Iran Stays Put in Syria, Raising the Stakes with Israel and the USA

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 12 point plan to force Iran into complying with normative international behavior is still driving the public discourse on the rogue regime’s nuclear ambitions.  While the Europeans have fought to hold onto the JCPOA, the US has slammed harsh sanctions on Tehran giving the EU a choice  – choose between Iranian oil or the US markets and financial institutions.

For Iran’s part they have not backed down.  If anything they see Pompeo’s speech given at the Heritage Foundation on May 21st as a “declaration of war.”  In usual Iranian parlance they have redoubled their efforts to strengthen their positions in Syria as well as ordering their Houthi proxy in Yemen to increase missile attacks..



For Israel, Iranian intransigence and its deepening hold on the southern areas of Syria pose the  most dangerous threat.  While Russia has appeared to sit back allowing Israel to roll back Iranian advancements, it still continues to provide advanced weaponry to Assad as well as allowing the Iranians to restock their forces in Syria.

Putin has masterfully pinned both Israel and Iran against each other in Syria allowing him to strengthen his holdings while ensuring the growing conflict between the Mullahs and Jerusalem keeps the USA’s focus off of his actions.

Will Jordan Fall to Iran?

Iranian and Hezbollah troops in southern Syria are not only becoming a threat to Israel, but are in a position to harm Jordan.  While there are significant US troops by the Yarmuk, they will be over matched by Hezbollah and Iran, if Putin decided to provide air support for any attacks the group may need to carry out cross border attacks in the fragile Hashemite kingdom.

Expect protests by Palestinians to continue against the King at the same time the kingdom faces an external threat from Iran.

Clash Between USA and Iran Inevitable

Anyone who believed that Iran would learn from new USA sanctions is missing the point on why the Trump administration pulled out of the JCPOA.  The Trump team determined it is far better to face a weaker Iran now than a regional powerhouse with nuclear capabilities in a few years. Trump’s team like many clear-sighted people understand that the Iranian regime will not change.  Afterall the Mullahs are set on conquest. It is part of their ideology and religious belief set.  The Iranian leaders will not stop being a menace to global security unless they are removed.

Syria is now ground zero for the coming war between the USA and Iran.




Netanyahu Attends Victory Day Celebration in Russia, But Iran is the Real Focus

It may appear strange that Prime Minister Netanyahu would spend time at a Victory Day celebration in Russia less than a day after President Donald Trump took the United States out of the JCPOA otherwise known as the Iranian nuclear deal. With the Israel’s northern border on high alert for Iranian reprisals after the IAF destroyed a cache of weapons last night, Netanyahu could of skipped the Victory Day celebration, even if he was the honored guest.

Yet, in the fast-moving events of the Middle East, attending the celebration is of utmost importance. “I am now leaving for an important meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin,” Prime Minister said. “The meetings between us are always important and this one is especially so. In light of what is currently happening in Syria, it is necessary to ensure the continued coordination between the Russian military.”

Coordination is the key.  With war on the horizon, Israel must ensure that any flare up does not unintentionally kill Russian soldiers on the ground in Syria.  If that happens then Putin will take a far different approach to Israel.

Does Putin Want Iran Pushed Back?

Although it appears Putin is an ally of Iran, historically this has not been so.  With the Mullahs taking advantage of the Syrian chaos to take up forward positions opposite Israel, the Iranian regime has complicated Putin’s strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean.  While not enthused by Trump’s bravado against Iran, Putin has grown impatient with the Shiite movements in the region.  Iran and Russia have diverging interests when it comes to Syria.

Putin’s Syria entanglement has been merely to ensure  he holds onto two key Russian bases in northwestern Syria along with creating a blocking strategy. In the early stage of Russian involvement he needed foot soldiers to consolidate Assad’s regime.  The Iranians and Hezbollah happily volunteered.

Netanyahu’s mission in Russia is twofold.  He must ensure Putin that Israel’s increased attacks on Iranian positions in Syria are meant to push Iran out, not harm Moscow’s interests and second Netanyahu is acting as a sort of intermediary between Presidents Trump and Putin.

