EFTA00976777.pdf

From: Office of Terje Rod-Larsen Subject: November 21 update Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 15:52:01 +0000 21 November, 2013 Article 1. The Wall Street Journal The Gipper's Guide to Negotiating George P. Shultz Article 2. Los Angeles Times Why Netanyahu won't yield Michael Oren Article 3. NYT How Bush Let Iran Go Nuclear Ari Shavit Article 4. Al-Ahram Ethiopia fails to see reason over the River Nile Nader Noureddine Article 5. The Washington Post Egypt looks for a path toward democracy David Ignatius Article 6. The Weekly Standard The Secret History of Hezbollah Tony Badran Article 7. Bloomberg Hezbollah Suffers Syria Blowback in Beirut Bombings Fouad Ajami Article 8. Project Syndicate The Shale Revolution's Global Footprint Javier Solana Arl.cle 1. The Wall Street Journal The Gipper's Negotiating George P. Shultz EFTA00976777 Nov. 20, 2013 -- With U.S.-led talks to curb Iran's nuclear program underway in Geneva this week, American diplomats would do well to take a few pointers from the Gipper—my former boss, Ronald Reagan, that is— on how to negotiate effectively: 1. Be realistic; no rose-colored glasses. Recognize opportunities when they are there, but stay close to reality. 2. Be strong and don't be afraid to up the ante. 3. Develop your agenda. Know what you want so you don't wind up negotiating from the other side's agenda. 4. On this basis, engage. And remember: The guy who is anxious for a deal will get his head handed to him. Take, for example, the negotiations with the Soviets that began in 1980 in Geneva over Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF). Reagan's agenda after taking office in 1981: zero intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles on either side at a time when the Soviets had around 1,500 such weapons deployed and the U.S. had none. Impossible! How ridiculous can you get? When negotiations with the Soviets didn't move forward, the U.S. deployed INF in Europe, including nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in West Germany. We, with our NATO allies, had upped the ante. The Soviets walked out of negotiations. War talk filled the air. Reagan and America's allies stood firm. About six months later, the Soviets blinked and negotiations restarted. We worked successfully on a broad agenda designed to bring real change in the Soviet outlook and behavior. On Dec. 8, 1987, seven years after negotiations began, President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty whereby these weapons would be eliminated. So much for the impossible. Apply these ideas to the Iranian problem—the regime's increasing nuclear capacity and its unacceptable behavior. The reality is that Iran is the world's most active sponsor of terror, directly and through proxies such as Hezbollah, and it has developed large-scale enrichment capacity that far exceeds anything needed for power-plant operations. Worse, Iran openly expresses its intent to destroy Israel. The election of President Hasan Rouhani, a "moderate" in the eyes of some, may provide a slight opening. But don't bet on it. At this point, strength in the form of EFTA00976778 sanctions is taking its toll. As with the INF negotiations, the U.S. shouldn't be afraid to up the ante. Tehran maintains that it wants nothing more than to produce nuclear power for its people, medical research and the like. As former Sen. Sam Nunn, currently CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, said on Nov. 11 in an address to the American Nuclear Society: "An agreement with Iran that allows us to test and verify Iran's claim that it has no intention of producing nuclear weapons is absolutely essential." Moreover, if Iran has no intention of producing nuclear weapons, then Tehran should cease all uranium enrichment and immediately allow international inspections for verification. Nuclear materials for power and research facilities are readily available and have been offered to Iran for such purposes for years. Do we have a fallback position? Yes. Allow Iran and the IAEA to identify an existing Iranian-enrichment facility that can supply what is needed for purely civilian use. Then make sure that all the other enrichment facilities and the heavy-water reactor in Iran are destroyed under international inspection. Once the job is done, sanctions will be lifted. It has become a cliché, but it still holds true: Trust but verify. An impossible dream? Remember Reagan, who dreamed an impossible INF dream. What did the Gipper teach us? Dreams can come true when accompanied by a little reality, strength and a willingness to engage. Mr. Shultz, a former secretary of labor, Treasury and state, and director of the Office of Management and Budget, is a distinguishedfellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Los Angeles Times Why Netanyahu won't yield Michael Oren November 21, 2013 -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been labeled a warmonger, a wolf-crier and an opponent of peace at any price because of his policies on Iran. EFTA00976779 Here's what Netanyahu's critics say: His warnings of a bad deal are designed to undermine measures to slow Iran's nuclear program and test its openness to long-term solutions. His insistence on strengthening, rather than easing, sanctions will weaken Iranian moderates and drive them from the negotiating table — precisely what Netanyahu allegedly wants. Similarly, his demands for dismantling Iran's uranium enrichment facilities and removing its nuclear stockpile are intended to replace diplomatic options with military ones. The critics claim that he is again playing the doomsayer, the spoiler of efforts to avoid conflict and restore Iran to the community of nations. Why would any leader subject himself to such obloquy? Why would he risk international isolation and friction with crucial allies? And why, as some commentators assert, would Netanyahu jeopardize a peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear threat and drag his country — and perhaps not only his — into war? The answers to