Another joint analysis of the developing Gaza situation with amysun. Read and enjoy!

(And those of you who follow my blog for politics may want to start reading hers, as well. We're probably going to do many more of these joint posts in the future.)

It's an interesting developing situation. I mispredicted: I expected that if Israel rolled into Gaza on the ground, it would do quick deep-penetration manoeuvers to wipe out selected "hard targets" which couldn't be hit from the air. Instead, it appears that this is a massed-force invasion. Part of this probably means that intelligence wasn't quite good enough to really wipe out the bulk of Hamas' military capability from the air. (DEBKA reports that the first day of bombing eliminated about 1,800 of Hamas' 8,000 Qassam [short-range] rockets, and the campaign so far has eliminated about 50% of their Grad [longer-range] rockets. At Hamas' new reduced rate of 80 rockets per day, they are still armed for about 2 months of firing, which is long enough for a war to end and for them to resupply.) Another thing this means is that Israel is probably going to go after Hamas' built-up infrastructure more thoroughly, including their enormous network of underground bunkers and facilities. That's going to be a particularly brutal sort of warfare, but it's probably necessary since the Gaza Strip is one of the most heavily tunneled places in the world.

I'd still conjecture that the invasion is meant to last on the scale of weeks rather than months, but there's now the distinct possibility that Israel will still be occupying significant ground positions within Gaza when Obama is inaugurated.

Ah, a new year. A perfect time to start posting about things going "Boom" in the Middle East.

This time, though, the post isn't going to be here. The lovely and talented amysun and I have been sitting together over the past few days and discussing the situation in Gaza in great depth, and she's posted her summary of the situation, together with a good backgrounder for those who are just joining, over on her blog. So head on over and take a look.

On 6 Sep 2007, Israel bombed the hell out of a facility in Syria which, rumor has it, was nuclear in nature. Today the CIA gave a presentation to Congress showing the detailed evidence, which the Washington Post has kindly presented here.

Some conclusions from looking at this, and being generally familiar with nuclear equipment. This is very, very different from the rather dubious WMD intel used in Iraq; rather than fuzzy satellite photos, someone appears to have been able to walk around and inside the building during its construction with a camera and take pretty clear pictures, which can then be compared in detail with some very good-quality satellite photos.¹

Assuming that the pictures are real, they are a smoking gun.² This building was a nuclear reactor; it was of a type that can be used to produce Plutonium for nuclear weapons, but is utterly useless for any research or power generation purpose;³ it appears to be a slightly smaller⁴ carbon copy of the North Korean Plutonium production reactor at Yongbyon; it was in a shape that could probably be started up within weeks when it was destroyed; there is clear and repeated evidence of extensive NORK involvement in its design, construction, and operation.

Now, a more interesting question. This reactor was obviously very close to startup, which means they had to have nuclear fuel lying around somewhere in fairly large volumes. (There's no evidence at all that Syria was working on the ability to enrich Uranium on their own, as Iran is) I'm guessing that the bombing didn't hit a large fuel storage area, since everyone else would have noticed clouds of radioactive soot and dust and generally been a lot more worried. Presumably this fuel came from some combination of North Korea, Russia and Pakistan. (Those being the three people with fuel who would even remotely consider doing business with Syria)

So... where is it?

Presumably Syria's next move is to try to build again, this time deep underground. NORK nuke people were on-site within days of the original attack, probably to do damage assessment; my guess is that they would tell al-Assad that this is what he gets for trying to build on the cheap in the desert, and if he really wants to protect his sites he'll invest in their better-concealed designs. This is going to lead to something a lot harder to find and destroy. The main things which would prevent that is if the Syrians started to run low on money, or if the government suddenly found itself with enough bigger problems on its hands that extremely expensive construction projects became less enticing.

---

¹ Whereas the Iraqi WMD photos that Colin Powell infamously presented to the U.N. were largely satellite photos with analyses explaining why this particular group of trailers could be a bio weapons plant, that group of trailers could be a chemical weapons storage facility. There was never anything up-close or really unambiguous there; at least, nothing that anyone outside the CIA ever seems to have seen.

² Well, at this point, more like a smoking hole in the ground, but I digress.

