[392cobra]

Assad’s charmed life



The Syrian-North Korean-Iranian site was located in the general vicinity
of the hiding-place where the Syrian engineering corps buried Saddam
Hussein’s WMD four years ago after they were spirited out of Iraq .

The Syrian Desert is one of the most desolate and arid places in the
Middle East.

It was chosen now, as in late 2002, for a proscribed nuclear purpose,
because habitation is so sparse that scarcely a trail is to be found
across the region.

The only people who have taken an interest in this bleak place are Israeli
intelligence watchers.

In December 2002 and early 2003, they observed Syrian engineering corps
units moving around the desert with heavy earthmoving equipment and
drawing dirt tracks. They then dug deep pits and lined them with concrete.

At the time, Israeli intelligence suspected the Syrians were taking the
first steps for building an atomic reactor. But on Jan. 10, 2003, two
months before the US invasion of Iraq , trucks and tankers filled the pits
with components of Iraq ’s WMD systems.

Their location was conveyed to the Bush administration at the time with
maps and coordinates.

And no one to this day has the answer to the puzzling question of why
President George W. Bush never sent in special forces to expose the
contents of the pits. It may be that parts of the administration were
skeptical of the information brought by Israel , just as some circles are
today.

Even now, the Syrian president lives a charmed life, notwithstanding his
murky record in helping insurgents fight American soldiers in Iraq ,
hatching assassination conspiracies to destabilize Lebanon , hosting the
most radical and belligerent of Palestinian terrorists, colluding with
Saddam Hussein in hiding his weapons of mass destruction, and planning his
own deadly plutonium project.


US Sanctions Hit Revolutionary Guards’ Pocket
Washington Hopes to Out Short Ahmadinejad’s Creeping Coup


The launching of the tough new US sanctions package for Iran was timed
deliberately with an eye to the rough-and-tumble in Tehran at the top
level of the Iranian regime.

Thursday, Oct. 26, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson jointly unveiled sanctions against Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards Corps as proliferators of weapons of mass destruction
and the al Qods Brigade as sponsors of terrorists.

There is no precedent for a government meting out punishment to the armed
forces of a foreign country and branding them as terrorists engaged in
nuclear proliferation.

Washington had clearly decided to strike while the iron was hot.

There would be no more waiting for results from the coming drawn-out
rounds of diplomacy between Iran’s newly-appointed nuclear negotiator Said
Jalili and European Union executive Javier Solana, or the UN Security
Council and, most of all, from the waffling international nuclear watchdog
IAEA and its director Mohammed ElBaradei.

US officials hope the tough new sanctions will bring the infighting
between two camps of the Revolutionary Guards Corps and its al Qods
Brigade, Tehran ’s primary overseas terrorist branch, to a constructive
conclusion.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Washington sources report that the sanctions
announcement capped a heated debate in the Pentagon, State Department and
Central Intelligence Agency. One side maintained that sanctions would
deepen the divisions cleaving the Iranian leadership; the other that they
would only unite the quarreling factions behind President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, whose offensive for seizing absolute power in all parts of
the regime is in full flight.



Toppling the Revolutionary Guards economic base



The Bush administration was galvanized into settling the argument by three
events.

1. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s epic visit to Tehran on Oct. 16
ended unexpectedly in his backing off from further Russian involvement in
the construction and activation of Iran ’s nuclear reactor in Bushehr.

(Putin’s flip-flop on Iran and its tie-in with the disposition of Caspian
Sea resources are discussed in the next article.)

2. The sudden resignation of Ali Larijani as senior Iranian nuclear
negotiator on Oct. 20. DEBKA-Net-Weekly reports that experts on Iran in
the West are not of one mind over whether Ahmadinejad fired the
exceptionally adept diplomat, or his resignation was requested by supreme
ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his senior adviser Hashem Rafsanjani to
prepare him to run for the presidency against the incumbent.

Both clearly regard Ahmadinejad is getting too big for his boots and
should be stopped.

3. The rumors in Tehran from Tuesday, Oct. 23, that another prominent
figure, foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki had resigned. Though denied,
this was taken by the experts as a further symptom of an advancing climax
in the power struggle of the top echelons of Iranian government.

When all the pros and cons were put before President George W. Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney, the deciding factor turned out to be the
prospect of the new sanctions package toppling Iran ’s economic and
financial establishment. These national institutions are managed largely
by the Revolutionary Guards Corps, which milk them to cover their
operations and to finance Iran ’s missile and nuclear programs.

Bush and Cheney calculated that, when the middle and lower IRGC ranks
begin to feel the bite of the sanctions, they will rise up and the corps,
Iran ’s powerhouse, will split down the middle.