Venezuela’s firebrand President Hugo Chavez visited Iran on Tuesday to boost energy and trade ties, days after clinching a deal with Russia to build his country’s first nuclear power plant

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Moving Towards Ezekiel 38-39

“Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:”
—Ezekiel 38:5

Editors note about the word Persia•FYI: Many Bible teachers believe Persia is the area of present day Iran.

“Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras. And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. By these were the isles•Strongs 339: from 183; properly, a habitable spot (as desirable); dry land, a coast, an island:—country, isle, island. of the Gentiles•Strongs 1471: gowy, go´-ee; rarely (shortened) y…Og goy, go´-ee; apparently from the same root as 1465 (in the sense of massing); a foreign nation; hence, a Gentile; also (figuratively) a troop of animals, or a flight of locusts:—Gentile, heathen, nation, people. divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.”
— Genesis 10:1-5

“And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles•Strongs #: iy, ee; from 183; properly, a habitable spot (as desirable); dry land, a coast, an island:—country, isle, island.: and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
—Ezekiel 39:6

JERUSALEM — The presidents of Iran and Syria on Thursday ridiculed U.S. policy in the region and pledged to create a Middle East “without Zionists,” combining a slap at recent U.S. overtures and a threat to Israel with an endorsement of one of the region’s defining alliances.

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Moving Towards Ezekiel 38-39

“Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him, And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords: Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:”
—Ezekiel 38:2-5

Editors note about the words and Gog•FYI: Many Bible teachers believe that Gog is the leader of the Russia alliance in the latter days., Magog•FYI: Many Bible teachers believe that Magog, the descendant of Japheth, is identified as the Russian coalition in the latter days. and Persia•FYI: Persia in concert with Adolf Hitler, changed its name to Iran (Aryan Land) in May of 1935.

Syria and Damascus

“The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous•Strongs 4654: mappalah, map-paw-law´; or mappelah, map-pay-law´; from 5307; something fallen, i.e. a ruin:—ruin( ous). heap.”
—Isaiah 17:1

The Obama administration is trying to build an international coalition behind economic sanctions aimed at curbing Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, which the United States and others fear is aimed at developing nuclear weapons. The United States also recently announced that it will send an ambassador to Damascus after a five-year absence, part of an effort to weaken Syria’s relations with Iran and discourage the country’s support for militant groups antagonistic to Israel.

But the message delivered by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a joint news conference was sharp and spoke to a shared sense that Iran is gaining influence in the region despite U.S. efforts. Until the outcome of the broader struggle over Iran’s nuclear program becomes clear, analysts here say, it is unlikely Syria will change direction — or that progress can be made toward an Israel-Syria peace agreement.

The United States wants “to dominate the region, but they feel Iran and Syria are preventing that,” Ahmadinejad said. “We tell them that instead of interfering in the region’s affairs, to pack their things and leave.”

Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier, spoke of Israel’s eventual “demise and annihilation” and said the countries of the region could create a future “without Zionists and without colonialists.”

Assad criticized what he regarded as the United States’ “new situation of colonialism” in the region, with troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and pressure on Syria to split from Iran, a friendship Assad emphasized was secure even given Syria’s faltering economy.

The joint appearance and tone of the remarks come as an answer of sorts to the U.S. decision to send an ambassador, Robert Ford, to Damascus after pulling its representative in protest over the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Hariri’s killing was among a wave of assassinations in Lebanon attributed to Syria and its allies.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that the return of an ambassador marked a “slight opening” toward Syria but that ultimately the United States expects Assad to curb his ties with Iran and his support for militant groups like the Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Hamas, based in the Gaza Strip.

But Assad and Ahmadinejad on Thursday emphasized that their countries’ relationship had deepened with the signing of an agreement waiving visa restrictions for travel.

The relationship between Iran and Syria has become one of the central alliances in the region, of particular interest now as a barometer of the success of U.S. policy toward Iran and of whether a larger Arab-Israeli peace deal is possible.

Nowhere is concern over Iranian nuclear ambitions more pointed than in Israel, where officials argue that a nuclear-armed Iran will become even more influential over countries like Syria and will embolden radical groups to take a harder line with Israel.

“If Iran is seen as being on the ascent, that strengthens all those people that oppose peace in the Middle East,” said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. “Those who are on the fence will come off the fence on the wrong side, and those who are in the peace camp will be playing defense.”

Israel and Syria have held several rounds of peace talks and until late 2008 were talking indirectly through Turkish mediators.

