Mideast Roundup

May 30, 2003

Bush & Putin

The Murmansk Pipeline Project to Restore a Partnership

US President George W. Bush will land in Europe smiling next week, intent on rebuilding fences damaged by the Iraq War - all except one. He will try and smooth over the sourness between America and Germany - he and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have not talked since last November - and further encourage the promising new ties with East European leaders. At the same time he is unshakably determined to dig a deep trench of isolation around France. But, most of all, Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin will reaffirm their once affable strategic partnership that worked so well in the Afghanistan War and broke down over Russia's resistance to the Iraq War. Their restored alliance, which also promises to shift the balance of the international oil market, will be grist for the mills of the re-election campaigns both presidents face in 2004.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly has learned from its political sources in Moscow and Washington that when they meet at St. Petersburg on June 1, the US president will present his Russian host with a valuable cornerstone for their renewed strategic alliance: an offer to back Russia's most ambitious and expensive oil pipeline project, as yet only on paper, for bringing Russian crude through the ice-free Arctic port of Murmansk the year round to America's East Coast market. This new gateway to the United States will take some three years to build and cost app. $4.5 billion, a sum far beyond Russian resources.

It will complement another cooperative oil pipeline scheme Putin agreed this week to launch with the new Chinese president, Hu Jantao as a joint Russo-Chinese venture, the $2.5 billion pipeline to carry Russian crude from the Siberian city of Angarsk across 2,400 kilometers of taiga to the northern Chinese city of Daqing. Due to be operational in 2005, it should transport 30 million tons of oil a year, supplying one fifth of the requirements of China's burgeoning economy.

Last year, Russian exports reached the level of Saudi Arabia's. The level was inhibited only by the lack of transport connections and resources. With oil the most effective tool of diplomacy in these times, Bush knows the new pipeline will cement the American-Russian rapprochement by expanding Russia's oil exporting capacity and its prosperity.

By assuming a dominant role in Russia's projected international pipeline network, the US president will also be reaching out to China and its thriving oil-guzzling economy to form with Putin and Hu a commanding world triumvirate.

Within a few years, these projects will reduce Middle East oil to second fiddle on the world market, a longstanding shared ambition.

In a joint declaration with his Chinese guest Wednesday, May 28, the Russian president administered two sideswipes to Washington: He called for a greater UN role in Iraq and stated that a multipolar world order was needed today more than ever. But he did not neglect extending an olive branch to Washington on the same day by informing Tehran that Moscow would cut off nuclear fuel to Iran's Bushehr nuclear center unless it opens all its nuclear facilities to international inspection.

It was more than a gesture to Bush. Moscow had just discovered that Iran was meddling in the Chechen dispute. (See next article in this issue.)

Ivan Safranchuk of the Moscow Center for Defense Information commented wryly after the visit: "His comments about a multipolar world suggest Putin is willing to modify his rhetoric depending on the leader or audience he is addressing. I doubt Putin will bring this idea up when he meets Bush."


US Vs Iran

Tehran Dips Finger in Chechen Conflict

As we write this, the White House is closeted in a top-level crisis consultation on Iran, at the end of which President George W. Bush may sign a presidential directive ordering his government to take steps against Iran, in view of its insistence on developing nuclear weapons, harboring al Qaeda terrorists and supporting radical Shiite subversion in Iraq.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly reveals exclusively from its counter-terror sources that some worrying last-minute additions were made to the list of Tehran's misdemeanors laid before the US president.

Saif al-Adil, one of the planners of the May 12 bombings at Riyadh's elite housing compounds, is not the only senior al Qaeda operative sheltered by Iranian Revolutionary Guards. With him too are Abu Musaab al Zarqawi, the Jordanian bio-chemical warfare expert who plotted large-scale terror campaigns for Europe and the Middle East from a base in northern Iraq, and Mahfuz Ould Waleed, known as Abu Hafs, a dangerous operations expert from Mauritania.

In its protest to Tehran straight after the attacks in Riyadh, Washington handed over all three names, together with those of their followers and taped recordings of telephone conversations proving the fugitives were in Iran.

