An Iranian flag hangs as smoke rises after what the Iranian media said was an Israeli strike on a building close to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, April 1, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Firas Makdesi

Given the BBC’s long documented habit of basing news reports on unverified claims made by a news agency controlled by the Assad regime in Syria, it was not surprising to find that some four hours after unclaimed airstrikes in Syria on November 21, the BBC News website was already promoting a headline stating “Israeli strikes on Syria’s Palmyra kills 36, state media say.”

The original version of that report quoted an announcement put out by the Sana news agency, and a claim from an unnamed “UK-based monitoring group” that, in a version published around an hour later and credited to David Gritten, turned out to be the one-man show called ‘The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’ (SOHR).

Gritten’s report was again updated on November 21 – some 21 hours after its original publication; the version currently available online opens by telling readers that:

At least 36 people have been killed and 50 others injured in Israeli air strikes on residential buildings and an industrial area in the central Syrian town of Palmyra, Syrian state media report.

The Sana news agency cited a military source as saying that Israeli jets attacked from the direction of the Jordanian border to the south at around 13:30 (10:30 GMT) and that the strikes causes [sic] significant material damage.

A UK-based monitoring group reported that the strikes hit a weapons depot and other locations in and around an area where families of Iran-backed militia fighters were, killing 68 Syrian and foreign fighters.

The Israeli military said it did not comment on foreign reports.

Later in the article, readers find a link to a Tweet put out by the SOHR and quotes from a report it put out:

Videos and photos posted on social media following Wednesday’s strikes appear to show three large columns of black smoke rising from the Palmyra area.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, cited its sources on the ground as saying that Israeli fighter jets struck three locations in the town.

Two were in the al-Jamiya neighbourhood, including a weapons depot near the industrial zone inhabited by families of Iran-backed fighters of Iraqi and other foreign nationalities, it said.

The third location was nearby and targeted a meeting attended by leaders of Iran-backed militias based in Palmyra and the surrounding desert as well as leaders of the Iraqi group Nujaba and Hezbollah, it added.

The SOHR initially reported that 41 people were killed, but later said the death toll had risen to 68.

It identified them as 42 Syrian members of Iran-backed militias, and 22 foreign members, mostly from Nujaba, and four Lebanese members of Hezbollah.

As noted by the Times of Israel in a report on the same topic:

SOHR, run by a single person, has regularly been accused by Syrian war analysts of false reporting and inflating casualty numbers as well as inventing them wholesale.

Remarkably, Gritten had nothing whatsoever to tell his readers about “the Iraqi group Nujaba” — despite the fact that in January 2024 he contributed to an article which includes the following:

Iran has built a wide network of allied armed groups and proxies operating in countries across the Middle East. They are all opposed to Israel and the US, and sometimes refer to themselves as the “Axis of Resistance”, though the extent of Iran’s influence over them is not clear.

The US says co-ordination is overseen by the IRGC and its overseas operations arm, the Quds Force. Both are designated by the US as terrorist organisations, as are a number of the regional armed groups, including Kataib Hezbollah.

The groups have dramatically stepped up their attacks against Israel, US forces and other linked targets since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip in October, in what they say is a demonstration of their solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many of the at least 165 drone, rocket and missile attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, or facilities hosting US troops, since 17 October have been claimed by an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

In response, the US says it has struck targets belonging to the IRGC and militias believed to have strong links with the force, including Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba and Asaib Ahl al-Haq.

The organization to which Gritten refers in this report as “Nujaba” is known as Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba (HaN) (Movement of the Party of God’s Noble Ones) or Harakat al-Nujaba. As reported by the ITIC:

The Nujaba Movement (Harakat al-Nujaba), or the Movement of the Noble Ones, is an Iraqi Shiite pro-Iranian militia established in 2013 by Sheikh Akram Abbas al-Kaabi, its secretary-general, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC’s) Qods Force. It is one of the largest militias in the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). It is operated by the Iranian Qods Force, which provides the funding, weapons, and training of its members. The Nujaba Movement is also supported by the Lebanese Hezbollah, with which Al-Kaabi has maintained close ties for many years. The militia adopts the ideology of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and regards Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as its supreme leader.