The outline of a deal, both sides say, is well known and in some ways simple: Israel’s full surrender of the Golan Heights territory it seized from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and Syria’s end of the strategy of “resistance” and support for militant groups that has defined the rule of Assad and his father, the late Hafez al-Assad.

Netanyahu and Assad have said they are willing to reopen peace talks but have disagreed over who, if anyone, should mediate. More recently, their countries traded barbs that included threats by the Israeli foreign minister to topple Assad and threats by the Syrian foreign minister to target Israeli cities in any war.

Israeli officials say they still believe that a deal with Syria is possible but less so if President Obama fails with Iran.

“The question is, where is Syria going to locate itself?” asked Tzachi Hanegbi, chairman of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. The alliance with Iran, he said, “gives them less reason to be pragmatic.”

TEHRAN – Major powers will only achieve results in their meetings on Iran if they adopt a “realistic approach” and recognize its nuclear rights, the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Sunday.

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Moving Towards Ezekiel 38-39

“Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:”
—Ezekiel 38:5

Editors note about the word Persia•Many Bible teachers believe Persia is the area of present day Iran.

He Will Send Fire

“And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
—Ezekiel 39:6

Ramin Mehmanparast made the comment a day after the six powers met to discuss prospects of further sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, with participants saying China made clear it opposed more punitive action at the moment.

Iran’s official IRNA news agency said Mehmanparast described the powers’ failure to reach an agreement on Iran’s nuclear issue as natural.

Diplomats from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China held a three-hour meeting in New York on Saturday.

It came after Iran ignored U.S. President Barack Obama’s Dec 31, 2009, deadline to respond to an offer from the six powers of economic and political incentives in exchange for halting its nuclear enrichment activities.

“The solution lies in the recognition of Iran’s nuclear rights by the group,” Mehmanparast said. “The planned meetings of the (six powers) would not have clear results as long as they lack a realistic approach.”

Washington and its Western allies accuse Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of its civilian atomic program. Iran, the world’s fifth-largest crude exporter, says its program is designed to generate electricity.

The European Union, which hosted the meeting at its New York office, said that despite the lack of a concrete outcome, further sanctions were now on the big-power agenda and the six would be in contact again soon to continue the discussions.

All the powers except China sent top level Foreign Ministry officials to Saturday’s meeting. But Beijing, which said earlier this month that it was not the right time for new sanctions, sent only a mid-ranking diplomat from its U.N. mission.

China’s virtual snub of the meeting dismayed the four Western powers in the group. They had hoped to reach an agreement on whether to begin drafting a new U.N. Security Council resolution on a fourth round of sanctions against Iran.

Three previous rounds of U.N. sanctions have targeted Iran’s nuclear and missile industries, but Iran has shrugged them off and said it plans to pursue its right to enrich uranium, which can have both civilian and military uses.

The Western powers had originally hoped to sanction Iran’s energy sector but dropped the idea months ago when it became clear Russia and China would never accept it.

(Reporting by Hashem Kalantari; writing by Fredrik Dahl; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Last September, when Iran’s uranium enrichment plant buried inside a mountain near the holy city of Qum was revealed, the episode cast light on a wider pattern: Over the past decade, Iran has quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex in networks of tunnels and bunkers across the country.

To view popup window put your cursor on the blue words.

Moving Towards Ezekiel 38-39

“Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:”
—Ezekiel 38:5

Editors note about the word Persia•Many Bible teachers believe Persia is the area of present day Iran.

He Will Send Fire

“And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD.”
—Ezekiel 39:6

In doing so, American government and private experts say, Iran has achieved a double purpose. Not only has it shielded its infrastructure from military attack in warrens of dense rock, but it has further obscured the scale and nature of its notoriously opaque nuclear effort. The discovery of the Qum plant only heightened fears about other undeclared sites.

Now, with the passing of President Obama’s year-end deadline for diplomatic progress, that cloak of invisibility has emerged as something of a stealth weapon, complicating the West’s military and geopolitical calculus.

The Obama administration says it is hoping to take advantage of domestic political unrest and disarray in Iran’s nuclear program to press for a regimen of strong and immediate new sanctions. But a crucial factor behind that push for nonmilitary solutions, some analysts say, is Iran’s tunneling — what Tehran calls its strategy of “passive defense.”

Indeed, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has repeatedly discounted the possibility of a military strike, saying that it would only slow Iran’s nuclear ambitions by one to three years while driving the program further underground.