It now transpires that immediately after receiving the American protest, Iranian Revolutionary Guards intelligence agents flew the al Qaeda rank and file - but not their commanders - out of the country to Armenia and thence to the Pankisi Gorge, the lawless Georgian-Chechen frontier region. This is the first substantial intelligence data reaching the Americans that prove the Revolutionary Guards and Saudi al Qaeda fighting strength in both Saudi Arabia and Chechnya maintain active intelligence and operational interchanges.

Also put before the White House conference was a report about a Turkish radical Islamic terror group called Bayaatal Al-Imam ("Those Who Obey the Imam"), whose members are employed by Iran's Revolutionary Guards as couriers. They ply the routes between al Qaeda cells in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and northern Iraq, as well as the Hizballah in Lebanon, carrying messages, funds, arms and explosives. Like the al Qaeda commanders, these Turkish radicals are to be found in Iran under the Revolutionary Guards' wing. This is the first time the United States has specific intelligence evidence of the operational partnership between al Qaeda and the Lebanese Hizballah.


Saudis Vs Bin Laden

Al Qaeda Chief Declares Vendetta on House of Saud

Wednesday, May 28, the Saudi authorities claimed to have captured five suspects involved in al Qaeda's May 12 suicide bombings against three gated housing compounds in Riyadh. They were reported detained at an Internet caf&Mac218; in the city of Medina. One of those arrested was identified as Ali Abd al Rahman al Ghamdi, suspected mastermind of the assaults and a leading al Qaeda light.

On Thursday, May 20, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef, announced the arrest of another 11 Islamic militants suspected of being members of al Qaeda and of complicity in the recent terrorist acts in Riyadh. The wording was deliberate. He was talking about two groups of detainees. In fact, the minister went on to say that among them were three ulemas (clerics) who called for jihad against the United States and also foreign women whom they called their wives. They were not accused of the Riyadh bombings. He named the clerics as Ali al-Khudair, Ahmad al-Khalidi and Nasser al-Fahd.

This differentiation points to two parallel Saudi operations: One to catch the accomplices of the Riyadh suicides, the second, the beginning of the crackdown ordered by Crown Prince Abdullah (as revealed in last week's DEBKA-Net-Weekly No. 110, May 23) on agitation fomented in the mosques by radical preachers.

It turns out that the second round of arrests caught al Qaeda on the raw. Radical Islamic sources claimed that two of the three clerics were not captured but killed (martyred) - which Nayef denied - and that they were two of Osama bin Laden's top commanders. As a result, according to a spate of messages picked up from al Qaeda's e-mail and Internet forums on Wednesday, a local al Qaeda agent brought the ill tidings to bin Laden in person in a direct cell phone call.

This is the first instance recorded of a subordinate reaching al Qaeda's leader directly by telephone.

An exceptionally intense burst of electronic chatter erupted immediately after the phone call as bin Laden summoned his top executives to a crisis conference. The messages did not betray the meeting's venue or bin Laden's location when he took the call.

But after the conference, the level of electronic traffic remained exceptionally high. For the first time, al Qaeda published a statement from a leadership gathering, a second step out of character that went to show how badly the network's leaders were shaken and how sorely they were affected by the two episodes.

Both departures also point to bin Laden's accessibility to his men in the Saudi arena, indicating his presence somewhere in the Arabian Peninsula or not far away.

The communiqu&Mac218; said: "If it is specifically confirmed that... Ali al-Khudair was martyred then our response against the al Saud family will be as great as the Sheikh is to us."

Al Qaeda has often in the past threatened to strike American and other foreign targets in the kingdom as well as joint Saudi-American enterprises. It also routinely denounces the Saudi regime. But this was the first time the organization declared a vendetta against the princes of the House of Saud.

Second blow to al Qaeda

Al Qaeda also sustained damage as a result of the May 16 Casablanca bombing attack that left 43 people dead five days after the Riyadh assaults. Wednesday, the Moroccan authorities announced that one of its planners was found dead in his detention cell. The official announcement gave heart and liver disease as the cause of death. This diagnosis is unlikely to wash with Al Qaeda who will take it for granted that their man was tortured to death under interrogation.

The Islamic terrorist organization suffered two grave reverses in one week in particularly painful circumstances; both occurred in Islamic countries where al Qaeda counts on strong local power bases and agents of influence buried in high places.