In 2020, the ITIC documented Nujaba’s activities in the Gaza Strip, where it maintains an office.

A WINEP profile of that US designated organization describes its chain of command as follows:

Iran. There is clear and convincing evidence that HaN is subordinate to and partly financed by the IRGC-QF. The preponderance of the evidence shows that Iran provides the group with financial assistance, military assistance, and intelligence sharing, as well as help in selecting, supporting, and supervising its leadership. HaN units in Syria are under the direct operational and administrative control of the IRGC-QF.

Partly financed by the Iraqi state. HaN operates the state-funded 12th Brigade of the PMF. Chain of command nominally runs through the Popular Mobilization Commission of the Prime Minister’s Office and up to the prime minister. In practice, HaN PMF units frequently disobey the Iraqi government chain of command while legally remaining organs of the Iraqi state.

In other words, a BBC report based entirely on unverified accounts from the Syrian regime-controlled news agency and a UK based project fails to clarify that among the “36 people” reportedly killed in a strike it attributes to Israel were operatives of an Iranian financed and operated Iraqi militia with bases in Syria and links to Hezbollah, which has threatened Israel since long before the current war.

BBC audiences would surely have found that context useful for full understanding of Gritten’s story about “Israeli air strikes.”

Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK — an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.

The post BBC Uses Syrian Regime Propaganda, and Calls It ‘News’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un visit the Vostochny Сosmodrome in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, Sept. 13, 2023. Photo: Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Kremlin via REUTERS

Soon, Israel will need to make critical decisions on launching preemptive strikes against Iran. Such non-nuclear defensive actions — expressions of anticipatory self-defense” under international law — would take calculated account of certain pro-Iran interventions. The point of such more-or-less plausible enemy state interventions would be to (1) deter Israel from making good on its residual preemption options; or (2) engage Israel in direct warfare if Jerusalem should choose to proceed with these options.

What would be the specific country sources of such pro-Iran interventions? Most reasonably, the states acting on behalf of Iran would be Russia and/or North Korea. If Russia were to act as Iran’s witting nuclear surrogate (because Iran would still be “pre-nuclear”), direct escalatory moves involving Moscow and Washington could ensue. There are no foreseeable circumstances under which direct Israeli moves against Russia would be rational or cost-effective.

Prima facie, all relevant analyses would be speculative. In strict scientific terms, nothing meaningful could be said concerning the authentic probabilities of unique events. This is because science-based estimations of probability must always depend on the determinable frequency of pertinent past events. Where there are no such events to draw upon, estimations must be less than scientific.

All potentially relevant scenarios involving Israel, Iran, Russia, and/or the United States would be unprecedented (sui generis). At the same time, both Israel and its American ally will need to fashion “best possible” estimations based on applicable elements of deductive reasoning. More particularly, useful Israeli assessments will need to focus on presumed escalation differences between Vladimir Putin’s “firebreak theory” and that of incoming US president Donald Trump.

Will Trump’s nuclear posture threshold remain unchanged from current doctrine; that is, will it continue to affirm the primacy of any escalation to nuclear engagement? Or will this escalation threshold more closely resemble the Russian theory that “small” nuclear weapons (i.e., tactical or theater ordnance) do not necessarily signal intent to initiate a full-blown nuclear war?

American and Russian nuclear escalation doctrines have always been asymmetrical; the implications of continuing such crucial difference could “spill-over” to Israel-Iran nuclear war calculations for the Middle East. Though counter-intuitive, a nuclear war could take place even while Iran remained pre-nuclear. And this risk has recently been heightened by Vladimir Putin’s nuclear policy “upgrades.”

With the United States in mind, the Russian president declared significant “enhancements” to his country’s nuclear doctrine. There are now additional reasons to worry about nuclear war stemming from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Most worrisome is that (1) Moscow would react more forcefully against the United States and/or Ukraine because of President Joe Biden’s widened gamut of missile-firing authority to Volodymyr Zelensky; (2) Vladimir Putin’s reaction would include prompt Russian enlargements of theater nuclear forces; and (3) these Russian enlargements would lower Russia’s tangible threshold of nuclear weapons use.