Iran’s nuclear plant at Isfahan has many buildings above ground, but American nuclear analysts say that Iran has also filled the nearby mountains with tunnels.

Some analysts say that Israel, which has taken the hardest line on Iran, may be especially hampered, given its less formidable military and intelligence abilities.

“It complicates your targeting,” said Richard L. Russell, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst now at the National Defense University. “We’re used to facilities being above ground. Underground, it becomes literally a black hole. You can’t be sure what’s taking place.”

Even the Israelis concede that solid rock can render bombs useless. Late last month, the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, told Parliament that the Qum plant was “located in bunkers that cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack.”

Heavily mountainous Iran has a long history of tunneling toward civilian as well as military ends, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has played a recurring role — first as a transportation engineer and founder of the Iranian Tunneling Association and now as the nation’s president.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of big tunnels in Iran, according to American government and private experts, and the lines separating their uses can be fuzzy. Companies owned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, for example, build civilian as well as military tunnels.

No one in the West knows how much, or exactly what part, of Iran’s nuclear program lies hidden. Still, evidence of the downward atomic push is clear to the inquisitive.

Google Earth, for instance, shows that the original hub of the nuclear complex at Isfahan consists of scores of easily observed — and easy to attack — buildings. But government analysts say that in recent years Iran has honeycombed the nearby mountains with tunnels. Satellite photos show six entrances.

Iranian officials say years of veiled bombing threats prompted their country to exercise its “sovereign right” to protect its nuclear facilities by hiding them underground. That was their argument when they announced plans in November to build 10 uranium enrichment plants. Despite the improbability and bluster of the claim, Iran’s tunneling history gave it a measure of credibility.

“They will be scattered in the mountains,” the chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Iran’s Press TV. “We will be using the passive defense so that we don’t need to have active defense, which is very expensive.”

Mr. Gates, along with other Western officials, has dismissed that line of argument as cover for a covert arms program.

“If they wanted it for peaceful purposes,” he said of the Qum plant on CNN, “there’s no reason to put it so deep underground, no reason to be deceptive about it, keep it a secret for a protracted period of time.”

Iran denies that its nuclear efforts are for military purposes and insists that it wants to unlock the atom strictly for peaceful aims, like making electricity. It says it wants to build many enrichment plants to fuel up to 20 nuclear power plants, a plan many economists question because Iran ranks second globally in oil and natural gas reserves.

Ploy or not, any expansion seems unlikely to zoom ahead. After a decade of construction, Iran’s main enrichment plant, at Natanz, operates at a tiny fraction of its capacity. The Qum plant is only half built. Nuclear experts say the new plants, if attempted, may not materialize for years or decades. Even so, they note that tunnels would be the easiest part of the plan and may get dug relatively soon.

Despite the questions about whether the West can credibly threaten to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, analysts insist that the United States, Israel and their allies will never rule out that option. The Pentagon, in fact, is racing to develop a powerful new tunnel-busting bomb.

“Deeply buried targets have been a problem forever,” said Greg Duckworth, a civilian scientist who recently led a Pentagon research effort to pinpoint enemy tunnels. “And it’s getting worse.”

A Tunnel Expert

Mr. Ahmadinejad began professional life as a transportation engineer with close ties to the Revolutionary Guards and an abiding interest in tunnels.

He helped found the Iranian Tunneling Association in 1998, according to the group’s Web site. That year, the Tehran subway began a major expansion, and Iran, in secret, accelerated its nuclear program.

In early 2004, while mayor of Tehran, Mr. Ahmadinejad served as chairman of the Sixth Iranian Tunneling Conference. He praised the leaders of ancient Persia for creating networks of subterranean waterways and called for the creation of new “tunnels” between the government, universities and professional groups.

“I ask God to help us all,” he said in a paper. Such tunneling conferences, held regularly in Tehran, draw global manufacturers of tunnel-boring machines — giant devices as big as locomotives that dig quickly through rocky strata. Terratec, an Australian maker, noted early last year that Iran had recently become “one of the most active markets in the world.”

Many of the companies keep offices in Tehran. Herrenknecht, a German firm considered the market leader, lists three. Engineers say Iran has hundreds of miles of civilian tunneling projects under way, including subways in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz, highway tunnels across the country and water tunnels to irrigate the dry interior.

By all accounts, the seeds of the downward military shift were planted during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, when Iraq hit Tehran and other Iranian cities with waves of missiles. Constructing shelters, bunkers and tunnels became a patriotic duty.