Its greatest loss, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources, was Khudeir, who was killed in Medina. A 47-year old Saudi, he was the head of a radical Wahhabi group associated with al Qaeda called Al Muwahidum - "Those who sanctify the one and only God". In recent years, he was based in northern Iraq, operating out of the enclave commanded by the radical Kurdish Ansar al-Islam, an al Qaeda ally that American forces smashed during their invasion of Iraq. Khudeir got away in time. Shortly before the Iraq War, he returned to Saudi Arabia and became operational.

Thursday, May 29, the fundamentalist Islamic forums were still chattering at top speed, creating a strong impression that Osama bin Laden and his legion of terrorists, enraged by their treatment at the hands of two Arab kingdoms, are in hectic preparation for something big and bad.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terror sources note that while the Saudi investigation into the Riyadh bombings faces endless obstacles, the Moroccan probe into the al Qaeda attack in Casablanca has run into a blind alley. The network's attacks on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 and the Mombasa raids in 2002 left forensic evidence that helped trace the perpetrators. However, not a single clue was found in Casablanca, as though the bombers had erased every last trace of their presence at the crime scenes.

Moreover, signals emanating from al Qaeda sources in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, East Lebanon, West and North Africa indicate intensive preparations for a series of strikes inside the United States, to be executed any time up until the presidential election in November 2004. The organization is in an advanced stage of planning to infiltrate a large number of terror cells into the United States. They expect some will be caught, their capture even held up by the Bush campaign team as proof of how well the global war on terror is succeeding, and some may break up. However al Qaeda's operational chiefs calculate that no more than one or two cells need to survive and penetrate United States anti-terror defenses in order to carry out a major attack. However many strikes the Americans successfully prevent, President Bush's chances of re-election could suffer a mortal blow from a single terrorist attack on the scale of September 11, 2001.


Mid East Peacemaking

A Bleak Week for Ariel Sharon. Or Was It?

The atmosphere was thick with tension in US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's office on Wednesday, May 21, as she and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, sat and talked to Israel prime minister Ariel Sharon's right-hand man, Dov Weisglass.

Before long, the encounter became a ding dong between two very different personalities. Unassuming and unpretentious, Rice is a Russian affairs expert with a brilliant, analytical mind, whose self-discipline and probing mind have won her admirers among Washington's jaded political establishment. A self-made, prominent Tel Aviv lawyer, Weisglass is today a top-notch powerbroker who smoothly mixes his social and personal connections with his business interests. A longtime confidant of Sharon, he is also close to the New York-based former Israeli tycoon, Aryeh Genger, who often carries out discreet services for the prime minister in America.

Weisglass, appointed this year director general of the prime minister's office, acts as Sharon's personal emissary to the White House in between the prime minister's own frequent visits since he took office two and a half years ago.

When in town, Weisglass always stops by to chat with Rice. But the story reaching DEBKA-Net-Weekly from political sources in Jerusalem is that this time their conversation was not just stormy. It was said that no Israeli official has received so sharp a dressing-down in the White House since 1976, when President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger decided to punish the prime minister of Israel, the late Yitzhak Rabin, for refusing to go along with Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Syria. The price paid for this defiance was the suspension of US economic assistance funds to Israel under the euphemistic designation "reassessment", a punitive measure that brought Israel to the brink of bankruptcy, with nary a dollar to buy wheat.

Rice's tough tone on May 21 - on Bush's instructions - brought to mind that dire period.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources paraphrase her words to Weisglass:

We know you're here only because Sharon took advantage of a wave of terrorist attacks as an excuse for not turning up here himself. (On the weekend of May 16-18, 12 Israelis were killed and more than 100 wounded, a quarter of them critically, in six Palestinian suicide bombing and shooting attacks.)

But it won't do Sharon any good. Here in Washington and in Riyadh we have gone through terrorist attacks just as deadly and that is exactly why we wanted Sharon here. But he chose to stay away and that was a huge mistake. With terror on the rampage in the Middle East, there's no more time to waste.