these questions are simple. Netanyahu is acting out of a deep sense of duty to defend Israel against an existential threat. Such dangers are rare in most countries' experience but are traumatically common in Israel's, and they render the price of ridicule irrelevant. Moreover, when formulating policies vital to Israel's survival, the prime minister consults with Israel's renowned intelligence community, a robust national security council and highly specialized units of the Israel Defense Forces. Netanyahu may at times appear to stand alone on Iran, but he is backed by a world-class body of experts. In 2011, these same analysts predicted that the Arab Spring, which was widely hailed as the dawn of Middle Eastern democracy, would be hijacked by Islamic radicals. They foresaw years of brutal civil strife. Netanyahu publicly expressed these conclusions and was denounced as a naysayer by many of the same columnists who are now lambasting him on Iran. Yet it is precisely on Iran that Israeli specialists have proved most prescient. They were the first, more than 20 years ago, to reveal Iran's clandestine nuclear activities. They continued to scrutinize the program, emphasizing its military goals, even after 2003, when weaponization was purportedly halted. EFTA00976780 Throughout several attempts at diplomacy, these experts have disclosed the ways that Iran systematically obstructed United Nations observers, lied to world leaders and hid nuclear facilities, such as the one at Fordow, which can have no peaceful purpose. Israeli intelligence has accurately tracked Iran's support for terrorist organizations, its role in the massacre of thousands of Syrians and its responsibility for attacks against civilians in dozens of cities around the world. This does not mean that Israeli estimates are infallible. Since the failure to foresee the 1973 Yom Kippur War, intelligence officials are wary of long- standing conceptions and rigorously question them. Nevertheless, Israeli experts agree that for hegemonic purposes and internal security, the Iranian regime wants and needs the bomb. Consequently, it will employ any ruse to preserve the ability to produce a weapon in a matter of weeks while obtaining some relief from sanctions. Iranian leaders know — and Israel's analysts agree — that lessening the economic pressure on Iran will send an incontrovertible message to foreign companies, many of which are already seeking contracts with Tehran, that the sanctions that took years to build are ending. Iran could drag out any confidence-building period indefinitely while producing fissile materiel for multiple bombs. Top-flight intelligence helped Israel grapple with the challenges posed by the Arab Spring, but the stakes regarding Iran — the lives of 8 million Israelis — are vastly greater. Pundits may posit that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is a moderate, but Israelis cannot indulge in speculation. Our margin for error is nil. Knowing that, Netanyahu is duty-bound to warn of Iranian subterfuge, to insist that Iran cede its centrifuges, cease enrichment, close its heavy-water plant and transfer its nuclear stockpiles abroad. He has a responsibility to explain that although Israel has the most to gain from diplomacy, it also has the most to lose from its failure. He is obliged to stress that the choice is not between sanctions and war but between a bad deal and stronger sanctions. And as the prime minister of the Jewish state, Netanyahu must assert Israel's right to defend itself against any existential threat. Critics can call him militant or intransigent, but Netanyahu is merely doing his job. Any Israeli leader who did less would be strategically and morally EFTA00976781 negligent. Michael Oren served as Israel's ambassador to the United Statesfrom 2009 to 2013. NYT How Bush Let Iran Go Nuclear Ari Shavit November 20, 2013 -- AMERICAN and Iranian negotiators yesterday began a second round of talks in Geneva, seeking a deal on Iran's nuclear program. If such an agreement were signed, it would represent an Iranian victory — and an American defeat. The Iranians would be able to maintain their nuclear program and continue to enrich uranium, while the Americans and their allies would loosen the economic siege on Iran and allow Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the economic oxygen needed to sustain his autocratic regime. Yes, Iran's race to the bomb would be slowed down — but an accord would guarantee that it would eventually cross the finish line. The Geneva mind-set resembles a Munich mind-set: It would create the illusion of peace-in-our-time while paving the way to a nuclear- Iran-in-our-time. But don't blame President Obama. Indeed, this American defeat was set in motion long before he took office. What three American presidents, four Israeli prime ministers and a dozen European leaders vowed would never happen is actually happening. What was not to be is almost a reality. The Iranian bomb is nearly here. Why wasn't the West able to mobilize its political, economic and military resources in time to force Tehran to give up its nuclear ambition? The answer may be described as a spelling error. After 9/11, the United States was determined to strike back, destroy terrorist sanctuaries and display its imperial might. President George W. Bush chose to do all of this in Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan may have been a mistake, but it was an understandable one: Al Qaeda enjoyed the Taliban's support and had found refuge in Taliban-controlled territory. But invading Iraq was an incomprehensible mistake, as there were no links EFTA00976782 between Saddam Hussein and the 19 terrorists who attacked New York and Washington in September 2001. If Mr. Bush had decided to display American leadership and exercise American power by launching a diplomatic campaign against Iran rather than a military one against Iraq 10 years ago, the United States' international standing would be far greater today. The Bush administration's decision to go after Iraq rather than