The Four Shia Horns (Daniel 8:8)

Iranian Official: In Yemen We Captured Our Fourth Arab Capital

by TheTower.org Staff | 11.04.14 1:55 pm

After the recent capture of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, by Shiite rebels, an Iranian official has boasted that the Islamic Republic now controls four Arab capitals. The other three capitals are Damascus, Syria; Baghdad, Iraq; and Beirut, Lebanon.

The boast, which was reported in an analysis published yesterday by Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael Segall of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, was made by an Iranian parliamentarian, Ali Riza Zakani, who is reported to be close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Segall pointed out that Zakani’s comments on Iran’s strong presence in the Arab world points to the fact that “the Islamic Revolution has changed the power equations in the region in its own favor and Iran is now at the height of its power, imposing its will and strategic interests on the region as a whole.”

Segall explains that the fall of Yemen to forces allied with Iran is important from a strategic, not just a symbolic, standpoint:

The Houthi Shia rebels, having conquered Sana’a and Al-Hudaydah, are now concentrating their efforts on a further conquest of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. This key waterway, the southern gateway to the Red Sea, passes through the Gulf of Aden, linking the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean, and historically constituted a strategic hub connecting Eastern and Western trade routes. Yemen overlooks and indeed commands movement through the strait from the island of Miyun (Birim). From the African side, Eritrea and Djibouti overlook the strait. …

Iran also sees Yemen as an important factor in its policy of establishing a physical Iranian presence, both ground and naval, in the countries and ports of the Red Sea littoral, which control the shipping lanes that lead from the Persian Gulf to the heart of the Middle East and onward to Europe. If the Shia rebels gain control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, Iran can attain a foothold in this sensitive region giving access to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, a cause of concern not only for its sworn rivals Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf states, but also for Israel and European countries along the Mediterranean.

In addition to control over the a critical shipping route, control of Yemen could allow Iran to “leverage the Houthis’ gains to step up its effort to subvert the kingdom, with the Shia in the oil-rich areas of eastern Saudi Arabia as its target audience.”

Libya Is One of Four Nuclear Horns With Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan (Daniel 8:8)

Concerns Grow Over Libyan Uranium Stockpiles

 Voice of America

WASHINGTON— Inspectors from the United Nations nuclear agency will soon begin an assessment of the adequacy of security arrangements for thousands of barrels of yellowcake uranium stockpiled in Libya. The inspection comes amid rising anxiety among Western powers and Libya’s neighbors at the lawlessness disrupting the transition from dictatorship to democracy since the ouster two years ago of Moammar Gadhafi.

A team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, will arrive in the troubled North African country later this month to “verify existing stockpiles and conditions of storage,” the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative to Libya, Tarek Mitri, told the Security Council on Monday.
According to Mr. Mitri, 6,400 barrels of yellowcake uranium are stored in a facility near Sabha, a desert town in the south that has witnessed episodic clashes between Tubu and Abu Seif tribesmen. Libyan intelligence officials say Al Qaida-linked Tuareg fighters fleeing the French intervention in Mali have moved into Libya’s south to set up camps.

The barrels of uranium are under control of a Libyan army battalion, Mitri told the 15-nation UN Security Council. In a closed-door meeting Russian Deputy U.N. Ambassador Alexander Pankin warned of the dangers of the Libyan uranium and also of weapons going astray and falling into the hands of terrorists.

Yellowcake is concentrated natural uranium obtained through the milling and chemical processing of uranium ore. It is a coarse powder and can be used to make nuclear fuel. Anxiety has risen about the security surrounding uranium storage amid rising violence in Libya and clashes between the country’s fledgling army units and hardline Islamist militias that have refused to disband.

Militias at the root of instability

For the past two weeks, Libyan army units have been clashing in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi with members of the Ansar al-Sharia militia, a group suspected by U.S. officials of having been involved in the assault last year on the U.S. consulate that left ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead. The clashes have left a dozen dead and 50 wounded.

Libya’s unruly militias originated in the rebel forces that overthrew with NATO assistance Col. Gadhafi in an eight-month civil war in 2011. Mitri told the Security Council “the weak capacity of state military and policy institutions remains a serious problem.”

During the civil war and in its aftermath Libyan militias looted weapons from Col. Gadhafi’s huge stockpiles and weapons experts say large quantities have been hoarded or sold on the black market.

