Israel seizes North Korean nuclear material in Syria?

[Amianthus]

This was in the Times of London the other day:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2512380.ece

Israelis seized nuclear material in Syrian raid

Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem.

The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say.

They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean. This raised fears that Syria might have joined North Korea and Iran in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

(more at the link above)

Any thoughts?  This comes a couple months after an explosion at what was apparently a joint Syrian-Iranian chemical weapons facility....

http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070919-082822-3481r

Syria blast said 'linked to chemical arms,' included Iranians

LONDON --    Iranian engineers were among those killed in a blast at a secret Syrian military installation two months ago, defense group Jane's said, claiming the base was being used to develop chemical weapons.   
 
The July 26 explosion in Aleppo, northern Syria, was reported at the time. The official Sana news agency said 15 Syrian military personnel were killed and 50 people were injured, most of them slightly from flying glass.

(more at the link above)

[kimba1]

this brings a question in mind for me
if we ever get nuked is it possible for our enemies to survive?
I mean it.
we will most definately return such action with alittle extra.
meaning is it really in our enemies best interest to attack us
9-11 enables us to go after 2 countries
money and man-power is not a factor when nukes are involved.
I never thought of this till this post.

[Michael Tee]

The way I see it, if the stories are true, all the Israelis can hope to gain is time.  Sooner or later, nukes and other WMD will come to the neighbourhood and Israel will lose its monopoly. 

[Plane]

Would an atomic wepon be usefull to Siria ?

In spite of Stalins hopes they were never much use to the Soviet Union.

[BT]

Analyses
Silence in Syria, Panic in Iran
By Dr. Jack Wheeler, To The Point News 19/9/07
Sep 25, 2007 - 12:09:27 PM

"Everyone in the government and military can only talk of one thing,' he reports.  'No matter who I talked to, all they could do was ask me, over and over again, 'Do you think the Americans will attack us?' 'When will the Americans attack us?' 'Will the Americans attack us in a joint operation with the Israelis?' How massive will the attack be?' on and on, endlessly.  The Iranians are in a state of total panic.'

And that was before September 6.  Since then, it's panic-squared in Tehran.  The mullahs are freaking out in fear.  Why?  Because of the silence in Syria. On September 6, Israeli Air Force F-15 and F-16s conducted a devastating attack on targets deep inside Syria near the city of Dayr az-Zawr.  Israel's military censors have muzzled the Israeli media, enforcing an extraordinary silence about the identity of the targets.  Massive speculation in the world press has followed, such as Brett Stephens' Osirak II? in yesterday's (9/18) Wall St. Journal. Stephens and most everyone else have missed the real story.  It is not Israel's silence that 'speaks volumes' as he claims, but Syria's. 

Why would the Syrian government be so tight-lipped about an act of war perpetrated on their soil? The first half of the answer lies in this story that appeared in the Israeli media last month (8/13):  Syria's Antiaircraft System Most Advanced In World.  Syria has gone on a profligate buying spree, spending vast sums on Russian systems, 'considered the cutting edge in aircraft interception technology.' Syria now 'possesses the most crowded antiaircraft system in the world,' with 'more than 200 antiaircraft batteries of different types,'  some of which are so new that they have been installed in Syria 'before being introduced into Russian operation service.' While you're digesting that, take a look at the map of Syria: Notice how far away Dayr az-Zawr is from Israel.  An F15/16 attack there is not a tiptoe across the border, but a deep, deep penetration of Syrian airspace.  And guess what happened with the Russian super-hyper-sophisticated cutting edge antiaircraft missile batteries when that penetration took place on September 6th. Nothing.

El blanko.  Silence.  The systems didn't even light up, gave no indication whatever of any detection of enemy aircraft invading Syrian airspace, zip, zero, nada.  The Israelis (with a little techie assistance from us) blinded the Russkie antiaircraft systems so completely the Syrians didn't even know they were blinded. Now you see why the Syrians have been scared speechless.  They thought they were protected - at enormous expense - only to discover they are defenseless.  As in naked. Thus the Great Iranian Freak-Out - for this means Iran is just as nakedly defenseless as Syria.   

I can tell you that there are a lot of folks in the Kirya (IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv) and the Pentagon right now who are really enjoying the mullahs' predicament.  Let's face it:  scaring the terror masters in Tehran out of their wits is fun. It's so much fun, in fact, that an attack destroying Iran's nuclear facilities and the Revolutionary Guard command/control centers has been delayed, so that France (under new management) can get in on the fun too. On Sunday (9/16), Sarkozy's foreign minister Bernard Kouchner announced that 'France should prepare for the possibility of war over Iran's nuclear program.' All of this has caused Tehran to respond with maniacal threats.  On Monday (9/17), a government website proclaimed that '600 Shihab-3 missiles' will be fired at targets in Israel in response to an attack upon Iran by the US/Israel. 