Iran was a fatal one, and the long-term consequences are only now becoming clear, namely a devastating American failure in the battle to prevent a nuclear Iran, reflected in Washington's willingness to sign a deeply flawed agreement. Mr. Bush's responsibility for the disaster now unfolding is twofold: He failed to target Iran a decade ago, and created a climate that made it very difficult to target Iran today. The Bush administration didn't initiate a political-economic siege on Iran when it was weak, and Mr. Bush weakened America by exhausting its economic power and military might in a futile war. By the time American resolve was needed to fend off a genuine global threat, the necessary determination was no longer there. It had been wasted on the wrong cause. The correct way to confront the Iranian threat would have been to establish a broad coalition including Russia, the European Union, Sunni Arab countries, Israel and the United States. This would have placed Iran's leaders in a real stranglehold and forced them to abandon their nuclear project — just as Libya did in 2003. The Republican Party could have done that in 2003 or 2005 or 2007. But Republican leaders squandered the opportunity. Worse still, the United States got bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and that sucked all the oxygen out of America's lungs. Mr. Bush passed on to Mr. Obama a nation that had lost much of the resolve it had possessed. When faced with a real threat to world peace, America's will was spent. It had evaporated in the violent streets of Basra and Baghdad. Sure, Mr. Obama has made mistakes, too. After coming to office, he wasted time on a futile policy of engagement and then on ineffective sanctions. He ignored the British, French, Israelis, Egyptians and Saudis who warned him that he was being naïve and turned his back on the freedom-seeking Iranian masses in June 2009. When Mr. Obama finally endorsed assertive diplomacy and punitive sanctions in 2011 and 2012, it was too little, too late. EFTA00976783 But Mr. Obama was operating within the smoky ruins of the strategic disaster he had inherited. After Iraq, America is a traumatized nation, with a limited attention span for problems in the Middle East. The empire is weary. It has lost the ardor and wisdom needed to deal with the cruelest of the world's regions and with the most dangerous of the world's evil powers. The Geneva agreement being negotiated is an illusion. The so-called moderate president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, is an illusion, too. So is the hope that Iran's supreme leader can be appeased. Because America missed the opportunity for assertive diplomacy, all the options now left on the table are dire ones. Rather than pursuing a dangerous interim agreement, the West must insist that all the centrifuges in Iran stop spinning while a final agreement is negotiated. President Obama was right to demand a settlement freeze in the West Bank in 2009. Now he must demand a total centrifuge freeze in Iran. Ari Shavit, a senior columnist at Haaretz, is the author of "My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel." Al-Ahram Ethiopia fails to see reason over the River Nile Nader Noureddine 20-11-2013 -- Ethiopia has been having trouble finding finance for its Renaissance Dam. The technologically hazardous and politically incendiary project has failed to whet the appetites of investors though this did not seem to bother the Ethiopian delegation to recent talks. Instead of admitting that the whole idea is unfeasible the Ethiopians harangued the Egyptian delegation, claiming that Egypt was wasteful with water, had no right to its full water quota, and should not be channelling water to Sinai or Toshka. The Egyptian delegation sat sheepishly through the meeting. The Ethiopians claimed they have no intention of building the dam "on the dead bodies of Egyptians", a meaningless assertion. The fact is they cannot EFTA00976784 find finance for the dam because — politics aside — the project doesn't make economic or ecological sense. The meeting began with the Ethiopians demanding an apology for the ridiculous — and unfortunately televised — meeting between ousted president Morsi and party chiefs. The Egyptian delegation duly complied though if anyone should be offering apologies it is the Ethiopians, and for a number of reasons. The Ethiopians pressed on, accusing the Egyptians of racism and arguing that Egypt is stealing their water. One even made the fantastical claim that Ethiopia was getting only three per cent of its water resources. According to an official report from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) released in December 2012, Ethiopia's rivers are fed with 122 billion cubic metres of water annually. Of this amount, about 71 billion cubic metres flows downstream via the Blue Nile, Atbarah and Sobat. Ethiopians left with 51 billion cubic metres — about as much as Egypt receives. I have no idea where the three per cent notion came from. Aside from river water, rainfall allows Ethiopia to raise 100 million cattle on natural grassland, making it the largest exporter of organic milk in Africa. Because it has the advantage of farming with clean rainwater, not the polluted river water Egypt uses, Ethiopia is high on the list of organic food exporters to Europe. If anyone is thrifty for water it is Egypt, a country that uses agricultural drainage water, sometimes more than once, and where the population lives on five per cent of the land. Egypt has lost two million feddans to urban sprawl in the past 30 years. No other nation in Africa, or the world, lives on such a small area of its land, something the Egyptian delegation could have told the Ethiopians rather than sitting around and taking the blame. How can you compare a country that has 14 rivers with one that has a single river? Ethiopia has already built 13 hydroelectric dams without a word of protest from Egypt's side. To add insult to injury the Ethiopians told our delegation that Egypt was giving water to the rich and