Prime Minister Netanyahu said the following to President Putin before their meeting: “I very much appreciate the opportunity to discuss regional problems with you, the attempts as you put it, to resolve the crises, to lift the threats in a prudent and responsible manner.”

The events of the next few weeks will flow from actions undertaken by Israel and the USA in the next few days as well as the agreements or the lack there of between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Putin.

 

Caroline Glick: 5 Key Points About the U.S.-Led Syria Strike

The United States, United Kingdom, and France joined in a combined operation on April 14 that used “precision” strikes against Syria’s chemical weapons infrastructure. The following are key points about the raid.

1. Operationally, the strike showed the U.S. has the capacity to conduct airstrikes with allies, against significant targets, with minimal lead time.

It took less than a week for the U.S. and its allies to organize and position the air and naval platforms they used to carry out the missile assault. Indeed, according to the Wall Street Journal, Secretary of Defense James Mattis delayed the strikes twice, despite operational readiness.

This demonstration of operational speed and competence tells us two things. First, President Donald Trump is respected by U.S. allies. French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May trusted Trump’s seriousness of purpose enough to join him in launching the missile strikes with little to no diplomatic jockeying.

In 2013, when then-president Barack Obama geared up to attack Syrian regime targets after Syrian President Bashar Assad killed 1,400 people in a sarin gas attack on East Ghouta, the British parliament refused to authorize British forces to participate in the planned strike.

The French, for their part, were left in a lurch by Obama. French bomber pilots were in their cockpits waiting to take off when they were informed that Obama had called off the airstrikes at the last minute.

In addition, Saturday’s strike showed that the U.S. has the capacity to degrade and destroy high value targets through indirect fire. U.S. pilots did not have to fly over their targets to bomb them. By the same token, if it chooses to do so, the U.S. can destroy the vast majority of Iran’s nuclear installations from a safe distance with Tomahawk and other precision guided weapons.

2. The operational success of the missile strike does not infer either tactical or strategic gains.

Tactically, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is correct that by bombing chemical weapons targets, the U.S. and its allies “set [the Syrians’] chemical weapons program back years.”

At the same time, the advance warning the U.S. provided the Syrians regarding the impending strike gave the Syrians the opportunity to remove significant assets and manpower from bases and installations before they were attacked.

As a consequence, high value materials and personnel were probably not at the installations when they were attacked on Saturday morning.

Haley said on CBS News’ Face the Nation that the U.S. was not interested in “killing anyone” in the attack. That is fine in and of itself. But by providing advance warning of the impending strike, the U.S. diminished the tactical losses that Syria incurred. This is doubly true given that according to Mattis and Marine General James Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the installations attacked were engaged in developing sarin gas. To date, the U.S. and its allies have said that they lack conclusive evidence that the April 7 chemical attack involved sarin. According to Mattis, they have only been able to determine conclusively that the Assad regime used chlorine gas in the attack. In other words, Syria’s ability to carry out further chlorine attacks was apparently not diminished on Saturday morning.

3. From a strategic perspective, it is difficult to know whether the strike was meaningful, largely because the Trump administration has given contradictory statements about its actual goals in Syria.

Officially, the Trump administration’s goal in Syria is the same goal that the Obama administration articulated: defeating the “Islamic State,” or ISIS. Mattis has been assiduous in opposing the expansion of that strategic goal. His insistence on preserving Obama’s strategy in place in Syria has confounded observers, who note that the purpose of Obama’s campaign against Islamic State was to protect the Assad regime to placate Iran in the hopes of developing a strategic alliance with Teheran. Obama’s keenness to align U.S. policy with Iranian interests made him blind to the threat that Teheran’s expansionism and nuclear proliferation constituted to the U.S. and its allies.

On Saturday, Mattis told reporters the missile strike was a “one-time shot.” Last Thursday, Mattis told  Congress, “Our role in Syria is the defeat of ISIS. We are not going to engage in the civil war itself.”

Following Saturday’s strike, chief Pentagon spokesperson Dana White said, “This operation does not represent a change in U.S. policy nor was it an attempt to depose the Syria regime.”

