In The Days

• Source: Haaretz
• News Date: 4/16/08
• Author: Zvi Bar'el

This week a fierce war broke out between Egypt and Iran, after brewing in the interrogation rooms of Egyptian intelligence officials for at least five months. The ultimate decision about publicizing the existence of a Hezbollah cell on Egyptian soil was made by Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who – after receiving the nod from President Hosni Mubarak – was assisted by the minister of information in making the news available to all government newspapers in Egypt.

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

Ishmael

“And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.”
—Genesis 16:12

Perilous Times

“This know also, that in the last days perilous•Strongs 5467: chalepos, khal-ep-os´; perhaps from 5465 through the idea of reducing the strength; difficult, i.e. dangerous, or (by implication) furious:—fierce, perilous. times shall come.”
—2 Timothy 3:1-2a

”But evil•Strongs 4190: poneros, pon-ay-ros´; from a derivative of 4192; hurtful, i.e. evil (properly, in effect or influence, and thus differing from 2556, which refers rather to essential character, as well as from 4550, which indicates degeneracy from original virtue); figuratively, calamitous; also (passively) ill, i.e. diseased; but especially (morally) culpable, i.e. derelict, vicious, facinorous; neuter (singular) mischief, malice, or (plural) guilt; masculine (singular) the devil, or (plural) sinners:—bad, evil, grievous, harm, lewd, malicious, wicked(-ness). See also 4191.
•Strongs4192: ponos, pon´-os; from the base of 3993; toil, i.e. (by implication) anguish:—pain. men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.”
—2 Timothy 3:13

“In that day shall five cities in the land of Egypt speak the language of Canaan, and swear to the LORD of hosts; one shall be called, The city of destruction.”
—Isaiah 19:1

Editors note about the word perilous•FYI: The Greek word (chalepos) (perilous) is only used one other time in the New Testament, Matthew 8:28. There it is translated as (fierce) when describing the nature of the devils that possess Legion and his cohort.

The unofficial beginnings of this war date back to November 2008, when a Lebanese citizen, Sami Shihab, 27, whose real name is Mohammed Youssef Mansour, was arrested after entering Egypt with a false passport, apparently through one of the tunnels that connects the Gaza Strip with the Sinai peninsula. The Egyptians, who began a prolonged investigation into Hezbollah’s activities in Egypt two years ago, were waiting for him, after having received confessions from colleagues, who said Mansour was their main operative and was supposed to fund the rest of the network’s activities.

Mansour underwent intensive interrogation in the Egyptian intelligence compound in Cairo for almost five months without revealing the names of those who had instructed him to operate the espionage cell. However, the name of Mohammed Kablan, the man in charge of Hezbollah’s intelligence operations, did come up during the interrogation; Kablan was active in Egypt from 2007 until the end of 2008, and some of Mansour’s dispatches were sent to him. According to Egyptian reports, Mansour was a member of the department charged with activities in the countries bordering on Israel, including Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Palestine. However, his exact status within the department is not clear.

Mansour received his directives via the Internet, while the money earmarked for the cell’s activities – several tens of millions of Egyptian pounds – was transferred via couriers entering Egypt through official border crossings. The money was for purchase of homes, businesses and land along the border between Gaza and Egypt, in the vicinity of Rafah, from tunnels could be dug into the Strip.

According to Egyptian government sources, the members of the cell also kept watch on the shipping traffic in the Suez Canal; they were instructed to identify foreign ships flying their own countries’ flags. The Egyptian assessment is that Hezbollah planned at least one large-scale terrorist attack against Western targets on Egyptian soil; they suspect that the goal was to attack a ship passing through the Suez Canal, which would reduce the amount of traffic in the waterway and hit the Egyptian economy. Reports this week said the members of the cell were also instructed to collect information about Israeli tourist haunts in Sinai, with a view to attacking them.

Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah knew about Mansour’s arrest and was also aware of the arrest of 49 other operatives belonging to his group, including some Egyptian Shi’ites suspected of belonging to the network. But, Egyptian sources say their intelligence officers forced Mansour to continue communicating with his superiors as though everything was business as usual – which is apparently why it took so long for the arrests to be publicized. But now that most of those involved, at least inside Egypt, are known, there is no longer any reason to withhold publication, especially in view of the rising tension between Cairo and Hezbollah following January’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

The Egyptian reports did not make any obvious mention of the connections between the espionage ring and Hamas, even though it was clear that the network’s objective was to smuggle weapons, missiles and sophisticated sabotage materials into the Strip. Hamas announced this week, in a relatively low-key way, that it knew nothing about the network’s activities. Why is Egypt not pointing an accusatory finger at Hamas, instead emphasizing the role of Hezbollah and Iran? The answer apparently lies in Cairo’s efforts to secure inter- Palestinian reconciliation: Egypt wants to maintain its status as an honest broker in talks between Fatah and Hamas, which would become impossible should Hamas be implicated in the network’s activities.

On the other hand, Hezbollah and Iran have become Egyptian targets. Nasrallah’s vilification of Mubarak during the 2006 Second Lebanon War and the way he belittled Egyptian efforts to secure Lebanese reconciliation, as well as his preference for Qatar over Egypt – all played a role in igniting the first public crisis between Cairo and Hezbollah. During the military operation in the Strip, Nasrallah accused Egypt of collaborating with Israel by placing Gaza under siege and even went so far as to call on Egyptians to overthrow their government.

If Nasrallah is the target from an intelligence and legal point of view, with Cairo now mulling over the idea of indicting the Hezbollah leader in absentia, the political target is Iran, which uses Hezbollah to suit its own purposes in Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen. In exposing the Hezbollah cell, Egypt wants to focus all responsibility on Iran.

The timing here is not coincidental. Now, while the U.S. is beginning to openly court Tehran, with President Barack Obama seeing it as a potential partner in solving regional problems – from Iraq and Afghanistan, through Lebanon and even Palestine – the time has come to expose Iran’s plotting for terrorist activities.

Egypt has now become an overt enemy of both Iran and Hezbollah, and like Israel, Cairo, too, fears a reprisal action by Hezbollah. An Egyptian government source told Haaretz that there is now a danger that there will be an “Egyptian Gilad Shalit” in addition to the abducted Israeli soldier.

“This is an organization that knows no boundaries, in every respect,” wrote Tareq al-Hamid, the editor of the Saudi Arabian newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat. “Nasrallah is like Osama bin Laden,” he continued. “He knows no limits and obeys no laws. His people act like dormant cells and just like al-Qaida activists went to the United States, so Hezbollah activists will go to Egypt.” The question is whether this affair will also have an effect on the emerging ties between Washington and Tehran.

Post-nuclear phase?

Iran is in no hurry to rush things. “We will examine Obama’s declarations closely,” Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said this week. “Negotiations are possible on the basis of mutual respect and estimation,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clarified. And when exactly will this happen? “When the U.S. proves that it is changing its policy and does not merely make do with declarations,” the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared.

Ahmadinejad informed the Iranian nation that of the 50,000 centrifuges scheduled to be installed within the next five years, 7,000 were in place and “the nuclear issue is a closed matter.” Mottaki, for his part, coined a new phrase: “We are already in the post-nuclear phase.” Iran will continue to develop its nuclear technology and the dialogue with the U.S. will be postponed until after the presidential elections, scheduled for June 12.

If Ahmadinejad was worried that the dialogue with Washington would turn into a central issue in the upcoming elections, Obama put that fear at rest. It seems that the debate in the U.S. administration over whether to wait for official election results before proposing new gestures to Iran, or whether to announce the new policy at an earlier stage has already been decided.

Dennis Ross, the U.S. State Department official tasked with Iran, has already prepared a detailed policy report. He believes America’s guidelines should rest on the assumption that Ahmadinejad will be elected to another term, which is why there is no point in delaying the start of the new policy. But Ross, who is opposed to a dialogue, was forced to reconcile himself to Obama’s desire to formulate a new policy toward Iran. In an effort to maintain certain aspects of the Bush administration’s conservative policy, he says the dialogue must be of limited duration and should be accompanied by the threat of using a heavy hand.

The substantive change in the American approach lies not merely in the offer to conduct a direct dialogue with Tehran, in which Under-Secretary of State William Burns would participate, but in promoting two principles that directly contradict those espoused by the Bush administration: refraining from posing preconditions for a dialogue and recognizing Iran’s sovereign right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. In this way, Obama has removed the main obstacle to an active dialogue with the Iranians. But, at the same time, he shocked several Arab countries, which once again find themselves on a collision course with the U.S. administration.

