While the estimated cost of fighting terror threats in the last decade cost U.S. taxpayers well over $1,300,000,000,000, fundamentalist Islamic terrorism is proving to be a highly effective way to force the further paralysis and –yet another- unconditional surrender of impotent Western Civilization.
The latest news coming out of the Middle East describes the US-brokered exchange deal with Hamas that is based on the pending release of a kidnapped French-Israeli citizen Gilead Shalit in exchange to the unconditional release into the world of 1,027 convicted Palestinian terrorists, cutting short the multiple life sentences of 280 convicted mass murderers responsible for hundreds of horrific bloodbaths.
Emboldened by the international response to the announcement, Hamas political leader and arch-terrorist Khaled Meshaal, who signed the exchange deal, vowed to continue renewed efforts to kidnap Israelis to obtain the release of even more convicted Islamists murderers.
The Shalit abduction was not the last, Meshaal said: "We got 1,027 out of jail and we'll recover the remaining 8,000 too."
He was strongly echoed by radical Palestinian leaders in the Gaza Strip as they prepared a heroes' welcome for the homecoming terrorists who are guaranteed to become the instigators of and perpetrators of even more terrorist acts for years to come.
On Thursday, Oct. 13 Cairo took two steps inimical to Israel. Egyptian Air Force Chief Gen. Reda Hafiz said to the official MENA news agency: "Sinai is our land and we do not need permission to increase our forces on our land" in direct contravention of the 1979 peace treaty signed with Israel which demilitarized Sinai by common consent. He added: "Egyptian planes conduct patrols without Israeli consent to secure Egypt's borders, including the eastern (Israeli) border."
Furthermore, without waiting for Hamas to open the prison doors for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit after five years of captivity in the Gaza Strip, Cairo let his captors cash in on the prisoner exchange deal by providing the first Damascus-based Hamas leaders with a new home in Cairo.
Wednesday, Oct. 12, Khaled Meshaal's deputy, Mousa Abu Marzuk, won permission from Egyptian intelligence director Maj. Gen. Murad Mowafi to relocate from Damascus to a permanent home in a luxury villa provided him in Cairo.
Meshaal, who arrived in the Egyptian capital Wednesday, was assured of the same privileges along with the staff of his Damascus politburo, if the new round of Palestinian unity talks launched between Hamas and Fatah in Cairo Thursday progressed satisfactorily.
Egypt’s official line is that Meshaal arrived to oversee arrangements for the handover of Gilad Shalit next week in return for the first batch of 450 jailed Palestinians. The remainder will be released at a later stage.
In reality, he came to supervise the transfer of his command center from the Syrian capital to Cairo.
Israel’s ageing President Shimon Peres caught between a rock and a hard place- having no other choice- expressed positive pronouncements regarding the purported role of power-drunk self-propelled candidate to become King of all Muslims, the shrewd Turkish leader Tayyip Erdogan in the exchange.
(In reality, the proper credit should be given to an outstanding German intelligence officer Gerhard Konrad, who heads the foreign section of the intelligence service of BND, who actually jump-started the Schalit mediation process way back in 2009.)
Erdogan, whose government tacitly supported the infamous Mavi Marmara provocation, is now adding insult to injury in demanding, that the victim- Israel- must apologize and pay reparation for defending itself. He is emboldened by his newly found importance in Washington for allowing a U.S. early warning system radar on Turkish soil.
Elsewhere in the region, the rabidly anti-Israel Egyptian media in hailing the prisoner exchange is breathlessly highlighting the praise Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu heaped on their government and security services for their key role in brokering the deal.
According to an unconfirmed report, the American-Israeli citizen Ilan Grapel held in Egypt on charges of spying and incitement to burn government buildings is included in the proposed exchange package in return for the release of more than 80 Egyptians in Israeli jails, most of them convicted security offenders.
Adding to the new developments, on Wednesday, Oct. 12 the US Government published a worldwide travel advisory warning US citizens to beware of Iranian-instigated terrorist attacks following the uncovering of an Iran-directed plot to assassinate Saudi Arabian ambassador Adel Al-Jubeir and bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies.
The US holds Iran accountable for its actions, said Attorney General Eric Holder, following which Tehran turned to the UN Secretary General to accuse the US of warmongering.
US officials are deeply concerned that Teheran may not take lying down Washington's apparent charge that the Revolutionary Guards' Al Qods Brigades were complicit in the assassination plot or the success of a prisoner exchange deal releasing the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity.
After being caught out, Iran is behaving hysterically as though it is under threat of war, its raging fury fueled by the US-Egyptian-Israeli-Hamas prisoner deal which threatens to cut the Islamic Republic out of Palestinian affairs and curtail its influence in the Gaza Strip, an important outpost.
A Washington statement said: "The US government assesses that this Iranian-backed plan to assassinate the Saudi ambassador may indicate a more aggressive focus by the Iranian government on terrorist activity against diplomats from certain countries, to include possible attacks in the United States."
With a valuable Middle East holding about to be lost, Iran is perfectly capable of unleashing waves of terrorists for outrageous acts that would again force the hands of the United States and Israel. By drawing Hamas into such operations, Tehran could seek to torpedo the Shalit deal a moment before its consummation.
Sources in Washington automatically criticized Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for jumping the gun by his announcing the deal Tuesday meant for domestic political gains.
"Prisoner swaps are counted successful only after or during the fact," lectured one US official.