The Bush administration has kept all its promises, Rice stressed, done what you wanted. Saddam Hussein has been thrown out with not a single Iraqi missile dropping on Israel. You asked for Arafat to be internationally isolated - and we did that for you. You said Hizballah threatened northern and central Israel, and we neutralized that threat. You said that if a moderate Palestinian leader were to be found with whom you could talk, you would work with him on a plan to solve the Palestinian problem. We asked you (Weisglass) if you had a leader in mind and you sat right here in this office and said 'Abu Mazen'. So we delivered Abu Mazen and forced the Palestinians to choose a prime minister and what did you do? Nothing. You didn't lift a finger to help him. The whole time you kept on hitting the Palestinians - but we didn't interfere or hinder you in any way. And now it is time to act, Sharon doesn't bother to come here and talk.

The president's adviser concluded: That being the case, whether or not Sharon comes, the president wants him to accept the road map, without conditions, prevarication, amendments, or arguments. He will have to sign onto the plan when a joint declaration is published at the end of the summit in Aqaba with Bush, King Abdullah and Abu Mazen.

(The summit was since scheduled for Wednesday, June 4.)

While no changes would be accepted, Rice told Weisglass that the administration recognized that Sharon heads a coalition government the majority of whose ministers are vehemently against the road map. Due consideration would therefore be given to Israeli reservations on sensitive issues, without any promise to accept them.

Sharon orders total compliance - and hush

The security adviser then turned the screw. If Sharon rejected the road map on those terms, the US president would seriously consider carrying out a reassessment of US-Israeli relations.

The Israeli prime minister recalled perfectly the pain of the first "reassessment" meted out a quarter of a century ago. And, while times have changed and no such high-profile retribution as meted out by President Ford is contemplated in 2003, still the precarious state of the Israeli economy today makes it vulnerable to the sort of measures the United States has administered in recent months against China, Syria and Russia.

Washington's recent ban on US companies contracting business with the North China Company, the Chinese conglomerate that transferred missile and nuclear technology to Iran, was heard loud and clear in Jerusalem. Besides producing military equipment, the North China Company also makes a wide range of products, including car engines, refrigerators and air conditioners, which it can no longer sell for hard currency on international markets.

Washington could simply target a number of Israeli high-tech companies or defense contractors, hold back orders and future contracts, defer payments or cut off exchanges of information. Such sanctions would be enough to knock off balance an Israeli economy badly battered by the 32-month confrontation with the Palestinians and gravely mismanaged by the Sharon government and its previous finance minister Silvan Shalom, now moved into the foreign ministry.

So when the prime minister's top adviser returned from Washington with grim tidings, his first piece of counsel was to go all the way with the Bush administration.

Asked what he meant by the whole way, Weisglass translated what he had been told by Rice into political language. He said Israel would have to accept the whole Bush deal, lock, stock and barrel, because what was really at stake now was the 2004 presidential campaign. He had been given to understand that the guidelines handed to Israel were vital bricks in the Bush re-election strategy and therefore immovable.

Whatever really passed between Rice and Weisglass in Washington, the account appearing above was the one the Israeli prime minister disseminated among his close circle. DEBKA-Net-Weekly is not entirely sure that it is the truth and nothing but. However, the posture Sharon has taken up for domestic and foreign consumption says that he is indeed toeing the Bush line but it was forced on him under duress.

The report put out week from putative "circles close to the US Congress" that Bush has demanded a list of American weapons in the Israeli military arsenal in order to ban their use against Palestinian targets is part of this implied duress.

In keeping with his act, Sharon hurried to demonstrate his compliance with the guideline handed down from Washington and make sure no Israeli official agency stepped out of line. He issued a blanket prohibition to top level officials and ministers, security and military chiefs and officers of the Mossad and Shin Beit, forbidding anyone to take any initiative on the Israel-Palestinian track, publicly discuss the road map or enter into contacts with US representatives engaged in its applications. They were not allowed to release any information or comment but dry facts.

Everyone obeyed the Israeli prime minister's injunction to the letter. No one wanted to be accused of torpedoing the latest Middle East peace effort; even inter-agency chatter on the road map fell silent. Sharon managed to muzzle Israel's right wing opponents of the road map, including his main Likud rival, Benjamin Netanyahu.

After setting the stage for a major exercise in obfuscation, Sharon fell silent himself, free now to operate solo in the dark away from any critical gaze.