Arms experts raised the alarm about weapon proliferation from Libya even before the Libyan civil war concluded. Emergencies director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, Peter Bouckaert, says he pleaded with NATO officials and major rebel militia leaders during the uprising to secure Gadhafi’s arsenals before it was too late.

“The proliferation of weapons from the Libya conflict was of a scale much greater than any other modern conflict. We already see the impact of these weapons in places like the Sinai, Gaza, and Mali, and we’ll still be talking about the consequences of this a decade from now, Bouckaert said.”

Earlier this year, Egyptian officials intercepted large caches of weapons smuggled from Libya destined for transfer to rebels in Syria, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and jihadists in the Sinai Peninsula.

Arms trafficking from Libya contributed to the destabilization of northern Mali, where huge inflows of weapons plundered from Gadhafi’s arsenals helped Tuareg mercenaries and jihadist fighters to carve out their own enclave in the heart of the sub-Sahara until France intervened.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an al-Qaida in the Maghreb (AQIM) leader who masterminded the seizure of an Algerian natural gas plant in January, bragged in a video posted online about how easy it had been to obtain Libyan weapons. Belmokhtar said his group got the weapons from Gadhafi’s arsenals during the eight-month-long uprising that ousted the late Libyan leader.

Chemical weapons experts will also be travelling to Libya this month to check on the elimination of Libyan toxic gas supplies that Gadhafi had agreed to dispose of before his downfall. Almost nine metric tons of mustard gas reportedly was destroyed earlier this year.

The security challenges facing the Libyan government were underscored Monday when yet another high-ranking security official was gunned down in Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown. Colonel Ramadan al-Turouk was shot dead in his car. There has been a spike in targeted killings in Libya in recent month mainly of security officials. An American teacher at an international school in Benghazi was shot dead last week while he was jogging.

Last month, Washington said it is planning to train 5,000 to 8,000 Libyan soldiers to help improve security. Other Western countries have agreed also to train Libyan military personnel but analysts say the training could take at least two years.

The Nuclear Powers are Actually Ten (Daniel 7:7) and Four (Daniel 8:8)

‘THE WORLD IS BIGGER THAN 5’ AND THE NON-PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Nuclear World War III

• Erkut Ayvazoğlu
• Updated : 01.10.2014 00:41:44
• Published : 01.10.2014 00:16:25

The Federal Republic of Germany traditionally seeks to have ordinary relations with one of its most important allies, the Turkish Republic. While Germany continues especially good economic relations with the predominantly Muslim country and having several partnerships in other important fields, it seems that there are interesting developments and a kind of rivalry in the background – particularly in recent years. Of course, it is not known what the concrete issues are – at least for now. However, what we know is that under these conditions, instruments such as German media outlets have become more and more striking in the last couple of years with regard to their negative reports about Turkey and its politics. These are both extremely strange and interesting. In addition to the many controversial articles concerning Turkey that have come from German media outlets, in August 2014 for instance, the German weekly Der Spiegel also revealed that the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has been spying on its NATO ally Turkey since 2009. Furthermore, another German daily, Die Welt, claimed recently that Turkey is seeking to acquire enriched uranium. The article published in Die Welt, which is known for its current bias toward the current Turkish government and president, claimed that Turks are working on building a nuclear weapon with instruction from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In addition, it was also reported without any reasonable proof that the technology to build this weapon was transferred to Turkey by Pakistan.

However, subsequently to the strange assertions in Die Welt both the Turkish Foreign Ministry and the Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yıldız denied the claims. Turkey did not have the intention or technology, such as a nuclear research reactor or a uranium enrichment program, for nuclear weapons production, Yıldız said. The Foreign Ministry also made clear that Turkey attaches great importance to issues of arms control and disarmament. Moreover, it said that the country is a party to all relevant international treaties and conventions including, in particular, the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. It is also an active participant in international efforts in these areas.

