Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

*** Al-Qaeda speaks to Egypt.  Al-Qaeda’s new leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has just sent his 10th message to Egypt since assuming the leadership of al-Qaeda after the killing last year of Osama bin Laden.  Al-Zawahiri is Egyptian born, and in April 1995 he wrote a pamphlet entitled The road to Jerusalem passes through Cairo.

In his latest message, a 47-minute audio posted on jihadi websites on 17 June, al-Zawahiri urged Egypt to cancel its peace treaty with Israel and to establish Islamic rule.  He also said that a priority goal was to prevent Israel turning Jerusalem into a Jewish city.

*** Israel looking for increased pressure on Iran.  On the eve of the latest round of talks between Iran and the major powers, held in Moscow on 18-19 June, Israel called for more pressure from the international community to “make clear there is a credible military option”.  Speaking on 17 June, an Israeli official said that the Iranians are “not yet convinced that when the US or others say that ‘all options are on the table’ they actually mean it”.  The official said that there was need for “greater specificity” when saying that all options are on the table.

However, nothing in Iran’s approach to the latest round of inconclusive talks suggests that this message has got through.  It is continuing to insist that its right to enrich uranium be recognized and that sanctions be removed in return for cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  After the talks, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov admitted that “the differences are very substantial”.  The next stage will be an experts’ meeting in Istanbul on 3 July.

In the meantime, those in Israel who fear that the West might in the end prefer to opt for living with a nuclear Iran rather than risk another Middle East war will have had their fears reinforced by the main article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs in which a US academic argues that a nuclear Iran would be stabilizing, not destabilizing.  Kenneth N Waltz argues that “by creating a more durable balance of military power in the Middle East, a nuclear Iran would yield more stability, not less”.

Of course, there is no chance of this becoming official Western policy, but it does emphasize a point about which Israel feels strongly, namely that the perspective from Washington (which is 10,000km from Tehran) is entirely different from Jerusalem’s.  It is this that makes Israel so anxious about allowing Iran to prevaricate and delay until its nuclear facilities are in the ‘zone of immunity’, by which it means until the point when they become invulnerable to Israeli attack but not to attack by the United States.