Abu Mazen offered on a platter

In Washington, some of DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources still believe the Israeli prime minister, a former super-hawk, walked voluntarily into what looked like a trap. Time after time, he and Weisglass were heard lamenting that, had Mahmud Abbas been Israel's Palestinian negotiating partner instead of Arafat, the peace process would have been well advanced by now.

Hearing this, George Tenet, Director of the CIA, went to the president with a plan. According to our sources in Washington and Jerusalem, he proposed letting the Israelis have their wish. Mahmud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, is considered a weak and vacillating character who cannot stand on his own feet with being propped up either from Washington or by Arafat. The CIA Director proposed having him appointed to achieve two objectives: First, as a tool to milk Israel for concessions to the Palestinians, on the pretext they were needed to keeping the Abbas administration from collapsing; second, Abbas's presence in office would act as a constant constraint on Arafat and force him to reduce his sponsorship of terrorists and their supporters in the Palestinian street.

The dynamic set in motion would, in Tenet's view, substantially cut back Palestinian terrorist violence even if it were not brought to a complete standstill.

A similar proposal came from a Palestinian, the controversial Mohamed Dahlan, internal security minister in the Abbas government. Two years ago, Dahlan exploited his job as head of Palestinian Preventive Security in the Gaza Strip to orchestrate deadly waves of terror in the service of his old mentor, Yasser Arafat. Then he turned against his master. Today, Arafat blocks him on the West Bank and from its hub in Ramallah thwarts the effort to reform the Palestinian Authority's security and intelligence apparatus and purge it of terrorists. Arafat is the power on the West Bank by virtue of his control of the Fatah-Tanzim militia and al Aqsa Martyrs (Suicides) Brigades.

Dahlan has therefore returned to his natural habitat in the Gaza Strip, where he has begun working to talk the Hamas terror group round to accepting some sort of gradual ceasefire albeit without a formal declaration. His chances are judged by Palestinian experts as better than those of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who spent long months last year trying to obtain a ceasefire and failed.

One advantage Dahlan has going for him is the Saudi Arabian cutoff of funds to Hamas and other groups, ordered after al Qaeda's attacks on Riyadh on May 12 (reported in the last DEBKA-Net-Weekly issue, No. 110, May 23.). Hamas is already feeling the pinch and has embarked on a fundraising campaign.

However, there are difficulties for the Gazan strongman to overcome first:

1. He has been able to muster a large enough force of loyalists in the Gaza Strip to forcibly disarm Hamas. This force numbers some 4,000 men and is financed and armed from US and Israel. However, neither he nor Abu Mazen seeks a violent showdown with Hamas, preferring peaceful palaver to reach negotiated understandings.

2. The Hamas leadership is divided against itself into three camps - one wants to continue its campaign of terror; one is willing to stop the violence while the third, led by its spiritual leader in the Gaza Strip Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, says it is willing to forego violence but sets prohibitive conditions. From Ramallah, Arafat has been able to persuade the wheelchair-bound Hamas sheikh not to heed Dahlan's arguments and to remain committed to terror

The high dollar cost of peace

The Abu Mazen- Dahlan's operation in the Gaza Strip does not come cheap. It is sustained by four main sources of revenue: The Bush administration transfers funds through the pro-American Palestinian finance minister Salim Fayad; the ruling families of the Persian Gulf oil emirates are personally close to Abu Mazen and back him; and the fund-raising efforts around the Arab-Muslim world of Arafat's former financial adviser, the Kurdish-Palestinian Mohammed Rashid. The two parted company eighteen months ago and now Rashid works with Dahlan. The last source is the Israeli government, which two years ago froze Palestinian Authority tax receipts to prevent the funds being used for terrorism.

On Wednesday, May 28, Sharon secretly handed over to Fayad, without notifying any ministers except for finance minister Netanyahu, a hefty slice of those funds, releasing an estimated $200m, in the hope that the cash will help Abu Mazen buy the loyalty of substantial sections of Hamas and Fatah and wean them away from Arafat in time for the summit the two prime ministers are scheduled to attend with President Bush next Wednesday in Aqaba.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Jerusalem describe this payout as the climax of Sharon's secret strategy to win an accommodation with the Palestinians, for the sake of which he drew a thick curtain over his actions and forced the better part of the national body politic to stay mute.

