War Drums Beating Again?

Fatah's Abbas is reorganizing his cabinet, sacking the thug in charge of Fatah's Gaza security. You think? The PLO is also offering to hold elections once the situation in Gaza settles down. As I noted yesterday, Fatah would likely lose those elections given the dissatisfaction most Palestinians have with the kleptocrats in charge.

The Israelis may have to parachute food into Gaza because the situation really is that bad. And if someone gets injured in the airdrop? That would be Israel's fault as well. No good deed goes unpunished.

Iran admits that it has been backing Hamas, but it denies providing weapons and then makes the absurd claim that NATO is providing weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan. This should be a surprise to absolutely no one. Iran has been pushing its agenda for the region more aggressively since it sees the US and Israel hamstrung by domestic opposition and is exploiting both a media that opposes the war in Iraq and taking the fight to the entities that are behind much of the fighting in the region - Iran and Syria.

Al Qaeda may also be taking advantage of the situation in Gaza, as this editorial suggests:

IT SEEMS that Al Qaeda’s dream is on its way to turning into reality. At last it has found a foothold on the Palestinian scene. Witness the kidnapping of BBC reporter Alan Johnston in Gaza by the Al Qaeda affiliated Jaish al-Islam 100 days ago yesterday, and the heated battles in Nahr al-Barid refugee camp between the Lebanese army and Al Qaeda sympathisers Fatah al-Islam over the past month. And with Gaza and the West Bank sliding further into anarchy, with Hamas and Fatah turning on each other after a year of crushing siege, this new presence can only grow stronger.

Since declaring jihad in 1998, Al Qaeda has aspired to acquire the legitimacy of representing the Palestinian cause, well aware of its rich symbolism within the Arab and Islamic collective conscience. Ever since the eruption of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948, Palestine has offered vital legitimacy to a great many political movements and regimes, from nationalist Nassirites and Ba’athists to liberals and Islamists. It is this moral authority that gave the late Yasser Arafat the status he enjoyed not only among Palestinians, but across the Arab world and beyond.

Palestine is the mirror in which the Arab political scene is reflected. Fatah was an expression of the rise of the left and nationalism; Hamas of the shift towards political Islam. And that is precisely why events in Gaza and Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps today should not be taken lightly. They are ominous harbingers of what could lie ahead. When Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri issued their “Jihad against Jews and Crusaders” statement on February 28 1998, responses to their declaration varied from apathy to amusement. They were an obscure group lost in the faraway emirate of the Taliban, a pathetic remnant of the fight against the USSR during the cold war. Their role looked historically defunct and their discourse archaic.

Jihad isn't solely against Israel and for the liberation of Palestine from the Jews, but rather the spread of Islam by the sword. Defeating Israel in the heart of the Islamic world would be a monumental victory for al Qaeda and the jihadis since it would be interpreted as nothing less than a divinely inspired victory, and thereby increase the likelyhood that others predisposed to jihad would join the fight against the West.

Along the same lines, Ahmadinejad makes yet another not so subtle threat against Israel. Those are just words, until Iran manages to get enough of its centrifuges spinning for weeks and months on end to produce weapons grade nuclear materials for a weapon. When that happens, and the estimates are all over the map, though one report claims that they have enriched 100kg of uranium, no one knows what Iran will do, but I don't think there's any peaceful intent there. Iran will use those weapons, either against the Israelis or against the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Iraqis, or US interests in the region.

That 100kg of enriched uranium doesn't mean that it is weapons grade, but simply the result of running the centrifuges long enough to have begun down that road. Iran also says that they'll step up enrichment if sanctions are imposed. Huh? They'll be stepping up enrichment either way, and the IAEA has once again failed to do its job.

There are once again reports that Israel is training for a long range mission to take out Iran's nuclear facilities.

Lebanon, meanwhile, has claimed victory over Fatah al Islam, after 33 days of fighting at the Palestinian camp near Tripoli, although it appears that the fighting is still ongoing.

Lebanese army helicopters and artillery fired on Friday at Islamist fighters who had retreated into the heart of a Palestinian refugee camp after troops captured all their outlying positions.

But Nahr al-Bared camp was generally calm a day after the army claimed victory in 33 days of fierce fighting against al Qaeda-inspired militants in which 172 people were killed.

Gazelle helicopter gunships fired machine guns and four shells hit the camp in the afternoon amid scattered gunfire.

It was not clear if Fatah al-Islam militants were shooting back. The defense minister has sworn to besiege the camp until they surrender, but says major military operations are over.

The battle for Nahr al-Bared in north Lebanon was the country's worst internal violence since the 1975-90 civil war.

This report indicates that Fatah al Islam lost many of its terrorist leaders and that they had no choice but to fall back.

We're also fast approaching the one year anniversary of Hamas's capture of Gilad Shalit in a raid that killed two other Israeli soldiers. There has been absolutely no movement on that front, as the most recent demands are little changed from the original demands - Hamas wants hundreds of Palestinians, including many terrorists, released from Israeli jails in exchange for Shalit.

The Quartet will be meeting in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

UPDATE:
It hasn't been a good week for the US, Israel or the West, in large part because of the beating their weak horse Fatah thugs took at the hands of Hamas. So, what does the US, Israel and the West do to compound the problem? They decide to throw even more money at Fatah and Abbas. Yes, that's a real bad move alright. Tom Rose has more - via LGF. This doesn't mean that the good work the US and Iraqi forces have been doing against al Qaeda and the insurgents in Iraq has been for naught, but the US has to recognize terrorists and actually treat them as such; the State Department is getting caught up in their pseudorealism once again.