But then, it isn’t clear the degree to which Mattis speaks for President Trump.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump pushed Mattis and his generals to expand the range of the attack to punish Iran and Russia for enabling the regime’s use of chemical weapons. Trump was reportedly “unhappy with the more limited options they… presented to him.” The same report indicated that Mattis said that “anything other than a ‘show strike’ risked broader escalation with the Russians in particular.”

With former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson gone, the Journal report claimed that Mattis was the lone voice calling for the U.S. to take no strategically significant action. Haley, along with new National Security Advisor John Bolton and Acting Secretary of State John Sullivan, all supported a more expansive effort.

In her interview on Face the Nation, Haley contradicted Mattis’s position that Obama’s strategy in Syria must be preserved. Haley indicated that the U.S. goals in Syria extend beyond defeating ISIS. Haley said the US has three goals it needs to achieve before it can withdraw its military forces from the country. First, she said, the US needs to ensure that there can be no “chemical weapons usage anywhere.” Second, she said that ISIS needs to be fully defeated. Third, Haley said, “We want to make sure that the influence of Iran doesn’t take over the area. They continue to cause problems throughout the region and we want to make sure that there is a hold.”

Haley added, “The president has asked the allies to step up and do more when it comes to Syria.” Apparently, they are.

On Saturday night, the Syrian media reported loud explosions at an Iranian base south of Aleppo. According to reports – which were contradictory – unidentified aircraft executed the strike. Some reports alleged that the aircraft were Israeli. If Israel did strike the Iranian base, it would be the second Iranian position Israel has been accused of bombing in the past week.

Speaking to his cabinet Sunday morning, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “The element that is undermining the Middle East more than any other is Iran, and … President Assad must understand that when he allows Iran and its proxies to establish its military presence in Syria, he is endangering Syria and the stability of the entire region.”

4. The U.S.-led attack signaled that at least for now, the U.S. has made its peace with Russian power in Syria and the wider Mediterranean basin.

Mattis succeeded in blocking any action against Russian interests in Syria. As Dunford noted, the Pentagon was in close contact with the Russians to ensure that there was no conflict between U.S. and Russian forces in Syria. Mattis’s explicitly stated concern with avoiding conflict with Russia indicated that at least as far as the Pentagon is concerned, the U.S. must not challenge Russia’s entrenchment in Syria.

Regardless of the actual policy adopted regarding Russia, objectively, Russia’s presence in Syria is a problem for the U.S. for three main reasons. First, Russia views its deployment in Syria first and foremost as a means to restore Russia’s superpower status by challenging U.S. power. In other words, Russia’s main goal in Syria is to weaken the U.S.

Second, U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia are no match for Russia. So long as Russia remains in Syria, it facilitates and protects Iran’s entrenchment in the country. Since neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia can contend with Russia, they cannot prevent Iran from effectively taking over the country both directly and through its Syrian and Hezbollah proxies. In other words, dealing with Russia is a job the U.S. cannot subcontract to its regional allies and they cannot achieve their regional goals so long as Russia remains unchallenged.

Finally, the Russian presence in Syria is a problem for the U.S. because it expands Russia’s influence over Turkey at America’s expense. It is true that Turkey has not been a credible U.S. ally for several years. But it is also true that the more Putin pushes Turkey away from the U.S., the more damage the U.S. will suffer to its strategic interests in the region.

The U.S. may very well lack good options for challenging Russia. Obama’s acquiescence to Russia’s entrenchment in Syria destroyed U.S. dominance in the Middle East in one fell swoop. Haley claimed Sunday that the U.S. intends to punish Russia for its facilitation of Assad’s war crimes by implementing new sanctions against Russian “companies that were dealing with equipment related to Assad and chemical weapons use.”

It remains to be seen how those sanctions will impact Putin’s cost-benefit analysis. But it is hard to see that sanctions, however harsh, will outweigh what Putin perceives as the benefits of maintaining Russia’s presence in Syria.