Such lowering would apply at both doctrinal and operational levels. Although nothing theoretic could be determined about competitive risk-taking in extremis, probabilities concerning Moscow and Washington would still need to be estimated. This includes examining derivative warfare scenarios between Israel and Iran, deductive narratives in which Jerusalem would rely on US nuclear deterrence to protect against Russian-backed North Korean forces. In the parlance of traditional nuclear strategy, this would signify Israeli reliance on “extended nuclear deterrence.” North Korea is a nuclear Iranian ally with a documented history of actual warfighting against Israel. 

Facing an intellectual problem

Nuclear war avoidance should always be approached by pertinent national leaders as a preeminently intellectual problem.

What happens next? How might these developments impact Israel? What should be expected from “Trump II?” Most specifically, how would the answers impact Israel’s precarious war with Iran?

During “Trump I,” major US national security problems were framed by an unprepared American president in needlessly rancorous terms. Today, armed with greater regard for applicable intellectual factors, American planners and policy-makers should look more systematically at what might lie ahead. What will happen next in Vladimir Putin’s determinedly cruel war against Ukraine? How can the United States best prepare for nuclear war avoidance? Playing Putin’s “nuclear firebreak” game, should Washington seek to persuade Moscow of America’s willingness to “go nuclear” according to Russian-defined policy thresholds, or should the United States proceed “asymmetrically” with its own preferred firebreak? How would Washington’s decision affect Israel’s national security?

In facing off against each other, even under optimal assumptions of mutual rationality, American and Russian presidents would have to concern themselves with all possible miscalculations, errors in information, unauthorized uses of strategic weapons, mechanical or computer malfunctions and assorted nuances of cyber-defense/cyber-war.

A still pre-nuclear Iran would still have access to radiation dispersal weapons and to conventional rockets for use against Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona. An Israeli nuclear war with a not-yet-nuclear Iran could arise if already- nuclear North Korea, a close ally of Iran, were willing to act as Tehran’s military surrogate against Israel. Such willingness, in turn, would be impacted by the presumed expectations of Russia and/or China.

Figuring all this out represents a survival-determining challenge for Jerusalem.

Pretended irrationality as nuclear strategy

Going forward, a joint US-Israel obligation will be to assess whether a nuanced posture of “pretended irrationality” could enhance nuclear deterrence posture. On several earlier occasions, it should be recalled, then US President Donald Trump openly praised the untested premises of such a posture. But was such presidential praise warranted on intellectual grounds?

In reply, US and Israeli enemies continue to include both state and sub-state foes, whether considered singly or in multiple forms of possible collaboration. Such forms could be “hybridized” in different ways between state and sub-state adversaries.

In principle, this could represent a potentially clever strategy to “get a jump” on the United States or Israel in any still-expected or already-ongoing competition for “escalation dominance.”

Nuclear weapons as instruments of war prevention, not punishment

A US president or Israeli prime minister should always bear in mind that any national nuclear posture ought to remain focused on war prevention rather than punishment. In all identifiable circumstances, using a portion of its available nuclear forces for vengeance rather than deterrence would miss the most essential point: that is, to fully optimize national security obligations.

Any American or Israeli nuclear weapons use based on narrowly corrosive notions of revenge, even if only as a residual or default option, would be glaringly irrational. Among other things, this would be a good time for both US and Israeli nuclear crisis planners to re-read Clausewitz regarding primacy of the “political object.” Absent such an object, there could be no meaningful standard of escalation rationality.

There remains one penultimate but critical observation.  It is improbable, but not inconceivable, that certain of America’s and Israel’s principal enemies would sometime be neither rational nor irrational, but mad. While irrational decision-makers could already pose special problems for nuclear deterrence — by definition, because these decision-makers would not value collective survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences — they might still be rendered susceptible to alternate forms of dissuasion.

Resembling rational leaderships, these decision-makers could still maintain a fixed, determinable, and “transitive” hierarchy of preferences. This means, at least in principle, that “merely” irrational enemies could sometimes be successfully deterred.