UPDATE:
Iran has reportedly amassed a significant number of armed fast patrol boats for use in the Persian Gulf. Try 1,000 of these boats, which could be outfitted with torpedoes, guns, and missiles, in the hopes of simply overwhelming a ship or ships defenses:

In 2005, IRGC developed its swarm doctrine following Teheran's assessment that the United States was considering an air strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Officials said the swarm doctrine was designed to exploit the slow pace of U.S. aircraft carriers and destroyers in the shallow waters of the Gulf.

"Iran still states that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps will employ swarming tactics in a conflict,'' U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence spokesman Robert Althage said.

IRGC swarming tactics envision a group of more than 100 speedboats attacking a target, such as a Western naval vessel or a commercial oil tanker. They said 20 or more speedboats would strike from each direction, making defense extremely difficult.

The Navy, with at least two carrier groups in the Gulf, has been developing counter-measures to an Iranian swarm attack. These include using minesweepers, unmanned aerial vehicles to monitor Iranian speedboats and the deployment of weapons that could blast Iranian speedboats at standoff range. Such exercises have been conducted over the past few months.

The problem for the Iranians is that the US has over the horizon capabilities to see threats well in advance of its ships and could similarly launch attacks against those boats. However, there is always a chance that such an attack could be successful - see how the USS Cole was badly damaged by a boat suicide bomb attack.

UPDATE:
Some Israelis are wondering why the Israelis are supporting Fatah. You could give Fatah F-16s and they wouldn't be able to deal with Hamas notes Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman. That's a dose of reality, but Olmert and the pseudorealists aren't going to have anything of it.

So, how did Hamas manage to get the editorial pages of the WaPo and NYT to pick up their agitprop on the same day no less? Reuters spills the beans:

Hamas leaders rarely have access to major U.S. media to express their views unfiltered, and getting an opinion piece into the Times and the Post on the same day appeared unprecedented.

Both Fred Hiatt, the Post's editorial page editor and David Shipley, the Times' deputy editorial page editor, said they would not have carried the articles had they known of the other paper's publishing plans.

In The New York Times, Yousef objected to the Western portrayal of the bloody events in Gaza as a Hamas coup against Fatah. "In essence, they have been the opposite.

"Eighteen months ago, our Hamas party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party."

Yousef also complained that recent news coverage had failed to mention that Hamas had offered a 10-year ceasefire to Israel and adhered to a unilateral ceasefire for 18 months.

"Nor has it been evident to many people in the West that the civil unrest in Gaza and the West Bank has been precipitated by the American and Israeli policy of arming elements of the Fatah opposition who want to attack Hamas and force us from office."

In The Washington Post, under the headline "Engage with Hamas," Yousef said President George W. Bush's administration had never intended to honor the outcome of the January 2006 Palestinian elections.

"Those who warn of 'failed states' and 'Hamastan' as a breeding ground for terrorism forget where blame for the failure belongs - at the feet of the American administration which has chosen to isolate, rather than deal with, the elected government."

The U.S. lifted its aid embargo to the Palestinian government last Monday after Abbas swore in a new 13-member emergency Cabinet without Hamas members.

Neither op-ed piece mentioned what the United States, Europe and Israel see as the key obstacle to dealing with Hamas: its refusal to recognize Israel and a world view of Jewish conspiracies and domination laid out in the organization's charter.

Reuters doesn't quite get all the problems with the Hamas position either. They omit the fact that Hamas has a bunch of thugs running around alligned to Hamas, but going by different names these days - plausible deniability, but they've still been launching attacks against Israel. The so-called 10-year truce is a strategic pause to enable Hamas the ability to up-arm for the next round in the jihad against Israel, and that Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel's right ot exist is founded on its religious ideology, and is non-negotiable.

Also, it's laughable how the media covered the Hamas takeover of Gaza; ignoring or minimizing the brutal way in which Hamas went after Fatah - including tossing Fatah thugs off rooftops and summary executions, including murdering injured Fatah thugs in hospitals (Fatah has done the same thing to Hamas, so they're both equal opportunity murderous thugs and terrorists).

Neither deserves space in the editorial pages, and yet Hamas managed to get into both on the same day.

UPDATE:
To continue with the Hamas editorials; as I had previously highlight above, WaPo and NYT editors had no problem with Hamas submitting their agitprop. They only found a problem after realizing that the other paper got the same kind of editorial. Only then would they have run something different.

UPDATE:
Via Rantburg comes this report about how the head of the thugs who captured Alan Johnston is demanding assurances from Hamas not to go after him.

The head of a Palestinian clan in the Gaza Strip holding BBC reporter Alan Johnston wants Hamas to guarantee his and his relatives safety in exchange for the reporter's release, the daily Jerusalem Post said Friday. Clan leader Mumtaz Dagmoush, is refusing to release the journalist - kidnapped over 100 days ago - for fear that Hamas will kill him and most of his clan members, the Jerusalem Post said, citing Hamas sources. Dagmoush, who is known as Abu Muhammad, is negotiating Johnston's release with Hamas leaders in return for assurances that he and his relatives will not be killed, the report said.

Since last Saturday, the sources said, dozens of Hamas militiamen have been surrounding the area where the Dagmoush clan lives in Gaza City's Sabra neighbourhood. Hamas has warned that it will use force unless Johnston is freed by Monday.

"This man is a big thug," an unidentified source was quoted as saying by the Jerusalem Post.

So, Dagmoush is a thug, but so is Hamas. So many thugs, and so little empathy for the lot of them. Hamas is applying the carrot and the stick with Dagmoush, though it is quite liberal with the stick. It is all that Hamas knows.

UPDATE:
From the cognitive dissonance files, here comes the Shiite Islamist leader in Lebanon, blaming all the violence on the US to further US interests in the region. Right. Just ignore Syria next door, Fatah al Islam, and Hizbullah.