³ It's not good for power generation for a couple of reasons, but the most obvious one is that there's no power plant attached to it, and the building very obviously has no room to attach one. The cooling system is simply transporting heat as quickly as possible into the Euphrates river, rather than using that heat to drive a turbine. Also, this would be a very bizarre place to build a power plant, since it was in the middle of nowhere in the desert. (And goats don't really need that much electricity) It's not good for research because the entire reactor vessel was placed about as inconveniently for experimenting with it as is humanly possible, it has almost no access points for probes or tweaks (as is clear from the top and side pictures), and this general design is very inflexible. Of course, Syria isn't exactly famous for its physics research, so one can't imagine that there was really an active cutting-edge science program going on there for other reasons as well.

⁴ Count the holes on the top for reactor rods; this one is 9 holes across at the top, Yongbyon is 11, but it's clearly a scaled-down carbon copy of the design.

According to Jimmy Carter, Hamas is ready for peace -- if Israel withdraws to its 1967 boundaries (i.e., cedes all of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan, and half of Jerusalem) immediately, it will agree to a ten-year cease-fire.

Translation: "If you accede to our demands right now, we won't attack you¹ for the next ten years."

My suggested answer: "Cus 'emac.²"

¹ Of course, we reserve the right to arrange for other groups to attack you, or to transfer our weapons to other groups.

² When one of my officemates asked what that phrase meant, someone else walking by translated: "Well, the second word means 'your mother.'"

So remember that case of an Israeli plane having to jettison its bombs over Syrian airspace about two weeks ago? It's been becoming clear over the past week that there was a good deal more to it. The Washington Post is now reporting as straight news (not rumor) that this was a concerted Israeli attack against a suspected Syrian nuclear site, constructed with North Korean assistance, and the attack staged after conferring with the US.

So there are quite a few pretty explosive statements in that last sentence.

(1) Syrian nuclear site -- this is the first mention of Syria trying to get the Bomb. I'm quite sure that they want it, but it wasn't at all clear that they'd made any steps towards getting one. I'm still not 100% convinced that this was really a nuke facility -- but it was some kind of extremely-high-value military target, the sort of thing that you risk a sneak attack in the dead of night for.

(2) Maybe the most interesting thing about this attack is what didn't happen. Has anyone heard any Arab government making loud warnings about the consequences of Israeli aggression? Or the Saudis arranging for broad denunciations of Israel on pan-Arabic television stations? Or for that matter, has anyone even heard the Syrians complaining about the fact that they just got bombed?

Nope. Me neither. There's been a deafening silence.

Tehran has been making some veiled threats (their assistant minister of defense making statements about how the military has contingency plans to bomb Israel if Iran is attacked), but even that's been pretty quiet.

My read on this: First of all, I appear to have grossly overestimated how well Bashar al-Assad is doing. If he's in such a weak plae that he doesn't feel that he can loudly complain and get sympathy from the Arab world, then he knows that the Arab world doesn't care if he lives or dies, and that he knows that the threat of an Israeli attack against Syria proper is very severe.

This makes some other things make more sense. For one thing, there's been this planned war. I can see how Hamas and Hezbollah would come out ahead from it - but Syria? If Syria were to try to get into a war with Israel, it would be defeated almost immediately. Its military capabilities have been deteriorating since the Soviet Union fell apart, and they weren't all that great even then. al-Assad isn't backing this war, he's trying to figure out ways to make sure it happens way the hell away from him.

It also means that a coup against al-Assad is still a very real possibility. He's never been popular at home. (Nor was his father, really. Not a nice fellow.) His habit of establishing Syrian influence in Lebanon by assassinating opposing politicians (another one was killed in a car bomb just last week) makes neighboring countries nervous. And frankly, trying to build a nuclear facility (or anything else similarly likely to bring down unpleasant foreign interest) in that area is just plain stupid -- the western Islamic world is trying to get the situation to calm down, so that they can try to contain Iran, and doing something like that could trigger another massive military "event" in the region. Or even worse, he could actually get the Bomb, and start to lord it over other Arab states, which they frankly would like a lot less than Israel doing the same. At least they know that Israel isn't going to try to destabilize their regimes or take over.