After World War II, which resulted in the defeat of Nazi Germany, several concerns arose that those few states possessing nuclear weapons would destabilize international relations and a nuclear war could even be possible. Thus, since the 1960s the main objective has been to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons, however, there were different opinions in order to achieve this goal. Today, everything could have been different if the Baruch Plan, based on the Acheson-Lilienthal report and submitted to the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission by the U.S., U.K. and Canada, which would have internationalized all nuclear activities from mining to final disposal, had been accepted in 1946 – when the U.S. was the only country that possessed nuclear arms (the Soviet Union did not trust the U.S. disarmament promise – perhaps rightly). Nevertheless, many years later and after other countries also developed their own nuclear weapons, a fundamental event took place: the adoption of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1970. The treaty distinguishes between official “nuclear weapon states” (NWS) such as the U.S., Soviet Union, China, France and the U.K. and “non-nuclear weapon states” (NNWS), that is to say, the rest of the world. The NPT distributes obligations but, above all it bans nuclear arms for every state except the NWS, i.e., those five states mentioned above.

Unfortunately, on the one hand, these NWS did not follow their disarmament pledges under the NPT and, on the other hand, NNWS countries developed their own nuclear arms such as North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel – of course, “illegally.” The NPT issue gets more difficult from the perspective of international law if one examines the case of North Korea, which withdrew from the treaty in 2003, and the case of India, Pakistan and Israel that have never joined the NPT. Ultimately, all four countries possess nuclear weapons as well. So what? Did anyone speak about legality or is there any credibility? In 1995 the treaty was extended indefinitely and there are currently approximately 190 NPT-members, without India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea. Turkey joined the NPT in 1980.

At the beginning of the 1990s, certain European states reacted reluctantly against the announcement that the U.S. administration under President Bill Clinton wanted to advance a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) with the goal of banning all nuclear explosions in all environments for military or civilian purposes. Non-nuclear states welcomed this attitude while the U.K., a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council (UNSC), supported the idea that nuclear tests are necessary for the safety and reliability of British warheads. Later, this opinion changed surprisingly into the position that Britain›s weapons would be safe and reliable even without tests. In a similar way, France changed its former anti-CTBT attitude as well. Ultimately, the CTBT was adopted in September 1996 by the U.N. General Assembly but still it could not enter into force until today.

There are nuclear states such as the U.K. and France who “legally” possess nuclear weapons in accordance with international law. These countries were colonial powers and the U.K. was even a superpower, though, once upon a time. Moreover, there are countries such as Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan – who acquired nuclear technology under the pretense that if India has the bomb, Pakistan has to possess it as well, which is quite understandable – which possess nuclear weapons as well.

After 2003, EU member states became a little more active in global matters and thus decided to reinforce the current non-proliferation treaties to intensify export controls and extend international cooperation with other states. In that context the EU made efforts within its EU-3 initiative with regard to the revealed Iranian nuclear program. Despite all the developments, the relations between the U.S. and EU improved after a certain period following the Iraq war. Consequently, the EU and U.S. were able to encourage a UNSC resolution that obliges the states to prosecute illegal activities concerning WMD-capable technology.

Despite the obvious and known hypocritical attitude toward certain countries by Western countries concerning nuclear weapons, of course, these steps for non-proliferation are encouraging developments that the global society welcomes. But today we also have to start questioning and challenging the state of mind of those countries that are the NWS, i.e., countries that legally possess nuclear WMDs according to the NPT. And surprisingly, those countries are the so-called five permanent members of the UNSC. As Dr. Cemil Ertem said a few days ago: “When we consider the fact that the five main victors of World War II (China, France, Russia, the U.K. and U.S.) became the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, it is not that difficult to see how and under what circumstances the U.N. was established.”

As one notices, the specific question of nuclear WMDs is not just a case that can be reduced to a German newspaper›s ideological slandering claims. First of all, there is a main fundamental global inequality that causes several other problematic circumstances in global politics. Thus, those needed steps might be started in accordance with some world leaders› recent call to initiate the UNSC reform. In this sense, a few world leaders demanded the UNSC reform during their addresses to the U.N. General Assembly over the past few days, calling for the addition of more permanent and non-permanent seats on the UNSC and the elimination of the veto. In this context, the slogan, “The world is bigger than five,” becomes, therefore, a key statement for the near future. The majority of people around the globe are echoing this call for immediate reform that should be seriously taken into account – otherwise, it might not be possible to solve several other problems that are directly or indirectly related to this issue.

* Political Scientist, Master of Arts, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

The Four Loose Horns (Daniel 8:22)

Danger from loose nukes in volatile countries

The New Nuclear Terrorism

BY BENNETT RAMBERG

Nobody would dispute the danger inherent in possessing nuclear assets. But that danger becomes far more acute in a combat zone, where nuclear materials and weapons are at risk of theft, and reactors can become bombing targets.

