Syria campaign progresses , Israel upset with US move for talks with Iran

http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/report-u-s-drones-flying-over-syria-to-monitor-crackdown-1.413606

Report: U.S. drones flying over Syria to monitor crackdown

Pentagon officials say drones used to gather evidence to make case for international response; 40 Turkish intelligence officials captured in Syria, Assad regime claims Israel's Mossad trained them.

By Zvi Bar'el

The Pentagon officials stressed that the U.S. is not preparing the ground for a military intervention, but is simply collecting evidence of President Bashar Assad's crackdown on protesters.

There was no official comment from Syria on the report.

The West has ruled out a Libya-style military intervention in Syria to stop 11 months of bloodshed.

Meanwhile, there have been disagreements regarding what action must be taken against Syria. Turkey refuses to set up buffer zones for civilians on its border with Syria, and demands that the transfer of equipment and medicine be done via the sea and not through its territory.

France, on the other hand, maintains that such buffer zones must be on land and will anyhow spill over the Turkish border.

While the Syrian army continued to attack Daraa and Homs with tanks and heavy artillery, large protests also took place in Damascus, as well as Aleppo, a city which hasn't taken part in anti-regime protests regularly thus far.

The resolution passed by the United Nations General Assembly condemning Syria, supported by 137 countries, has not impressed the Syrian regime which is only escalating its war against the opposition and widening its war zones. Russia continues to come to aid of the Assad regime with weapon shipments, and on Friday two Iranian warships passed through the Suez Canal on the way to Tartus port in Syria.

Western officials fear that Iranian military presence along with Russian aid could turn Syria into a center of international friction much worse than the struggle inside Syria. They fear that the control over actions in Syria will be taken over by a Russian-Iranian "partnership" which would exclude the European Union and Turkey and that U.S. involvement could be too late and inefficient.

Turkey fears this development after a diplomatic crisis erupted with Syria when more than 40 Turkish intelligence officers were captured by the Syrian army. Over the past week, Turkey has been conducting intensive negotiations with Syria in order to secure their freedom, and Syria insists that their release will be conditioned on the extradition of Syrian officers and soldiers that defected and are currently in Turkey.

Syria also conditioned the continuation of the negotiations on Turkey's blockade of weapon transfers and passage of soldiers from the rebels' Free Syria Army through its territory. It also demanded that Iran sponsor the negotiations of releasing the Turkish officers.

Turkey, who mediated several weeks ago between the Free Syria Army and Iran to secure the release of several Iranian citizens who were captured by the rebels, rejects Syria's demands, and for this reason Turkish sources believe that Turkey will soon decide on hardening its stance on Syria.

Syria, on the other hand, has recently published "confessions" that it allegedly gathered from the Turkish officers that they were trained by Israel's Mossad, and were given instructions to carry out bombings to undermine the country's security. According to the Syrians, one of the Turkish officers said that the Mossad also trains soldiers from the Free Syria Army, and that Mossad agents came to Jordan in order to train al-Qaida officials to send to Syria to carry out attacks.

and....

http://www.debka.com/article/21751/

US-Israel crisis: Approaching nuclear talks with Iran disable sanctions, spark anti-Israel terror
DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis February 18, 2012, 9:42 AM (GMT+02:00)

Tags:  US-Iran   Iran nuclear   Israel 

There were better times

US President Barack Obama is convinced that the resumed international nuclear negotiations he has worked hard to set up will not only avert war but lay to rest once and for all the problem of Iran’s nuclear bomb program. He was led to this belief in secret back channel exchanges at the highest level between US and Turkish representatives and emissaries of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which paved the way for the formal talks.
Our Washington sources describe the White House mood as one of high optimism. They think they have the silver bullet for success:  The US will match Iran’s concession on its nuclear weapon program with the staged whittling down of sanctions. They will drop to zero for a successful accord.
No confirmation of this assumption is to be found from any Iranian sources. However, Obama’s well-informed former senior adviser Dennis Ross was confident enough that talks were just around the corner to publish an article in the New York Times Thursday, Feb. 16 under the caption “Iran Is Ready to Talk.”
The furious response to the news in Jerusalem is in direct contrast to the rosy optimism in Washington and a measure of the gaping rift between the two administrations on the nuclear issue.
And indeed, putting nuclear diplomacy on Iran back on the table has already had untoward consequences, DEBKAfile reports, even before formal talks get started:

1.  It has triggered am Iranian-instigated terror campaign against Israeli targets.
Official of Israel’s Counter-Terror Bureau, in a briefing to reporters Friday, Feb. 17, said Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah are plotting more attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions overseas.

Travelling Israelis were advised to exercise extreme caution. The special alert for Israeli embassies and institutions declared after the last two of five bombing incidents in two months, one of which injured an Israeli woman in New Delhi, the other thwarted in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, remains in force.

The advisory was not based on specific intelligence about locations but on incoming warnings of Iranian plans to continue to seek out Israeli targets for widely-spaced attacks on different continents.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources say that neither Israel nor any Western agency has identified the specific Iranian body orchestrating the five bombing and botched attacks in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Thailand, Argentina and India.

Their investigations appear to have ruled out the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence - which Washington added to its banned list Thursday, Feb. 16 for collaborating in the Syrian ruler’s crackdown on dissenters - as well as the notorious Al Qods Brigades. Both defer directly Ayatollah Khamenei, and are unlikely to have been authorized to engage in terror against Israel while he accepts diplomacy with the United States – especially not in India, one of Tehran’s most valued allies.DEBKAfile’s sources believe that the bombing attacks are the work of Iranian radicals bent on derailing the Supreme Leader’s diplomatic cooperation with the US in case he is persuaded to give up Iran’s nuclear program. Therefore, the more progress achieved in the forthcoming negotiations, the harder these elements will fight it with an escalating spiral of terrorist attacks – and not just against Israeli targets.

As for sanctions, Ross presents them as a whip for the United States to force the Iranians back into serious negotiations if they try their old tactics of spinning out the process to buy time for their nuclear plans.

A timer was accordingly built into the toughest sanctions imposed in the last few weeks: They go into force in July. If the talks are going well by then, they will never be needed and stay on paper – or so it is hoped.

But this delaying mechanism has already made the sanctions self-defeating.

The governments Washington seek to harness to its oil embargo, as well as such opponents as India, China Russia, Turkey, South Korea and the Europeans, realize the Obama administration is not planning to stiffen sanctions but more likely to ease them in the coming months of negotiations with Iran until they disappear. So why play along with them?

The sanctions regime is therefore breaking up before the formal talks have even begun.
This accounts for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s angry comment Wednesday, Feb. 16, after his talks with Cypriot leaders. He said sanctions imposed on Iran are important but so far “haven't worked. … the Iranian president's guided tour of centrifuges at Tehran research reactor on Wednesday was proof that sanctions have not properly crippled Iran's efforts to develop nuclear capabilities.”

Tehran knows this too and has anyway made it clear that sanctions will not make Iran give up its nuclear program. So if anything persuaded Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to go along with Obama’s pursuit of diplomacy it was not sanctions, but the Israel’s willingness to resort to military action to pre-empt a nuclear Iran.

The US president for his part is pinning his hopes of averting a Middle East war with unpredictable consequences by engaging Iran in dialogue. Its advisers wave off the side-effects of a new wave of terror and the disabling of sanctions as calculated risks worth taking.