Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

*** Israel reconstituting alternative ‘alliance of the periphery’.  Before the fall of the Shah of Iran, Israel ‘s strategy to mitigate the consequences of being surrounded by enemy states was to forge an ‘alliance of the periphery’ at the core of which were the non-Arab regional states Iran and Turkey.  With both Iran and Turkey now hostile, Israel has been looking for other potential friends, including Cyprus, which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is visiting this week.  This is a remarkable turn-around, as Cyprus, like Greece, was long seen as one of the more unfriendly European states.  But now Israel is exploiting the antipathy between Turkey and Cyprus/Greece to forge close ties.  It is also doing this with Romania and Bulgaria.  With tension between Cyprus and Turkey mounting over Cyprus’s intention to develop off-shore natural gas deposits without first settling the dispute with Turkish-backed Northern Cyprus, Cyprus is gratefully embracing Israel’s support.

*** Russia’s problem with Russian-made weapons.  On 11 January, Russia’s deputy prime minister, and former representative to Nato, Dmitriy Rogozin, said that Russia must stop buying foreign arms, only doing so as an exception.  Unfortunately for Rogozin, the Russian Defence Ministry is not convinced.  Chief of the General Staff General Nikolay Makarov made it clear in remarks on 14 February that Russia’s arms manufacturers were inferior.  Referring to domestically manufactured weapons, he said: “We have practically stopped buying all the products for the ground forces because we are not happy with a single model.”  One particular area of concern for Makarov is that Russia’s defence industry has traditionally focused on the firing capacity of armoured vehicles and their mobility and manoeuvrability while “forgetting about people’s lives”.  According to Makarov, “the degree of personnel protection is extremely low”.  He said: “Any small mine explosion will lead to the entire crew being killed.”

*** Clutching at straws over Iran.   A former chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Ephraim Halevy, has been arguing that there is another way – other than sanctions or war - of stopping Iran going nuclear, and that is to do a deal with Russia over Syria.  Writing in the 15 February Yedioth Ahronoth, he argued that such a deal (under which Assad would have to go but Russia would be given a special position in post-Assad Syria) would deprive Iran of its position in Syria and that “the Iranian threat would be removed”.  Something seems to be missing from this argument, because if the removal of Iranian influence from Syria were a certain way to neutralizing Iran’s nuclear plans then it would be difficult to see what all the fuss is about.  Perhaps what Halevy has in mind is that Russia might act to prevent Iran going nuclear if Moscow were given special rights in post-Assad Syria.  But again, it is hard to believe that Moscow has not already been given every possible incentive to bring its influence to bear on Tehran.  Increasingly, the opponents of military action seem to be clutching at straws.