This was followed by Iranian deputy air force chief Gen. Mohammad Alavi announcing today (9/19) that 'we will attack their (Israeli) territory with our fighter bombers as a response to any attack.' A sure sign of panic is to make a threat that everyone knows is a bluff.  So our and Tel Aviv's response to Iranian bluster is a thank-you-for-sharing yawn and a laugh.  Few things rattle the mullahs' cages more than a yawn and a laugh. Yet no matter how much fun this sport with the mullahs is, it is also deadly serious.  The pressure build-up on Iran is getting enormous.  Something is going to blow and soon.  The hope is that the blow-up will be internal, that the regime will implode from within. But make no mistake:  an all-out full regime take-out air assault upon Iran is coming if that hope doesn't materialize within the next 60 to 90 days.  The Sept. 6 attack on Syria was the shot across Iran's bow.

So - what was attacked near Dayr az-Zawr?  It's possible it was North Korean 'nuclear material' recently shipped to Syria, i.e., stuff to make radioactively 'dirty' warheads, but nothing to make a real nuke with as the Norks don't have real nukes (see Why North Korea's Nuke Test Is Such Good News, October 2006). Another possibility is it was to take out a stockpile of long-range Zilzal surface-to-surface missiles recently shipped from Iran for an attack on Israel. A third is it was a hit on the stockpile of Saddam's chemical/bio weapons snuck out of Iraq and into Syria for safekeeping before the US invasion of April 2003. But the identity of the target is not the story - for the primary point of the attack was not to destroy that target.  It was to shut down Syria's Russian air defense system during the attack.  Doing so made the attack an incredible success. Syria is shamed and silent.  Iran is freaking out in panic.  Defenseless enemies are fun.



http://www.ocnus.net/artman2/publish/Analyses_12/Silence_in_Syria_Panic_in_Iran.shtml

[Michael Tee]

<<Defenseless enemies are fun.>>

And psychos are psychos.

I'm not sure that things happened exactly as portrayed.  If the air-defence system didn't work exactly as advertised, no need for the Syrians to give the Israelis any inkling of just what did go wrong.  And if the Israelis fucked up majorly or even lost some men or planes in the raid, no need to boast about it either.  Olmert's got enough demerit points from Lebanon already, any more and he could lose his licence.  One thing's for sure - - if the system really did fail, the designers aren't just going to say "Whaddayagonnadoo" and walk off into the sunset.  They'd be hard at work even as we speak, figuring out what went wrong and why.  And the Israelis would be hard at work too, trying to figure out where the Russians are headed and what they can do about it. 

On a higher level, strategists would be working on a different problem - - assuming that nobody is going to win a contest of brainpower against the Israelis, at least where electronics and hi-tech defence systems are concerned, how can we fuck these guys up if they DO break through our air-defence systems, militarily, economically, diplomatically?

It may well be that the Arabs are fucked.  If they are, it's due neither to American power or Israeli brilliance.  It's due to disunity in their camp, and it's their own God-damn fault.  They have no one but themselves to blame if they are continually brutalized, attacked and humiliated in their own homes by a relatively tiny number of Jews and a declining superpower.  "Things have to get worse before they can get better" may apply to the Arabs as well as to anyone else.

If we step back from the immediate situation, we can start to see the real extent of the problem.  The Arabs are fucked because they are divided.  They are divided because they are ruled by people who by and large don't give a shit about their own citizens much less the other Arabs in the region, much less the Turks and Persians and even the Jews who are their neighbours.  The rulers are firmly embedded, with an army, police and secret police forces and all the apparatus of state terror to keep the people in line, with the assistance of corrupt clerics who misuse the Islamic principle of submission to God's will to convince large segments of the population to bend over and take it.  This is a kind of self-perpetuating system of permanent misrule, which the Americans and British, and to a much lesser degree the French, Spanish and Italians, have known instinctively how to exploit for their own benefit for generations.  A bribe here, an assassination there, a boon here, a penalty there, an invasion or two or three or four, and the natives are kept in a fairly docile state of permanent submission while their non-renewable natural resources are pumped out of their land as fast as is humanly possible.

What the Arabs really have is a leadership problem.  They need visionaries and prophets.  They need a new way.

[Plane]

Americans also are divided , but we know how to make a strength of it.

[Michael Tee]

<<Americans also are divided , but we know how to make a strength of it.>>

Basically by keeping the divisions within reasonable bounds and not killing one another for them, at least not since 1865.  IMHO they drew a lot from the English experience, where they learned the hard way what can happen from extreme partisanship.

But I think the fault lines run a lot deeper in the Middle East:  Jews, Muslims, Christians; Sunni, Shi'a; Turks, Arabs, Persians.  Even the Egyptians are derided by lots of Arabs as "Pharaohs" and not seen as genuine Arabs since their history long pre-dates Islamic and even Arab culture.