International law

From the standpoint of international law, it is always necessary to distinguish preemptive attacks from “preventive ones.” Preemption is a military strategy of striking first in the expectation that the only foreseeable alternative is to be struck first oneself.  A preemptive attack is launched by a state that believes enemy forces are about to attack.  A preventive attack, on the other hand, is not launched out of any concern about “imminent” hostilities, but rather for fear of some longer-term deterioration in prevailing military balance.

In a preemptive attack, the length of time by which the enemy’s action is anticipated is presumptively very short; in a preventive strike, the anticipated interval is considerably longer. A related problem here for the United States and Israel is not only the practical difficulty of accurately determining “imminence,” but also that delaying a defensive strike until imminence was more precisely ascertainable could prove existential. A resort to “anticipatory self-defense” could be nuclear or non-nuclear and could be directed at either a nuclear or non-nuclear adversary. Plainly, any such resort involving nuclear weapons on one or several sides would prove catastrophic.

America and Israel are not automatically made safer by having only rational adversaries. Even fully rational enemy leaderships could commit serious errors in calculation that would lead them toward nuclear confrontation and/or a nuclear/biological war. There are also certain related command and control issues that could impel a perfectly rational adversary or combination of rational adversaries (both state and sub-state) to embark upon variously risky nuclear behaviors. It follows that even the most pleasingly “optimistic” assessments of enemy leadership decision-making could not reliably preclude catastrophic outcomes.

For the United States and Israel, issues of calibrated nuclear deterrence remain fundamentally intellectual challenges, issues requiring meticulous analytic preparation rather than any particular leadership “attitude.” Such planning ought never become just another contest of “mind over matter” — that is, just a vainly overvalued inventory of comparative weaponry or identifiable “order of battle.”  war.

In both Ukraine and portions of the Middle East, the historical conditions of nature bequeathed at the Peace of Westphalia (1648) could soon come to resemble the primordial barbarism of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Long before Golding, Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, warned insightfully in Leviathan (Chapter XIII) that in any such circumstances of human disorder there must exist “continual fear, and danger of violent death….”

Perceptions of credibility

If Putin should sometime prove willing to cross the conventional-tactical nuclear firebreak on the assumption that such a move would not invite any reciprocal cycle of nuclear escalation with the United States, the American president could face an overwhelmingly tragic choice: total capitulation or nuclear war. Though it would be best for the United States to avoid ever having to reach such a fateful decisional moment, there could still be no guarantees of “mutual assured prudence” between Washington and Moscow. It follows that growing perils of asymmetrical nuclear doctrine should be countered incrementally and intellectually.

Looking ahead at “Cold War II,” American and Israeli security will hinge on fostering vital “perceptions of credibility,” Regarding Russia’s changing nuclear doctrine, only dedicated analytic minds could ever distance Planet Earth from World War III. Taken together with Russia’s war against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s strategic doctrine blurs essential conceptual lines between conventional and nuclear conflict and creates existential hazards for both the United States and Israel. The solely rational response from Washington and Jerusalem should be to understand these unsustainable hazards and to plan appropriately for their most efficient minimization or removal.

For the United States and Israel, the threat posed by asymmetrical nuclear firebreaks could impact the likelihood of both deliberate and inadvertent nuclear war.

These are daunting intellectual issues. Sorting out the most urgent ones, Israel could soon find itself confronting North Korean military assets that threaten on behalf of a pre-nuclear Iran. Whether or not these proxy weapons and forces were under the overall direction of Moscow, asymmetries in nuclear escalation doctrine between Russia and the United States would be material to pertinent event outcomes. Left unanticipated or unmodified, they could sometime prove determinative.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books, monographs, and scholarly articles dealing with military nuclear strategy. In Israel, he was Chair of Project Daniel. Over recent years, he has published on nuclear warfare issues in Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; The Atlantic; Israel Defense; Jewish Website; The New York Times; Israel National News; The Jerusalem Post; The Hill and other sites. A different version of this article appeared in JewishWebsight.

The post Vladimir Putin Has Threatened to Use Nuclear Weapons; What Would This Mean for Israel? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Quebec Premier François Legault wants Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante to get her house in order. Speaking to reporters in Quebec City on Nov. 26, Legault talked about the violent demonstrations […]

The post Quebec premier urges Montreal mayor to take a harder line on rioters after a weekend of violence appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.