depriving the poor. The reference is perhaps to the couple of professional golf courses we have. The truth is that Egypt uses 80 per cent of its river water for agriculture, an activity that is concentrated in the impoverished countryside where nearly three out of four people are classified as poor. The remaining water is split EFTA00976785 almost equally between domestic and municipal uses on one hand and industry on the other. So where do the rich fit into this image? The Ethiopians are angry because Egypt is channelling Nile water to Sinai and Toshka, areas that they claim have no right to get water as they are far from the Nile basin. The Egyptian delegation didn't answer that, but I will. Sinai was connected to the Nile centuries back, through the Pelusiac branch. In fact the area of Baluza in Sinai is named after this branch. There is a valley, called Tina, in Sinai in which 60 per cent of the soil is made up of Nile silt. The canal to Sinai isn't operating yet. When it is, it will draw only two billion m3 per year from the Nile water, and an additional 2.3 billion m2 from agricultural drainage. We are not wasting water but preserving it at a rate rarely seen in Africa. There is not one upstream country in the Nile Valley that reuses water, Ethiopia included. Toshka represents a fraction of the arable land we have lost over the years. As I have mentioned, since 1952 Egypt has lost nearly two million feddans of agricultural land to urban growth. It would only be fair to reclaim an equal amount of land — or more if it is to feed its growing population — elsewhere. The Toshka project extends over 540,000 feddans. To compensate for the land it has lost, Egypt plans to reclaim one million feddans on the north coast. There is nothing rapacious about this. Egypt's population has grown from 20 million in 1952 to over 90 million at present while its arable land has diminished over the same period. Our delegation should have pointed out the above and asked a few questions of its own, such as: - Why has Ethiopia increased the capacity of the Renaissance Dam from 14 billion m3 before the January 2011 Revolution to 74 billion m3, an increase that doesn't lead to higher production of electricity or more land reclamation? - Why did the height of the dam increase to 145 metres from 90 metres? - What will Ethiopia do with the immense amount of silt that the Blue Nile carries? The water of the Blue Nile is so heavy with silt that it has been rated as one of the least suitable rivers worldwide for damming. The river carries about 245 million tonnes of silt every year, enough to fill it within a EFTA00976786 few years. The only way to deal with the problem of silting is to build three more dams, the total capacity of which is 200 billion m3. Knowing that the capacity of the Blue Nile is no more than 48 billion m3 per year, the whole thing is bizarre. Why would any country try to store 200 billion m3 of water from a river that brings only one quarter of this quantity every year? - Why is Ethiopia ignoring the report by the 10-member committee (two representatives from Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, one expert from the UK, France, Germany, and South Africa) about the need for further studies on the ecological and other repercussions of the dam? Experts have pointed out that the dam is likely to lead to the desertification of Egypt, which means that Mediterranean water will inundate the Delta. If the dam is built Egypt's water supply will drop drastically preventing power generation in the High Dam. Lake Nasser will become irrelevant since Egypt will have no extra water to store. - What is the reason to build this massive dam with its fantastically large lake? Hydroelectric dams don't need that much water. Smaller dams, with a lake ranging between eight billion to 14 billion m3 in volume, are more efficient. So what is the point of building a massive dam with an electric generating efficiency as low as 33 per cent, when the efficiency of smaller dams average 66 per cent. - What if the dam collapsed, a scenario of which a German expert warned? There is a 90 per cent chance that the dam will collapse within the first 10 years of its construction. Is this something Ethiopia is capable of dealing with? Is it offering Egypt — and Sudan — any guarantees against damages? Ethiopia is acting as if Egypt is threatening its security whereas the opposite is true. Egypt has a responsibility to defend its people. It cannot allow them to starve, go thirsty, or be inundated. I recall the words of the late Anwar Al-Sadat, who said that if need be we will go to Ethiopia and die there, not die of thirst where we stand. One way out of the dilemma is for Egypt to allow Ethiopia to go back to the old specification of the dam — with a height of 90 metres and a lake of 14 billion m3. But this must be conditional on the Ethiopians not building future dams on the Blue Nile without prior consent from Egypt and Sudan. Ethiopia should also apologise for its attempts to impose a fait accompli on downstream countries, something which runs in the face of international EFTA00976787 law. The negotiations are continuing, but if this attitude on the Ethiopians' side persists it will be a matter of weeks before they collapse. In this case Egypt will have to consider taking other measures to protect itself. The writer is professor of water resources and soil at Cairo University. The Washington Post Egypt looks for a path toward democracy David Ignatius NOV 20, 2013—Cairo Bassem Youssef, Egypt's popular television comedian, expresses the irreverent confidence this country will need to regain stability. On air, he mocks the autocratic tendencies of both the Muslim Brotherhood leaders and the army generals who toppled them from power. Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi and his adoring supporters unfortunately seem to have lost the celebrated Egyptian sense of humor. Youssef presented a hilarious episode on Oct. 25 that showed footage of Sissi admonishing the nation. Then a muscular hand emerged from under the table and placed a new script before Youssef. After he shouted the Arabic word for "freedom," the anonymous hand dove for his groin and began squeezing. Youssef's next show was pulled from the air, and last week an Egyptian prosecutor referred 30 complaints to a judge for investigation. It was a chilling response. But more than that, it was stupid: It made Sissi's government look petty and dictatorial. I came away from a visit here convinced that Egypt can find its way to civilian democracy — but only if officials lighten up and create the more tolerant, robust country that was envisioned by the Tahrir Square revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak. If Sissi decides to run for president next year, he would almost certainly win. But that would retard Egypt's political development. The United States, after months of confusing stop-go policy toward Egypt, may finally be moving to help its long-standing ally find some balance. The State Department is forming a team to work with the United Arab EFTA00976788 Emirates, and perhaps Saudi Arabia, to support the Egyptian economy and smooth the political transition. U.S. policy over the past year had managed to offend nearly everyone here. The United States was seen as too supportive of President Mohamed Morsi during his year in power. When the military intervened, some Islamists thought (wrongly) that the United States was complicit in the bloody crackdown. U.S. attempts to punish the regime by cutting military and economic assistance further angered people. Unfortunately, high-level confusion in U.S. policy appears to be continuing, with Secretary of State John E Kerry supporting more assistance for Egypt and national security adviser Susan Rice resisting what might appear to be support for the military coup. The United States can't afford such policy disarray. "You can't act as if this regime didn't kill a thousand people in one day. You need accountability," said Hossam Bahgat, one of Egypt's leading human rights activists. But that accountability must come from Egyptians, not Americans. "The country goes down the drain, and the U.S. responds with its usual policy of `managing the crisis.' That sends the wrong message," complained Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister. "If the crisis has to be managed, it should be managed by us. We don't want a lose-lose situation here like Syria or Iraq." Moussa is heading a 50-person commission that is writing a new constitution for Egypt as part of its road map back to democracy. Tlieplan calls for the constitution to be completed in December and for a public referendum in January. Parliamentary elections would follow in the spring and presidential elections in the summer. But this constitutional framework may have the regrettable effect of legitimizing military rule, should Sissi decide to seek the presidency — following in the path of officers-turned-presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Mubarak. "We don't want a new pharaoh," said Bahgat. Many Egyptians share this wariness of another military leader. Egypt's political problem is that the secular parties haven't generated a popular leader as an alternative to Sissi. "Three years of revolution have not produced one person who can speak for the revolution," said Hani EFTA00976789 Shukrallah, the former editor of Al-Ahram Online and a vocal critic of both Mubarak and Morsi. "We haven't found that macho, elegant young man who is a secularist," says Nabil Fahmy, the foreign minister, noting the lack of a strong civilian candidate. He argues that the reformed political process must include the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party if it is to have legitimacy. Westerners should take hope, as Egyptians do, from the fact that most people here decided they didn't want to live in the rigid Muslim society that the Brotherhood was creating. When Morsi suspended the constitution last November, the United States was slow to react; it was too supportive of the new Islamist regime. That still grates with Egyptians. A slogan among Egyptians these days is "Ayzeen ne'aish," which loosely translates as "We just want to live." But this understates the desire for change that's still evident when Egyptians talk about their "revolutions" — first against Mubarak and then against Morsi. People want to live, yes — but with the freedom and dignity the revolutions promised. The U.S. policy tilt back toward Egypt, as urged by Kerry, makes sense, especially if it aligns the United States with the narrative of change that began in 2011 in Tahrir Square. The Weekly Standard The Secret History of Hezbollah Tony Badran November 25, 2013 -- Thirty years ago last month, Hezbollah blew up the barracks of the U.S Marines and French paratroopers stationed at the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 Frenchmen. It wasn't Hezbollah's first terrorist operation, but this attack, the most memorable in Lebanon's vicious and chaotic 15-year-long civil war, marked the Party of God's entry onto the world stage. Three decades later, thanks to the efforts of Israeli Hezbollah expert Shimon Shapira, we now know that one of the men responsible for the attack was an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander EFTA00976790 named Hossein Dehghan—the man Iranian president Hassan Rouhani recently tapped to be his defense minister. In other words, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been joined at the hip from the very beginning, even before the 1979 Iranian revolution. Of course, that's not the standard account of Hezbollah, the historical narrative jointly constructed and largely agreed upon by Middle East experts, journalists, some Western and Arab intelligence officials, and even Hezbollah figures themselves. This account holds that Hezbollah was founded in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in 1982 to fight, or "resist," the Israeli invasion of that year. On this reading, the belief—held by the organization's many critics, targets, and enemies—that Hezbollah is little more than an IRGC battalion on the eastern Mediterranean is simply part of a U.S.