Sharon's three-step plan

A.
Acceptance of Israel's total conformity with the Bush plan of action for the Middle East as laid out for Weisglass by Condaleezza Rice on May 21.

B.
Far-reaching concessions and gestures to pacify the Palestinians. When the Israeli prime spoke out to his own Likud parliamentary party on May 26 against "maintaining 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation," he knew he was horrifying many Israelis, but it was no slip of the tongue. He reiterated the offending phrase at the top of his voice to make sure it registered in certain international quarters and reached Muslim-Palestinian ears.

C.
Sharon is bending over backwards to demonstrate his extreme care not to place obstacles to the consolidation of Abu Mazen and Dahlan in power. He is willing to hand over the entire Gaza Strip - excepting the Jewish communities of Gush Katif and the Israel-Egyptian border crossing - and even allow them to reopen one or two Palestinian offices in Arab Jerusalem.

In all, Sharon has bought the Bush proposition that the Middle East is at a unique juncture in its history, opening up a window of opportunity that may never recur. After the Iraq War, the Bush priorities are eradicating Iran's nuclear capability and deducting the United Nations and European Union from the Israeli-Palestinian equation.

Recognizing this, both international bodies quietly withdrew any claims for a role in the monitoring body the Americans are creating to supervise the implementation of the road map,

Sharon has no illusions about Arafat falling meekly into line. He remains the outstanding obstacle to the plan's implementation and fully capable of inflicting lethal waves of suicidal terror. Sharon and Israeli security experts see a danger of Arafat setting up Abbas and Dahlah for physical harm. (See HOT POINTS below).

At the same time, the Israeli prime minister has decided to give the US-backed Mahmoud Abbas experiment a chance - if not for peace, then for an Israeli-Palestinian accord and cooperation. He is clearly averse to going down in the history books as the man who alongside Yasser Arafat defeated a peace initiative. He would rather appear as its great champion.


Presidential Envoy

Selecting Washington's Senior Road Map Monitor

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's Washington sources, the White House is in the process selecting a high prestige figure to officiate in one of the most sensitive jobs in the world during the coming US presidential election campaign.

As head of the American monitoring administration called on to supervise the implementation of the Israel-Palestinian road map to peace as envisioned by President Bush last June, he will also have to midwife the birth of an interim Palestinian state and see through the negotiation and signing of a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace accord covering the demarcation of final borders, a formula for Jerusalem and the partial evacuation of Jewish communities from Palestinian areas.

The selection process is being hurried along so that President Bush can introduce the new official at the two Middle East summits he will be attending next week - with Arab leaders at the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh and with King Abdullah, Sharon and Abu Mazen at Jordan's Red Sea port of Aqaba.

Sources close to the selection process tell DEBKA-Net-Weekly that the administration is looking for a candidate of "ministerial" weight - not just a Republican, but someone close to the president, who rates the job as even more high-powered that that of civil administrator for Iraq.

Cited as the sort of candidates in view are high flyers experienced in challenging tasks. One name mentioned is that of Richard Armitage, who would have been considered if he were not deputy secretary of state; or a former CIA director, such as James Wolsey who was a candidate for the Iraqi post that was filled by Paul Bremer and is also a counter-terror expert who wholeheartedly supports the Bush administration's war on international terror.

The tasks confronting this official are daunting. Supervising the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is just the start. He will have to create an American monitoring and administration body that will function alongside the Israeli and Palestinian government and military systems.

For some time to come his administration will have to contend with the Palestinian terror-manufacturing apparatus run by Yasser Arafat. The American body will have to work with the Palestinian and Israeli governments to whittle down Arafat's power base and systematically reduce the forces at his disposal for terrorist operations - until he is stripped of all his resources.


HOT POINTS
(that you may have missed in DEBKAfile Round-the-Clock)
A Digest of the Week's Exclusives

24 May: According to DEBKAfile's Washington sources, the Bush team is divided on how to deal with Iran's persistence in developing nuclear weapons and continued shelter for al Qaeda members operating from its soil. Some of the president's White House advisers and certain factions in the CIA and the Pentagon favor direct action - another group advocates quiet negotiation.