These risks — most apparent in today’s Middle East — raise troubling questions about the security of nuclear assets in volatile countries everywhere.

Two recent events demonstrate what is at stake. On July 9, the militant group now known as the Islamic State captured 40 kg of uranium compounds at Mosul University in Iraq. The captured uranium was not weapons-grade; international inspectors removed all sensitive material from Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War (which is why it was absent when the United States invaded in 2003). But what international response, if any, would have been initiated if the cache had been highly enriched?

On the same day, Hamas launched three powerful Iranian-designed rockets from Gaza at Israel’s Dimona reactor. Luckily, two missed the target, and Israel managed to intercept the third. But the episode represented a serious escalation of hostilities and served as an important reminder of the vulnerability of nuclear reactors in war zones.

In fact, Hamas made similar attempts to attack the Dimona complex in 2012, as did Iraq in 1991, with the aim of releasing the site’s contents to inflict radiological damage on Israel’s population. (The perpetrators appeared clueless to the fact that certain weather conditions would have concentrated the radioactive debris in the Palestinian-majority West Bank.)

It is possible that these events are an aberration. After all, the only conflict so far in which authorities have lost control of sensitive nuclear materials was the Georgia-Abkhazia War in the 1990s, when unknown forces seized a small amount of highly enriched uranium from a research institute.

Likewise, though there have been numerous attacks on nuclear reactors under construction, the sole threat to an operating plant in a combat zone outside of Israel occurred at the start of the fighting in ex-Yugoslavia, when Serbian nationalists considered attacking Slovenia’s Krško nuclear power plant and sent warplanes over the site. The plant’s operators temporarily halted electricity generation to curb the risk of a radiation release, but nothing came of the threat.

Indeed, whenever nuclear assets have been least secure — during the Soviet Union’s collapse, China’s Cultural Revolution, and the Algiers putsch (when a group of mutinous retired generals set their sights on a nuclear device that France was testing in the Algerian desert) — they have not been compromised. Even in Ukraine today, despite the escalating civil conflict, the country’s 15 nuclear power plants have remained untouched (though even with new defensive measures taken by Ukrainian officials, this could easily change).

It is impossible to know whether this benign pattern will hold. But recent developments in the Middle East suggest that there are grounds for concern in other volatile countries, namely Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran.

Pakistan has a large nuclear weapons program and faces an expansive jihadi insurgency, which previously attacked military bases suspected of housing nuclear assets. Though Pakistan has not experienced a nuclear breach, and the government insists that safeguards remain robust, the country’s increasingly frequent and severe bouts of instability raise serious questions about the future.
While North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is much smaller, persistent doubts about the regime’s sustainability make it a matter of grave concern. In the event of the regime’s collapse — a distinct possibility — it would be difficult to prevent the diversion of its assets, or even the use of its weapons.

For its part, Iran seems relatively stable, at least compared to its neighbors. But it faces an uncertain political future. If a power struggle emerges, the large Bushehr reactor could be used as a bargaining chip.

To mitigate such risks, the international community could maintain its traditional policy of sitting tight and hoping that governments retain control of their nuclear infrastructure. But the United States, for one, is no longer satisfied with this approach.

According to media reports, it has devised a strategy for deploying Special Forces to neutralize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in the event that its authorities lose control. And some government-connected think tanks have explored the possibility of deploying U.S. combat forces to address nuclear risks in North Korea if the regime crumbles.

Such plans, however, are by no means foolproof — not least owing to the difficulties of finding concealed nuclear assets and safeguarding reactors. Moreover, the American public’s willingness to become enmeshed in yet another risky military venture, when boosting homeland security could suffice, is dubious, at best.

Instead of waiting for a major development to force hurried action, the world’s major powers should engage in a full-throated debate to determine the best approach to address nuclear risks in volatile countries, seeking ways to cooperate whenever necessary. After all, even rival powers like China and the U.S. or India and Pakistan share an interest in preventing the world’s most dangerous weapons from falling under the control of its most fanatical minds.

Bennett Ramberg, a policy analyst in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs under President George H.W. Bush, is the author of “Destruction of Nuclear Energy Facilities in War and Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy.” © 2014 Project Syndicate www.project-syndicate.org