-Israeli disinformation campaign meant to smear a national resistance movement fighting for the liberation of Lebanese lands. Sure, Hezbollah was founded with some help from Iranian officials, and still receives financial assistance from Tehran, but the organization is strictly a Lebanese affair. It was engendered by Israel's 1982 invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon. The occupation, as one author 7, sympathetic to the group put it, is Hezbollah's "raison Even former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak contends that it was the Israeli occupation that gave birth to Hezbollah. "It was our stay [in Lebanon] that established [Hezbollah]," Israel's most decorated soldier said in 2010. "Hezbollah got stronger not as a result of our exit from Lebanon but as a result of our stay in Lebanon." Perhaps Barak was simply keen to defend his decision to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000, for his account is simply not true. The big bang theory of Hezbollah that puts the Israeli occupation at the alpha point is based not in fact but in legend—it's an Israel-centric myth that makes the Jewish state Hezbollah's motivation and prime mover. In reality, the story of Hezbollah's origins is a story about Iran, featuring the anti-shah revolutionaries active in Lebanon in the 1970s, years before Israel's intervention. Thus, to uncover Hezbollah's roots, it is necessary to mine the accounts of Iranian cadres operating in Lebanon a decade before Israel invaded. There we find that, contrary to the common wisdom, Hezbollah didn't arise as a resistance movement to the Israeli occupation. Rather, it was born EFTA00976791 from the struggle between Iranian revolutionary factions opposed to the shah. Lebanon was a critical front for this rivalry between Hezbollah's Iranian progenitors and their domestic adversaries. Accordingly, an accurate understanding of this history gives us not only the true story of Hezbollah's beginnings, but also an insight into the origins of Iran's Islamic Revolution. Those early internal conflicts and impulses, played out in Lebanon as well as Iran, also provide a roadmap for reading the nature of the current regime in Tehran, its motivations and concerns, its strategies and gambits as it moves toward acquiring a nuclear weapon and challenging the American order in the Middle East. For Iranian revolutionary activists, Lebanon in the early to mid 1970s was valuable ground, not because it bordered Israel, but because it was a free zone in which to pursue their anti-shah activity. Though the Lebanese government maintained relations with Iran, the weakness of the state presented opportunities unavailable elsewhere in the Middle East. The autonomy of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the most significant military outfit in Lebanon after it was pushed out of Jordan in 1970, and the military training camps it ran in Lebanon afforded the anti-shah opposition—often traveling with fake Palestinian identity papers—many benefits. There they could operate and organize freely, acquire military training and weapons, make contacts with other revolutionary organizations, form alliances, and establish networks of support for their fight against the Pahlavi regime. Another attraction for the Iranians was Lebanon's large Shiite population, especially the influential Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr, who proved helpful to many of the Iranian oppositionists. Both Sadr's network and the PLO's would continue to prove critical even after the Iranian revolution, in the ensuing power struggle between Iran's revolutionary factions. Of the several Iranian groups operating in Lebanon in the 1970s, two main factions are of note. One comprised figures from the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI), such as Mostafa Chamran, who served as defense minister after the fall of the shah. In Lebanon, Chamran and the LMI worked closely with Sadr, whom LMI leaders knew from his student days in Tehran, and who was the uncle of one of the group's leaders in exile. Sadr also relied on the Palestinians for training his newly formed Amal militia. His concern wasn't fighting Israel but rather protecting his and the EFTA00976792 Shiite community's interests from other Lebanese factions with the onset of the Lebanese civil war. He and Chamran were ambivalent about the Palestinians, and in 1976, when Sadr aligned with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad and supported Syria's entry into Lebanon, the divide only widened. The PLO and its allies on the Lebanese left opposed Syria and sharply criticized Sadr. Moreover, Palestinian attacks on Israel from south Lebanon put Shiite villagers in the face of Israeli retaliation, a danger that worried both Sadr and Chamran. It wasn't long, then, before Amal came into conflict with the same Palestinian factions that had trained Sadr's men. In contrast, the other main faction of Iranian revolutionaries operating in Lebanon maintained close relations with the PLO and mistrusted Sadr and the LMI. This faction was made up of devotees of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and after the Iranian revolution became part of the Islamic Republic party. Many of them also became top commanders in the IRGC and the Office of Liberation Movements (OLM), charged with establishing contacts with and supporting revolutionary movements abroad. In effect, the OLM was the precursor of the Quds Force, the overseas operations arm of the IRGC. It was set up under the supervision of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a close associate of Khomeini and his heir apparent, and was headed by his son, Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Montazeri. Others associated with the Khomeinist faction working in Lebanon included Jalaleddin Farsi, a close associate of Montazeri who was the party's candidate in Iran's first presidential election