5. Saturday’s strike showed that the U.S. is again a force to be reckoned with in Syria.

Despite the limited if not altogether nonexistent immediate tactical and strategic significance of the strike, by undertaking it, Trump took another important step towards restoring U.S. credibility and power in the region. This is a necessary precursor to any tactically and strategically significant operation in the future. Since the administration is clearly revisiting its strategic posture and goals in Syria, this is an altogether positive achievement.

Obama wrecked U.S. credibility in the Middle East, and arguably worldwide, in 2013, when at the last moment he failed to enforce the red line he drew regarding chemical weapons attacks. It is not clear that his red line, according to which the U.S. would respond to chemical weapons attacks, was a reasonable one. By saying the U.S. would respond to chemical attacks, Obama signaled that conventional killing methods were fine by him. Assad, who used conventional munitions to kill nearly half a million people, understood the message and continued killing.

But whether or not Obama’s red line was rational is beside the point. Once Obama drew a line in the sand, and then failed to maintain it when it was challenged, he weakened America in a fundamental way.

As a consequence, Trump has to defend Obama’s red line to restore American power and credibility. By retaliating against Assad’s April 7 chemical attack in Douma — and doing so with Britain and France – Trump communicated clearly that the U.S. demands respect. This message was a necessary precondition for successfully implementing whatever strategic goal the president and his team adopt regarding Syria and its Iranian and Russia sponsors.

Originally Published in Breitbart.

Israel Must Brace for Impact

The “smart” missiles have now been fired into Syria and according to the Pentagon they were successful.  For all of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, the operation to degrade Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities took a few short hours on Saturday.  On the surface of it, Trump accomplished his goal of destroying Assad’s ability to harm civilians using chemical weapons while not getting involved enough to draw Russia into a direct confrontation.

Of course, on the ground things are far different.  Within a few hours of the missile barrage, unidentified aircraft struck an Iranian base in Aleppo, Syria.  Most sources suggest this was an Israeli attack. Iran and Russia have already pledged to respond to the US attack, which will most likely take the form of attacking an American proxy rather than the US itself.  Stability was never an adjective to describe Syria, but whatever semblance of order there was it had not completely vanished until now.

Despite Bibi Netanyahu’s public support for the US attack on Syria, Israel has little need or desire for an American attack which will end up causing the Jewish state serous damage. Russia’s response will be calculating and not come right away. Putin has held Iran and Hezbollah back from attacking Israel. This has seemingly changed after Trump’s attack on Syria.

Although Israel has the free reign to do what is necessary, Russian involvement may neutralize some of its capabilities when dealing with an Iranian/Hezbollah advance into the Golan or the Galilee. While Russia is no America and Iran’s traditional military has taken a backseat to its ballistic missile program, both would be a formidable force for the Israeli military to defend against.

Trump’s attack on Syria, while forceful was merely a quick carrying out of a hit and run strategy that may have unknown consequences on geopolitical structures in the Middle East and the broader region.

Trump’s day of reckoning for Syria has come and gone, but Israel’s standing in relation to Russia has now deteriorated placing its populace in direct danger.

Israel must now brace for full impact as it is the number one target for Russia and Iran’s retaliation against America.

 

Kurds Losing Ground to Turkey in Afrin

Kurdish forces in the Afrin Canton of northwest Syria continue to lose ground to the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) and their terrorist allies known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA). This Free Syrian Army made up of thnic Turkmen should not be confused with the militia of the same name in the south. What seemed to be a growing quagmire for Erdogan and the TAF has now given way to a Turkish push towards Afrin City.  The current success of the TAF is significant for a variety of reasons.

  1. Syrian forces have yet to take up arms against Turkey despite Assad’s rhetoric
  2. Russia continues to stand aside and allow his rival Erdogan to push back against the Kurds
  3. The US has clearly decided to consolidate the SDF/YPG holding on the eastern side of the Euphrates

The moves in Syria allow for Erdogan to save face by keeping his invasion of Syrian Kurdistan to the isolated Afrin district while giving the US what it has wanted, Turkish acquiesence to a Kurdish proto-state east of the Euphrates. It is clear that Russia has abandondoned the Kurds of Afrin, that is unless the Turks overstay their welcome and invade Afrin City, then the unstable arrangement detailed above may come apart.

Image Source: Syrian Civil War Map