If the Bush administration was seen as anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, as an administration that divided the Middle East into “good Arabs and bad Arabs,” occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, saved Israel from itself, and considered Iran to be the central point of the “axis of evil” – the Obama administration is beginning to look as if it might prefer Iran to the Arab axis.

This image is evolving at a time when most Arab countries, particularly the Gulf states, see Iran as a two-pronged danger. Iranian nuclear plans are no less of a threat to them than to Israel, and Iran is determined to be involved in any effort that until now was limited to a purely Arab front, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – via Hamas – through Lebanon – via Hezbollah – and culminating in Syria, Sudan and Algeria. The Arab effort to promote the peace process, or at least to bring about a reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, is not isolated from the desire to expel Iran from the Arab diplomatic arena. All of a sudden, the Arab countries and Israel have a joint interest and a joint “suspect”: Barack Obama.

Bridge of contention

Toward the end of the week, Turkish newspapers reported on swimming pools at the Ottoman Palace Hotel in the southeastern province of Hatay: the temperature of the water in them, how much iodine it contained and how beneficial it was to health. That is where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is vacationing after Obama’s recent Istanbul visit.

It is not by chance that Erdogan chose Hatay: It is the only Mediterranean province where his Justice and Development Party won the local elections, held at the end of March. These were the first elections since 2002, when the party’s popularity slumped and the government’s power was undermined. True, it won 39 percent of the votes, but the results still smacked of failure – Erdogan had been aiming for 47 percent, the same number the party received in the parliamentary elections.

If Erdogan had hoped for results that would yield the necessary public support to change the constitution substantially, now he can only make small amendments, if anything. This means it will apparently become impossible to pass an amendment to the paragraph that allows for banning political parties – a clause the constitutional court invoked excessively and which it also used to threaten the ruling party.

The changes to the election law will also be put on ice, as will the amendments to the structure of the constitutional court and its authority, which allowed the Turkish army to seek the arrest of political activists or those who were too vociferous in their criticism of Turkey’s secular nature. All these initiatives will be shelved indefinitely. Erdogan paid the price in the elections for incorrectly assessing the economic crisis. He told his citizenry a few months ago that Turkey was immune to serious crises and that the country’s troubles were caused by large Turkish companies, not the economic system or the global crisis.

His rivals also attribute his drop in the polls to his behavior toward Israel, and especially his dramatic appearance at last year’s Davos conference. “Erdogan showed just how haughty he is when he left the television studio in Davos,” a source in the Turkish foreign ministry said. “His remarks about Israel are correct in principle, but the way in which he expressed his criticism is unacceptable.”

However, aside from his political failures, Erdogan has also chalked up several diplomatic achievements – the most important of which was Obama’s visit to Turkey, the first Muslim country he has visited, and his reaction to it. To Turkish ears, it was no mere feat that Obama chose not to refer to the murder of the Armenians as genocide; they were also satisfied about the fact that he refrained from calling Turkey a moderate Muslim state, saying instead that it was a country where most citizens are Muslim. The Turks used to cringe every time Bush described Turkey as a country that represents “moderate Islam,” thereby trying to differentiate it from other Muslim and Arab countries. Even though it is governed by an Islamic party, Turkey takes pains not to define itself as a Muslim country, and Erdogan’s party refers to itself as a “social-democratic party” – along the lines of Germany’s Christian Democratic party. More importantly, any mention of Turkey in an Islamic context is perceived as another obstacle in Turkey’s path to the European Union. Obama was briefed in details about Turkey’s sensitivities and was therefore well prepared when he arrived there.

France and Germany, in particular, are opposed to Muslim Turkey joining the EU. Last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said unambiguously that Obama should not interfere in the question of Ankara’s efforts to join the EU. Turkey is aware that, in this matter, Washington’s support will not count for much – it is for Europe to decide. During his visit, Obama spoke about Turkey being a bridge between two cultures, but France did not understand what he was trying to say. Indeed, the French and the Americans collided on this Turkish bridge – a mere 90 days after Obama took office.