after the revolution, and Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar Mohtashami, a student of Khomeini who later became ambassador to Syria and would play a critical role in the emergence of Hezbollah. Another important figure in this camp who played a key role in forming Hezbollah was Mohammad Saleh Hosseini, a founding member of the IRGC. Hosseini appears prominently in the primary sources, and yet he has been entirely overlooked in the scholarly literature on Hezbollah. Born to an Iranian family in 1942, Hosseini grew up in Najaf, Iraq, where he became involved in, and got arrested for, Islamic activism, and also established close relations with Iraqi-based officials from Yasser Arafat's Fatah, the dominant party in the PLO. After the 1968 Baathist coup in Iraq, Hosseini was forced to flee to Lebanon, where, in late 1970, he was given shelter by EFTA00976793 Musa al-Sadr and became the principal of one of Sadr's schools, where, thanks to his contacts with Fatah, he helped train the school's Shiite youths. Even after he was dismissed from the school, Hosseini and the Khomeinists established connections with young Shiite militants associated with Fatah who yet balked at the Palestinian group's secular, indeed leftist, outlook. From the Khomeinists' perspective, these young fighters were ripe for recruitment, and part of Hosseini's role was to ensure that the Shiites he cultivated were, unlike those in Sadr's organization, pro-Khomeini. Those who passed inspection would come to form the nucleus of Hezbollah. The most famous of them was Imad Mughniyeh, who would become the group's military commander and mastermind of many of Hezbollah's most notorious operations. By the time of the Marine barracks bombing in 1983, Mughniyeh was already a well-known Iranian asset who, along with other like-minded Shiites, had been working closely with future senior IRGC commanders since the mid-1970s. There were tensions between the two Iranian camps in Lebanon, and the friction between the Khomeinists and the Sadrists foreshadowed the divisions among the anti-shah activists that would be played out on the streets of Tehran after the revolution. One of the key debates among the Khomeinists was whether to use Sadr's Amal militia as the vehicle for political and military action in Lebanon. The chief problem with that idea was that Khomeini and Sadr were rivals. Or at least that's how Khomeini and his followers saw Sadr, and perhaps for good reason. The Iranian-born Sadr, won a huge following in Lebanon, had established such close ties with senior LMI leaders that he might have leveraged for influence inside Iran. It's unclear whether Sadr was as ambitious as Khomeini, or as jealous of another cleric's reputation. Sadr never endorsed Khomeini's status as marja', or Shiite religious authority. It's worth noting that it was the religious authority of the cleric that would undergird the theory, "guardianship of the jurist" (velayat-e faqih), according to which Khomeini would justify his theocratic rule when he eventually took power. But Sadr didn't live to see it. In August 1978, Sadr disappeared during a trip to Libya. Montazeri and his faction maintained a close relationship with the Libyans, sponsors of the EFTA00976794 PLO, and Sadr's associates in Lebanon would eventually come to accuse the Montazeri camp of complicity in Sadr's presumed death. It's hardly surprising that Khomeini failed to exert any serious efforts to discover the missing cleric's fate. He valued the alliance with Libya and the PLO—and the disposal of a potential challenger was hardly inconvenient. Shortly after Sadr's disappearance, the countdown to the revolution picked up its pace. The shah departed in January 1979, and Khomeini returned to Iran a few weeks later in triumph. The Islamic Republic party was soon formed, bringing together Khomeini's devotees and other radical clergy who sought an Islamic republic. They began calling themselves Hezbollah. This was to distinguish themselves from their domestic rivals, the LMI and allied factions, whom they referred to as the "liberals," and who they feared would sabotage the revolution. Those so-called liberals were not the same as those in the current regime who are often referred to as "moderates." Today's "moderates," or pragmatists, like former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, were part of the IRP. Their domestic rivals, the liberals, were typically sidelined, exiled, or liquidated in a struggle over the direction of the revolution. By the summer of 1981, the Islamic Republic party finally rolled up its rivals and took sole control of the government, which it called "the Hezbollahi government." LMI's most influential figures met the fate of their friend Musa al-Sadr. Mostafa Chamran, for instance, was killed in mysterious circumstances in June 1981 during the war with Iraq. But the Khomeinists also absorbed significant losses. Mohammad Montazeri was killed in a blast that targeted the IRP headquarters in Tehran in June 1981. Mohammad Saleh Hosseini, who under Khomeini became a senior IRGC official responsible for external relations, had been assassinated in Beirut two months previously. His death had little effect on Iranian policy inside of Lebanon since the assets that he and top IRGC leadership had been cultivating since the mid-70s were now being consolidated. Moreover, there were plenty of colleagues to pick up where Montazeri and Hosseini had left off. For instance, in 1981 Ali Akbar Mohtashami summoned Mughniyeh and Hezbollah's future secretary general, Abbas Musawi, to Iran for initial discussions about providing training for Hezbollah. As the newly appointed ambassador to Damascus, Mohtashami EFTA00976795 was well placed to facilitate the arrival of IRGC troops. And in 1982, that Iranian delegation landed in the Bekaa Valley, led by current Iranian defense minister Hossein Dehghan. In the conventional narrative of Hezbollah's origins, it is the arrival of this contingent, the work it did there, and the men it trained that is typically