The first group offers following arguments to support tough action:

1.
Iran is playing a double game - while pretending to cooperate, the ayatollahs are in a covert race to make the Islamic republic a nuclear power and present Washington with a fait accompli. American cannot let them get away with it. Let us first destroy their nuclear program, then go back to the negotiating table.

2.
Eradicating the Iranian nuclear option will be a lesson for North Korea, whose only foreseeable source of revenue for its own program is Iran. So action against Tehran's program would kill two birds with one stone.

3.
It would also serve as a graphic lesson to Syria and the Lebanese Hizballah that Washington's demands are not to be trifled with.

The pro-diplomacy factions in the White House, the CIA and the State Department maintain:

A.
Iran's leaders are open to reforming their regime in line with American demands. These reforms should be extracted quickly before any thought of war action.

B.
The US government knows by now that changing an entire system of national government is arduous, difficult and expensive. In Iran with a population of 60 million, three times that of Iraq, the enterprise would be hugely daunting.

C.
If Tehran can be persuaded to scale down its nuclear ambitions from a bomb to a limited option, then China and North Korea, who rather than Russia are Iran's primary suppliers of nuclear and missile technologies will have lost their best client. Iran's switch to the American sphere of influence will leave the Chinese and North Koreans with nowhere to go but to play ball with the Americans on nuclear non-proliferation.

D.
Quiet, discreet understandings with Tehran could open up the way to good working accommodations with Iraq's Shiites, as well as Syrian leaders and the Iran-backed Hizballah.

A heavy outlay of effort and patience is worth while if they lead to pricking the hot bubble of Shiite militancy and anti-Americanism and achieving pragmatic co-existence under the American aegis. The Sunni Muslim extremists would be left isolated by their belligerence and terrorism - witness the Palestinians and the multi-branched al Qaeda network.

25 May: Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was drawn into saying yes to the Middle East road map and fitting unreservedly into America's geo-strategic box for the postwar Middle East by three key inducements:

First - The building into the Bush master plan the systematic disarmament by the United States of Israel's most dangerous enemies - Iraq first, to be followed by the attempt to dissolve Iran's nuclear weapons option, steps to eliminate Syria's missile systems and weapons of mass destruction and the Hizballah's military capabilities, as well as in the long term, the curtailment of Egyptian and Libyan N-bombs programs. All this, without Israel having to sacrifice a single soldier, fire a single shot or expend its military and economic resources. For the first time in its history, Israel stands to find itself liberated from all its next-door enemies in the space of three or four years.

Second - The prospect of Yasser Arafat's eclipse on the international and Palestinian stage. The United States has acquired a new partner for the job of tightening the noose of isolation around the terror master's neck - Saudi Arabia.

Third - Sharon has been assured by the Bush White House - though not publicly - that Washington will back him in resisting any attempt to include the return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees in a final-status accord. Washington also promises to go along with leaving the main Jewish settlement blocks in place on the West Bank.

These incentives for Israeli acceptance of the road map carry a steep price tag.

For the first time since the Six Day War - and however strenuously this may be denied - a foreign power from outside the Middle East will be responsible for governing Palestinian Authority areas. Israel and its armed forces will have lost their freedom of action to combat terror emanating from these regions. The IDF will have to give prior notice of incursions, and eventually require permission from those outside "coordinators".

No one mentions Jerusalem, a particularly intractable issue. At some point, the US administrators-coordinators will almost certainly want to extend their jurisdiction to the Palestinian residential districts of the Israeli capital, including the Old City, which also happen to occupy the sites of supreme Jewish historical and religious importance.

Sharon's passivity and his total conformity with the Bush administration's policy lines have seriously devalued Israel's geopolitical and regional standing. In the shadow of a strong American military presence in the region, along with US allies like Britain, Australia, Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Israel is being reduced from a regional power to a segment of the very local Israel-Palestinian conflict. The regional centrality formerly occupied by the Israeli-Turkish military pact has been sidelined since Turkey lost its strategic value to Washington, leaving Israel with the single regional asset of its military cooperation pact with India.

Furthermore, Israel's hopes of an economic shot in the arm from Iraq's reconstruction projects have been disappointed.

Having foregone much of its own freedom of action and independent policy-making, the Sharon government will find itself left with meager defenses against undue assaults on the country's national interests.