Other Western intelligence sources commented that by letting the cat out of the bag a week in advance, Israel may have given Iran and Hizballah time to sabotage it.
Iran and Hizballah both maintain a strong presence of an army of murderers, assassins and undercover agents in the Gaza Strip.
They are still fully capable of blowing away the deal Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal struck with Israel in the framework of an accord with the United States for packing up his Hamas terrorist command centers and moving them out of Damascus- the scene of yet another colossal U.S. mess-up with the “Arab Spring” and the complete impotence and incompetence exhibited by U.S. policy makers in the failed effort to remove Assad from power.
All the while Iran is getting ever closer to permanently changing the equation: they are inches away from achieving nuclear capabilities. Ahmadinejad’s latest pronouncements signal a more aggressive and dangerous Iran, possibly one that feels its nuclear program is so far advanced it can provoke the United States and the West with complete impunity.
Food for thought: look at the consequences in our world of a handful of Islamic terrorists armed with box cutters ten years ago, or the countless fundamentalist atrocities since!
Now think of what a nuclear-capable Iran, controlled by fundamentalist zealots would do to us?
Iran’s hand in the latest murder/bombing plot is the culmination of a steady intensification of provocations in recent months that has seen the Teheran regime increase its open support for radical Shiite groups in Iraq; provide assistance and weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan; blatantly ignore international calls to end its nuclear program; back Syria's slaughter of thousands of protesters with infusions of cash and weapons; rearm Hezbollah in Lebanon; support Hamas in Gaza; test new and more accurate, extended range ballistic missiles; threaten to attack U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf; and threaten with impunity at having Iranian warships, armed with cruise missiles, patrol off the coast of the United States.
Just as the KGB served the Soviet Union in the front lines of the Cold War, Iran's Quds Force, an elite special operations unit of the Revolutionary Guards, named for the Arabic word for Jerusalem, has become Tehran's weapon of choice in its covert war with the West.
But the Quds Force, which is controlled directly by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has traditionally acted through proxies and focused on training and equipping Islamic revolutionary groups in the Middle East.
It helped create Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 1980s and completely underwrote, managed and equipped the group's guerrilla war with Israel in southern Lebanon. During Iran's 1980 to 1988 war with Iraq, the Quds Force helped Iraqi Kurds fight Saddam Hussein. In the early 1990s it supplied arms to Bosnian Muslims and worked with Sudan's army in southern Sudan trying to crush an African-led rebellion. In 1994, a Quds Force commander was suspected of planning and financing an attack by Hezbollah on a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in which 85 people were killed.
In 2006, when Israel attacked Lebanon, it found Iranian-designed missile and rocket command and control centers in southern Lebanon and insisted Quds Force operatives, not Hezbollah, were responsible for attacking an Israeli missile patrol boat with two Iranian-built Chinese "Silkworm" anti-ship missiles.
In 2007, then U.S. President George W. Bush accused the Quds Force of training and arming Shiite extremists in Iraq and said it gave Iraqi terrorists armor-piercing explosives that were used to kill U.S. soldiers.
In January 2007, the U.S. military in Iraq detained five Iranians with links to the Quds Force in northern Iraq, accusing them of providing funds and weapons to Iraqi insurgents.
Within nine days of their arrest, gunmen, dressed as U.S. soldiers, attacked a U.S. army depot in Karbala and killed and wounded several U.S. soldiers. The sophisticated attack was widely regarded as a cross-border revenge raid by the Quds Force.
Iran continues to use the Quds Force to provide weapons, training and funds to Hamas and other murderous Palestinian groups, including Palestine Islamic Jihad. It has also supported Islamic fundamentalists in destabilizing Arab Gulf States.
According to General David Petraeus, a former U.S. commander in Iraq, the head of the Quds Force, General Kassim Suleimani, sent him a message in 2008 in which he blatantly bragged about controlling Iranian foreign policy in the region.
"He said, 'General Petraeus, you should know that I, Kassim Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan,'" Gen. Petraeus told a Washington conference last year.
"That makes diplomacy difficult if you think that you're going to do the traditional means of diplomacy by dealing with another country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs," Gen. Petraeus said.
Any shift in Iranian policy that sees the Quds Force stage direct attacks on Iran's enemies could signal a new stage in its covert war with the West and that could pose as significant a terrorist threat as al-Qaeda.
Yet despite of all this, U.S. policy makers preoccupied with getting the current Administration reelected and therefore dead set against doing anything to effectively curtail Iran’s growing atomic-fueled arrogance are sweeping all this under the carpet- while repeatedly sending Robert Gates and Leon Panetta to order that the Israelis sit on their hands and do nothing about Iran.
While Israel has no desire do enter into open warfare against the Islamic Republic of Iran, things might accelerate to the point of no return in the not too distant future.
If there will be solid proof of a clear and present danger threatening Israel’s very existence, there may be only one option left: removing the Iranian thread with or with out the approval or support of any third parties. Ironically, Israel would be doing the biggest favor to the Saudi regime and to the West in general by going after Iran.
While chaos reigns around the region, Europe is wrapped up in their economic misery, and Washington pre-occupied with partisan politicking, Ahmadinejad’s atom factory at Quom is steadily humming towards weapons-grade nuclear materials.
So who is minding the store?
A U.S. intelligence official asked me the other day: “What do Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Teheran have in common?”
With a dry smile he added: “Nothing ….yet!”
