right to self-defense. There is no such thing as "disproportionate." We can blockade Gaza, we can answer Kassams with F-16s and Apaches, we can take 100 eyes for an eye.

We can deliberately destroy thousands of Gazan homes, the Gazan parliament, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Interior, courthouses, the only Gazan flour plant, the main poultry farm, a sewage treatment plant, water wells and God knows what else.

Deliberately.

After all, we're acting in self-defense. By definition.

And what right do the Palestinians have to defend themselves against this?

None.

Why? Because we're better than them. Because we're a democracy and they're a bunch of Islamo-fascists. Because ours is a culture of life and theirs is a culture of death. Because they're out to destroy us and all we are saying is give peace a chance.

One look at the ruins of Gaza ought to make that plain enough.

Here is our idea of the "laws of war": When Israeli bulldozers rolled across the border into Gazan villages and flattened house after house so Hamas wouldn't have them for cover after the IDF pulled out, that was self-defense. But if a Palestinian boy who'd lived in one of those houses threw a stone at one of the bulldozers, that was terrorism.

The Goldstones of the world call this hypocrisy, a double standard. How dare they! Around here, we call it moral clarity.

Iran, Arms Races, and War

By Stephen M. Walt
Thu, 10/01/2009 - 6:09pm
Courtesy Of Foreign Policy Magazine

One of the arguments that is often invoked to justify a hardline approach to Iran's nuclear program is the fear of a "regional arms race." In this view, if Iran were to get the bomb, neighboring states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt might be forced to get them too, with presumably harmful effects on regional stability. (For a recent invocation of this line of thinking, see Michael Slackman's article in the New York Times today).

One obviously cannot rule out such a possibility out, but there are good reasons not to accept this particular justification uncritically. To begin with, the real danger is not a regional arms race per se, it is the possibility that an arms race might lead to conflict in a critical region (or make it easier for terrorists to steal a weapon). By themselves, arms races just waste money, which is obviously not a good thing but not necessarily a disaster in strategic terms. So the question is two-fold: Would an arms race actually occur if Iran went nuclear, and would it then have dangerous effects on regional stability?

Here the evidence is mixed. With respect the first question, history suggests that one state's acquisition of nuclear weapons does not necessarily produce an immediate flock of imitators. The Soviet Union did get nuclear weapons because the United States had them, and one could argue that Soviet acquisition (and the desire to retain the trappings of great power status) played a role in the British and French decisions to go nuclear in the 1950s. China's decision to get a minimum deterrent of its own undoubtedly reflected their concerns about U.S. (and later, Soviet) power, although Mao seems to have been as worried by the other great powers’ conventional capabilities as by their nuclear arsenals. And it's clear that Pakistan's nuclear program was an obvious response to India's nuclear program. So we obviously cannot rule out the possibility that an Iranian bomb would encourage others to follow suit.

But the overall record on this point is far from clear. There are between 40 and 60 states with the technological capacity and economic wherewithal to build a nuclear bomb, and the vast majority of them have decided not to do so, even when there were other nuclear powers in their neighborhood. A few states have started down that road and then turned back, sometimes in the face of international pressure (Libya, Brazil, Argentina), and sometimes mostly on their own (Sweden, South Africa). Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons in the 1960s did spark some interest in the Arab world, but only Saddam Hussein got really serious about it (and even he gave up trying for nukes in the 1990s). Libya had a semi-serious nuclear program too, but it was hardly a crash program and Ghaddafi eventually abandoned it as well. Iran’s own nuclear program (which began under the Shah) reflected broader security concerns and the Shah's own desire for status, and doesn't appear to have been a direct response to anyone else's bomb. North Korea’s entry into the nuclear club hasn't led South Korea, Japan, or anyone else to start a new nuclear weapons program yet. In short, people have been forecasting the rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons ever since the nuclear age began, but all of those forecasts have been overly pessimistic.

The key point to remember is that a decision to build a bomb involves some complex cost-benefit calculations, and Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon would not necessarily lead any of its neighbors to decide that their best course is to follow suit. One reason they might hold back is simply the recognition that getting a bomb would not enhance Iran's influence as much as is sometimes claimed. China did not suddenly become a more influential power when it tested a bomb in 1964; its rise to true great power status came when it began to modernize its economy in the l980s. Getting a bomb may have reinforced Israel's "existential security" (which is why Ben Gurion wanted one), but having a couple of hundred nuclear weapons doesn’t enable them to blackmail the Palestinians or the other Arab states into doing whatever Jerusalem wants. Similarly, North Korea has hardly any influence in world affairs despite its recent entry into the nuclear club; the only thing that that Pyongyang can do with its weapon is discourage others from putting too much pressure on them. Americans really should understand this: we have several thousand nuclear weapons and we have a tough enough time getting other states -- even rather weak ones -- to do what we want. The same would be true for a nuclear Iran: it could not blackmail anyone because the threat would not be credible, and even nearby states might find it easier to adjust to than we sometimes think .

By the way, this same logic may also help convince Iran that it doesn't need to go all the way to full acquisition of a nuclear capability. It won't buy them much influence, but it still might encourage some of their neighbors to follow suit. Ironically, that situation might decrease Iran’s regional influence over time. Iran is the most populous state in the Gulf region, and it has enormous economic potential. If the mullahs ever get their act together, Iran’s conventional capabilities would overshadow the other states in the region. And if that's the case, crossing the nuclear threshold might lead others to look for a cheap way to counter that. Thus, from Iran's own point of view, staying on this side of the nuclear threshold (but having the capacity to go nuclear quickly if need be), might be the optimal strategy, particularly if they were less worried about an imminent Israeli or U.S. attack.