said to signal the organization's birth. However, by the time Dehghan, Mohtashami, and Mughniyeh engineered the October 1983 attack that killed 241 American servicemen, the Khomeinists had already been active in Lebanon for over a decade. They wanted their own Shiite organization operating in Lebanon. The PLO was never going to be an entirely trustworthy asset, and Amal, as long as Sadr was alive, was an adversary, and even after his death would never prove pliant enough. As Khomeini and his followers established their control over the revolution, here was an opportunity to do the same in the place where it had, arguably, first taken shape. And now it was all coming full circle as Iran's triumphant Islamic Republicans, Hezbollah, spawned their namesake in Lebanon. Three decades later, Hezbollah remains on top in both Iran and Lebanon. Tony Badran is a columnistfor the Beirut-based website NOW Lebanon and a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Bloomberg Hezbollah Suffers Syria Blowback in Beirut Bombings Fouad Ajami Nov 20, 2013 -- Hassan Nasrallah, the dreadful Shiite cleric who commands the Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement, couldn't get what he wanted. He had plunged his militia into the war in Syria, he had helped turn the tide of war in favor of the Bashar al-Assad regime, and he had bragged about the prowess of his fighters. Yet he had asked that the fight for Syria be waged only on Syrian soil. EFTA00976796 The two bombings that hit the Iranian embassy in a Hezbollah neighborhood of Beirut on Tuesday should have delivered to Nasrallah a truth known to all protagonists in this fight. There are no easy victories, no way that the fire could rage in Syria while life went on as usual in Beirut. It was Nasrallah -- and by extension his Iranian paymasters -- who wrote the grim new rules of the Syrian war. Assad hadn't been able to prevail against the Sunni rebellion. The Russian weapons and Iranian money, deployed on his behalf, hadn't sufficed. The Iranian desire for a measure of deniability had come up against the incompetence of Assad's armed forces: The dictator's supporters were barbarians, but defections from the ranks, and the flagrant sectarian base of his regime, had forced the Iranians into the open. This is when Iran decreed the entry of Hezbollah into the fight. Dual Allegiance It didn't matter whether Nasrallah and his lieutenants were enthusiastic about this new mission beyond Lebanon's borders. The Hezbollah leaders are at once players in the Lebanese political game and self-professed soldiers in Iran's revolutionary brigades. The effective leader of Hezbollah isn't Nasrallah in his bunker, but Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in Tehran. Iran's power and money and protection raised Nasrallah, a child of Beirut's most wretched slum, to his position as mightiest warlord in Lebanon. Iran may have been pressed for money at home, hobbled by sanctions, but the money kept coming to Beirut. There was money for Hezbollah's gunmen, there was a television station, Al Manar, that spread Iran's message. A vast relief network enabled Nasrallah to pose as a benefactor of impoverished Shiites and to ask his followers for ever greater sacrifices. Nasrallah's mission was clear: He and his fighters were to make Iran a power of the Mediterranean and, by way of Lebanon, a veritable neighbor of Israel. Once Iran had committed itself to Assad's survival, Hezbollah forces were on their way to Syria. This war kept no secrets. At first, Hezbollah fighters who fell in battle were given quiet burials. Their death notices were ambiguous -- they died while performing "jihadi duty." A vicious battle last May for Qusayr, a town near the Lebanese border, shattered the ambiguity. Hezbollah fighters prevailed at a price. Their EFTA00976797 triumphalism was abhorrent. They defied the sensibilities of Sunnis everywhere. They raised Shiite banners atop a Sunni mosque. There had been an unwritten pact that all parties to the sectarian feuds of Lebanon would keep a distance from Syria's struggle, lest the divisions tear Lebanon apart. For the Sunnis of Lebanon, once masters of the coastal cities of Beirut, Sidon and Tripoli, Qusayr was a summons to battle. They had watched Hezbollah gunmen overrun their beloved West Beirut; they had seen Shiite squatters from the southern hinterland and Bekaa Valley swamp Beirut and alter its demography. They had bristled at the emergence of Iran and its embassy and its agents as a power in their midst. The two suicide bombers who struck the Iranian embassy, one on a motorcycle and the other behind the wheel of a car loaded with more than 100 pounds of explosives, were Lebanese members of al-Qaeda, "two heroes of the Sunnis of Beirut," according to a statement on Twitter. Double Game The Sunni jihad in Syria had come to Beirut, and Nasrallah and his Iranian masters have to accept that this was the war they made. Iran plays a double game. It feigns respectability in regional affairs; it even wants a role in the negotiations over Syria, if and when these negotiations materialize. Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, described Syria in an article under his name in the Washington Post as a "civilizational jewel," even as Iran's Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah fighters have heaped grief and loss on Syrian civilians. But the attack in Beirut is a stark confirmation that Iran has run out of deniability for its deeds in Syria. Fouad Ajami is a seniorfellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of "The Syrian Rebellion." Article 8 Project Syndicate The Shale Revolution's Global Footprint Javier Solana EFTA00976798 NOV 20, 2013 -- Thousands of negotiators are currently gathered at the United Nations climate-change talks in Warsaw, creating a blueprint for a comprehensive global agreement to be delivered by 2015. But, as the negotiators work, the world's energy landscape is in enormous flux. Given that most of the world's CO2 emissions stem from energy production and tr