This situation has partially disabled the Sharon coalition cabinet as an effective instrument of governance, leaving most of the ministers dependent on three rival decision-making centers: The prime minister's office and Sharon's personal advisers, who exercise most of the government's real powers; a second faction which supports finance minister Binyamin Netanyahu whose hope of regaining office as prime minister motivates most of what he does; the third power center, which is headed by defense minister Shaul Mofaz, who stays clear of insider politics in order to focus on his tasks and prevent interference.

26 May: The forty-member Likud parliamentary party hurled bitter complaints against prime minister Ariel Sharon Monday, May 26, for failing to consult the party before he presented the Middle East road map to the cabinet for endorsement on Sunday, May 25. It was carried by a narrow majority of 12 to 7 ministers and four abstentions. None of the Likud ministers voted against the document. Even the nay-saying coalition hawks did not walk out of the Sharon coalition.

Former foreign minister David Levy attacked the government for accepting a Palestinian state. For a much lower price, he said, "the left" would have got us full peace. One MK accused the Sharon government of accepting "Oslo C" - a reference to the 1993 Oslo accords signed by a Labor government, long anathema for Likud and nationalist parties.

Sharon replied by declaring:" Maintaining three and a half million Palestinians under occupation is a bad thing. One and a half million are in the care of international organizations. Do we want to take over? Can we? Asked what would happen if the Palestinians continued to wage a war of terror, he said thumping on the table: We will continue to fight terror day and night as we do now and the Palestinians will get nothing. Without our consent, nothing can go forward.

When a representative from the West Bank town of Ariel asked about building a new neighborhood, Sharon replied: Expansion to accommodate natural growth is not restricted. "Go and build houses for your children, your grandchildren and maybe even your great grandchildren."

DEBKAfile's political analysts note that Sharon is the first Israeli prime minister to use the term "occupation" in reference to Israel's presence on lands captured in the 1967 all-out war launched by its Arab neighbors. He thereby risks providing fodder for future anti-Israeli UN resolutions, writers of international treaties and international courts, including war crimes tribunals, seeking grounds for incriminating Israel or any individual acting in its name. The Americans mindful of this potential legal trap were careful to refer to their invasion of Iraq as liberation rather than occupation.

26 May: The Israeli government's narrow endorsement of the Middle East road map on Sunday May 25 - and acceptance of a Palestinian state at the end of the road - far from removing the obstacles to peacemaking, accentuates the difficulties facing the next stages.

DEBKAfile's US and Israeli security sources report increasing signs that Yasser Arafat is now seriously gunning for the new Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas. Arafat cannot abide the notion of any top-level conference going forward without him. The plot he is thought to be preparing would inculpate Israel for any harm befalling Abu Mazen or his associates. He would thus show the Palestinians and the Muslim world that his arm is still long and that if anyone is bent on sabotaging the prospects of peace it is Israel.

Arafat is busy with a complicated scheme that may start with an attack on someone close to Abbas or a Washington-backed appointee as a warning to the Palestinian prime minister to remove himself while he still has time. He is reported going to the lengths of waking up or importing secret sleeper terror cells kept till now in reserve. Not all their members are Palestinian. They include bearers of Canadian and European passports, genuine or forged, like the two British terrorists who carried out the April 30 Mike's Place bombing. The attack, which was meant to hit the US embassy, was set up and prepared in Damascus by Hamas and Hizballah planners and comprehensively supported by Fatah and Hamas teams in the Gaza Strip as well as Fatah, al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Hamas accomplices on the West Bank.

DEBKAfile's intelligence sources totally refute the reports broadcast last week claiming Syria had shut down the Damascus offices of Palestinian terror groups in response to a sharp American ultimatum. They discovered that Jihad Islami and Hamas operational leaders supposedly expelled to Beirut, Cairo and Qatar to throw the Americans off the scent have all gone to ground in Syria. The Jihad Islami's Abdullah Salah Ramadan, Zeid Nahla and Ibrahim Shehada, as well as the Hamas's Mussa Abu Marzuk, Khaled Mashal and operations chief Imad al Alami are all in hiding under the protection of Syrian military intelligence. A senior Israeli security source commented: "Having this collection of top terror operatives under cover and working overtime is not good news for anyone."

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