Next, would a Middle Eastern arms race lead to war? There is a vast academic literature on the general relationship between arms races and war, and the results are at best inconclusive. The empirical results are highly sensitive to the model specification and other definitional questions, and the best short answer is that the effect is highly conditional: arms races may raise the danger of war in some circumstances, but make war less likely in others.

And what about nuclear arms races? Here too, there is a heated academic debate. On one side are those who believe the slow spread of nuclear arsenals might actually be stabilizing (or at least not destabilizing), essentially because the logic of deterrence would kick in, make war too dangerous, and also induce greater overall caution short of war. Other scholars question this optimistic appraisal, and argue that new nuclear states might have trouble establishing stable deterrent relationships and would also create a greater risk of nuclear leakage to terrorists.

I lean toward the former view, but it’s clearly not an open-and-shut case. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the spread of nuclear weapons has generally been stabilizing so far; in the sense that no one has launched a major war of aggression against a nuclear power at any time in the past. (The Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel in the 1973 October War is not an exception, by the way, as it was clearly a "limited aims" attack focused on regaining territory captured by Israel in 1967, and not an attempt to conquer Israel itself). The Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan is probably the most serious counter-example, but even that dispute remained at a fairly low level and fear of nuclear escalation probably played some role in allowing cooler heads to prevail.

There are plenty of good reasons to try to prevent Iran from going nuclear, which is why one hopes that the talks in Geneva will make progress. But the sometimes apocalyptic visions of what an Iranian bomb might mean rest on worst-case arguments about which one should maintain a healthy skepticism. And for other reasons to be skeptical about the current effort to mobilize for war, see Juan Cole's "top ten things you know about Iran that are not true," here.

How Israel Was Disarmed

October 6 2009
Courtesy Of The Wall Street Journal

Jan. 20, 2010

NEW YORK—When American diplomats sat down for the first in a series of face-to-face talks with their Iranian counterparts last October in Geneva, few would have predicted that what began as a negotiation over Tehran's nuclear programs would wind up in a stunning demand by the Security Council that Israel give up its atomic weapons.

Yet that's just what the U.N. body did this morning, in a resolution that was as striking for the way member states voted as it was for its substance. All 10 nonpermanent members voted for the resolution, along with permanent members Russia, China and the United Kingdom. France and the United States abstained. By U.N. rules, that means the resolution passes.

The U.S. abstention is sending shock waves through the international community, which has long been accustomed to the U.S. acting as Israel's de facto protector on the Council. It also appears to reverse a decades-old understanding between Washington and Tel Aviv that the U.S. would acquiesce in Israel's nuclear arsenal as long as that arsenal remained undeclared. The Jewish state is believed to possess as many as 200 weapons.

Tehran reacted positively to the U.S. abstention. "For a long time we have said about Mr. Obama that we see change but no improvement," said Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. "Now we can say there has been an improvement."

The resolution calls for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. It also demands that Israel sign the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and submit its nuclear facilities to international inspection. Two similar, albeit nonbinding, resolutions were approved last September by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

At the time, the U.S. opposed a resolution focused on Israel but abstained from a more general motion calling for regional disarmament. "We are very pleased with the agreed approach reflected here today," said then-U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA Glyn Davies.

Since then, however, relations between the Obama administration and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, never warm to begin with, have cooled dramatically. The administration accused Tel Aviv of using "disproportionate force" following a Nov. 13 Israeli aerial attack on an apparent munitions depot in Gaza City, in which more than a dozen young children were killed.

Mr. Netanyahu also provoked the administration's ire after he was inadvertently caught on an open microphone calling Mr. Obama "worse than Chamberlain." The comment followed the president's historic Dec. 21 summit meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Geneva, the first time leaders of the two countries have met since the Carter administration.

But the factors that chiefly seemed to drive the administration's decision to abstain from this morning's vote were more strategic than personal. Western negotiators have been pressing Iran to make good on its previous agreement in principle to ship its nuclear fuel to third countries so it could be rendered usable in Iran's civilian nuclear facilities. The Iranians, in turn, have been adamant that they would not do so unless progress were made on international disarmament.

"The Iranians have a point," said one senior administration official. "The U.S. can't forever be the enforcer of a double standard where Israel gets a nuclear free ride but Iran has to abide by every letter in the NPT. President Obama has put the issue of nuclear disarmament at the center of his foreign policy agenda. His credibility is at stake and so is U.S. credibility in the Muslim world. How can we tell Tehran that they're better off without nukes if we won't make the same point to our Israeli friends?"

Also factoring into the administration's thinking are reports that the Israelis are in the final stages of planning an attack on Iran's nuclear installations. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who met with his Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak in Paris last week, has been outspoken in his opposition to such a strike. The Jerusalem Post has reported that Mr. Gates warned Mr. Barak that the U.S. would "actively stand in the way" of any Israeli strike.

"The Israelis need to look at this U.N. vote as a shot across their bow," said a senior Pentagon official. "If they want to start a shooting war with Iran, we won't have their backs on the Security Council."

An Israeli diplomat observed bitterly that Jan. 20 was the 68th anniversary of the Wannsee conference, which historians believe is where Nazi Germany planned the extermination of European Jewry. An administration spokesman said the timing of the vote was "purely coincidental."

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A21