Anyway, while all this is happening the situation in Gaza is continuing to get tenser. The Israeli government has referred to the regime in Gaza as a hostile one, and the border continues to be completely closed; Gaza's economy has pretty much shut down. Hamas continues its low-level fighting with Israel.

My expectations for the immediate future: There will be further Israeli actions to shut down Hamas' military capability in Gaza, especially focused on shutting down their arms supplies via the Philadelphi Corridor. (Along the Gaza/Egypt border) Most of these operations will be secretive, but a few may be loud and public. At the same time, there's a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiation going on to try to head off a war; but several factions are trying to sieze power in Lebanon, Syria is trying to get involved in that, and there could be a coup in Syria at any time. (Or none) Both Syria and Lebanon are on the brink of civil war, and if that war gets serious enough Hezbollah is going to have too many problems at home to start exporting trouble. Israel is going to have elections soon, (probably the government will dissolve in a few months; public confidence in Olmert is extremely low) but policy probably won't change too radically no matter who is elected.

So we're looking at a period of quiet fighting and delicate manoeuvering, with a chance for localized all-out conflagrations.

Those "positive statistics" you hear from him seem to be an excellent case of how to manipulate data. Here's a nice article from the Washington Post summarizing the issue. For example, the report is touting the reduction in sectarian violence, but

Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

Ilan Goldenberg summarized it nicely:

"So to recap. The violence numbers do not include: 1) Sunni on Sunni violence. 2) Shi'a on Shi'a violence 3) Car bombs 4) Getting shot in the front of the head."

General Petraeus was chosen for this job in no small part so that he would be the one giving this testimony to Congress; and he was chosen for that because he's widely respected. But him coming before Congress, not reporting on his own professional judgement but on that judgement as modified to accord with administration goals, is a farce.

On the other hand, Adm. William Fallon (commander of CENTCOM) recently spoke at the Commonwealth Club and gave a very interesting talk about his own background and how he sees the present situation in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa. I must say that he's impressed me a great deal of late; his presence in CENTCOM strikes me as some of the best news coming out of that part of the world these days.

Slight heat-up in activity in the Middle East. Apparently Syrian air defenses fired on an Israeli recon flight, forcing it to drop its bombs and fuel in an empty chunk of desert. Story just in from the wires.

Future impact unclear. The latest rumor mill I've heard is that Syria wanted to reschedule the war that was supposed to happen this past summer (which was going to be some joint Hamas / Hezbollah / Syria / logistics by Iran effort, but got scotched because Hamas and Fatah decided to have a civil war instead) for mid-November, but that sort of specific rumor has to be taken with a nontrivial grain of salt. Nonetheless, the basic schedule seems likely; all four of those groups still really want a war right about now, and it's just a matter of when is convenient.

Impact on US domestic politics, when that happens, will be an interesting question as well.

Via gleemie, from "Jihad: The Musical!" -- just closed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival --

"I Wanna Be Like Osama"

sy4 posted this lovely little find:

An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City. At least 175 people were slaughtered on Tuesday and more than 200 wounded when four suicide truck bombs targeted people from an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq, officials said. (AFP/Wissam al-Okaili)

So, What's Wrong With This Picture?

Actually, there are two things -- one obvious, one subtle. See if you can catch them both.

( Why source-checking is importantCollapse )

In order to counter allegations that his foreign policy stance is naïve, today Barack Obama threatened to invade Pakistan.

Boy, he sure countered that allegation. Does he intend to conquer and hold a country of 157 million people, largely in hard-to-access mountain regions? Or is the plan simply to invade hostile areas like Waziristan, so that we can drive the people there slightly further into the mountains (which they've practiced holding by guerilla warfare for the past three thousand years or so) and in the process destabilize and delegitimize the central government until Musharraf's fragile grip on power fails, and the increasingly strong Islamist movement in the Pakistani military takes over?

I do like him as a "fresh face..." but seeing him on the last debate, he came across as an amateur. If he wants to get serious support in the primary, he's going to need to fill in his foreign policy background with some real understanding, not half-assed grandstanding.