An Opposition Watchdog

In 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group, revealed that Iran was building a secret underground nuclear plant at Natanz that turned out to be for enriching uranium. Enrichment plants can make fuel for reactors or, with a little more effort, atom bombs.

Satellite photos showed the Iranians burying two cavernous halls roughly half the size of the Pentagon. Estimates put the thickness of overhead rock, dirt and concrete at 30 feet — enough to frustrate bombs but not to guarantee the plant’s survival.

The disclosure of Natanz set off the West’s confrontation with Iran. Two years later, the International Atomic Energy Agency found to its surprise that Iran was tunneling in the mountains by the Isfahan site, where uranium is readied for enrichment. “Iran failed to report to the agency in a timely manner,” an I.A.E.A. paper said in diplomatic understatement.

Then, in late 2005, the Iranian opposition group held news conferences in Paris and London to announce that its spies had learned that Iran was digging tunnels for missile and atomic work at 14 sites, including an underground complex near Qum. The government, one council official said, was building the tunnels to conceal “its pursuit of nuclear weapons.” The council further charged that Mr. Ahmadinejad and the tunneling association were providing civilian cover for military work and acquisitions.

The council’s assertions got little notice. Some Western experts saw them as overstated. Some questioned the council’s objectivity because it sought the government’s overthrow. Perhaps the biggest impediment was a suspicion of defectors at a time when the American invasion of Iraq was proving to be based in part on Iraqi dissidents’ false claims about Saddam Hussein’s unconventional weapons.

United Nations atomic inspectors did check out a few of the tunnels at Isfahan, but not at Qum because the plant was on a military base and thus off limits for inspection without strong evidence of suspicious activity.

“We followed whatever they came up with,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the recently departed head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said of the council in an interview. “And a lot of it was bogus.”

Frank Pabian, a senior adviser on nuclear nonproliferation at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, strongly disagreed. “They’re right 90 percent of the time,” he said of the council’s disclosures about Iran’s clandestine sites. “That doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but 90 percent is a pretty good record.”

In 2007, the council announced that Iran was tunneling in the mountains near Natanz, the sprawling enrichment site. Satellite photos confirmed that.

And Qum became a vindication, though belatedly, in late September, when President Obama, flanked by the leaders of France and Britain, identified “a covert uranium enrichment facility” being constructed there.

Military Warrens

In December, the opposition group capitalized on its new stature to issue a report on Iranian military tunneling. It said Iran had dug tunnels and bunkers for research facilities, ammunition storage, military headquarters and command and control centers. “A group of factories” in the mountains east of Tehran, it said, specialize in “the manufacturing of nuclear warheads.”

Over all, the report raised to 19, from 14, the number of locations where it said tunnels — often multiple tunnels — were hiding military bases and work on arms.

American war planners see Iran’s tunnels — whatever their exact number and contents — as a serious test of military abilities. Most say there is no easy way to wipe out a nuclear program that has been well hidden, widely dispersed and deeply buried.

Among the difficulties, military experts say, are decoy tunnels and false entrances, the identification of which requires good intelligence. The experts add that Iran’s announcement about new enrichment plants may simply produce a blur of activity meant to confuse Western war planners.

David A. Kay, a nuclear specialist who led the fruitless search for unconventional arms in Iraq, said the hiding of a plant or two among the rocky labyrinths could pose a particular challenge for Israel. “They have limited intelligence for targeting,” Dr. Kay said, adding that the United States was better equipped to map out Iran’s nuclear terrain.

Raymond Tanter, an Iran expert at Georgetown University who served in the Reagan White House, agreed. “So far, the tunneling has not succeeded to the point that the American technology couldn’t get to it,” he contended. “But it makes Israel’s options more problematic, because they have less of a military edge.”

Doubts notwithstanding, the Obama administration has been careful to leave the military option on the table, and the Pentagon is racing to develop a deadly tunnel weapon.

The device — 20 feet long and called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator — began as a 2004 recommendation from the Defense Science Board, a high-level advisory group to the Pentagon.

“A deep underground tunnel facility in a rock geology poses a significant challenge,” the board wrote. “Several thousand pounds of high explosives coupled to the tunnel are needed to blow down blast doors and propagate a lethal air blast.”

The bomb carries tons of explosives and is considered 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. It underwent preliminary testing in 2007, and its first deployments are expected next summer. Its carrier is to be the B-2 stealth bomber.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters in October that budget problems had delayed the weapon but that it was now back on track. Military officials deny having a specific target in mind. Still, Mr. Whitman added, war planners consider it “an important capability.”