in its coming issue out next Friday offers a blow-by-blow account of the "democratic revolution" which brought Egypt's generals to power, what they are really telling the Obama administration and the candidates they are weighing for next ruler in Cairo. Read unpublished details about Mubarak's fall and find out what other Arab rulers have learned from it. Get some insights into where Washington is going next in relation to the Arab world and Israel. Cairo's approval Friday, Feb. 18 for two Iranian warships to transit the Suez Canal on their way to the Mediterranean has brought Israel and Iran closer than ever before to a naval collision at sea. DEBKAfilereports: Israel has learned that the Iranian cruiser Kharg is carrying long-range missiles for Hizballah which it plans to unload at a Syrian port or Beirut harbor. Friday, Israeli government and military officials were urgently casting about for a way to prevent those missiles reaching the Lebanese terrorists. Heavy US and Israeli pressure failed to dissuade Egypt's military rulers from letting the Iranian flotilla through Suez. So now the waterway has been opened wide for Iran to consign heavy weapons deliveries to Syria and Lebanon - in the first instance, and eventually to try and break Israel's naval blockade on the Gaza Strip and bring Hamas the heavy munitions that were impossible to transport through smuggling tunnels. Twenty-four hours after Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the Egyptian upheaval had no military connotations for Israel, Tehran applied for the Iranian frigate Alvand and cruiser Kharg to transit the Suez Canal on their way to Syria Wednesday night, Feb. 16. Their passage was termed "a provocation" by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. In Beirut, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah said he was looking forward to Israel going to war on Lebanon because then his men would capture Galilee. Up until now, Saudi Arabia, in close conjunction with Egypt and its President Hosni Mubarak, led the Sunni Arab thrust to contain Iranian expansion – especially in the Persian Gulf. However, the opening of a Saudi port to war ships of the Islamic Republic of Iran for the first time in the history of their relations points to a fundamental shift in Middle East trends in consequence of the Egyptian uprising. It was also the first time Cairo has permitted Iranian warships to transit Suez from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, although Israeli traffic in the opposite direction had been allowed. However, Israeli military intelligence which failed to foresee the Egyptian upheaval and its policy-makers ignored the Iranian admiral's announcement and its strategic import, just as they failed to heed the significance of the Iranian flotilla's docking in Jeddah. 1. To cut off, even partially, the US military and naval Persian Gulf forces from their main route for supplies and reinforcements;
DEBKA-Net-Weekly
DEBKAfile Special Report February 18, 2011, 7:39 PM (GMT+02:00)
On February 16, DEBKAfile reported:
Israel was closely monitoring the Iranian flotilla, whose visit to the Saudi Red Sea port of Jeddah on Feb. 6, preparatory to transiting Suez, was first revealed exclusively by DEBKA-Net-Weekly481 on February 10.
Iran made no secret of its plants to expand its naval and military presence beyond the Persian Gulf and Red Sea to the Mediterranean via Suez: On February 2, Iran's Deputy Navy Commander Rear Admiral Gholam-Reza Khadem Biqam announced the flotilla's mission was to "enter the waters of the Red Sea and then be dispatched to the Mediterranean Sea."
DEBKAfile's military sources report that Iran is rapidly seizing the fall of the Mubarak regime in Cairo and the Saudi King Abdullah's falling-out with President Barack Obama (seeDEBKAfile of Feb. 10, 2011) as an opportunity not to be missed for establishing a foothold along the Suez Canal and access to the Mediterranean for six gains:
2. To establish an Iranian military-naval grip on the Suez Canal, through which 40 percent of the world's maritime freights pass every day:
3. To bring an Iranian military presence close enough to menace the Egyptian heartland of Cairo and the Nile Delta and squeeze it into joining the radical Iranian-Syrian-Iraqi-Turkish alliance;
4. To thread a contiguous Iranian military-naval line from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through the Suez Canal and the Gaza Strip and up to the ports of Lebanon, where Hizballah has already seized power and toppled the pro-West government.
5. To eventually sever the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, annex it to the Gaza Strip and establish a large Hamas-ruled Palestinian state athwart the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea.
By comparison, a Fatah-led Palestinian state on the West Bank within the American orbit be politically and strategically inferior.
6. To tighten the naval and military siege on Israel.
DEBKAfile Special Report February 18, 2011, 2:23 PM (GMT+02:00)
Without serious aforethought, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have waved through another 3,000 Egyptian troops into North Sinai, topping their number up to 4,000 and virtually scrapping the key demilitarization clause of the 1979 peace treaty. DEBKAfile's military sources report that the men belong to the Egyptian army's 18th mechanized infantry division.
Earlier this month, Israeli permitted the first 1,000 Egyptian troops to enter Sinai to guard Sharm el-Sheik and the hotel and resort strips of eastern Sinai. Senior Israeli military officers report that Israel posed no conditions for its permission then or now – not even demanding a timeline for their withdrawal so that Sinai might revert to the military-free buffer status which buttressed the peace for 32 years.
Neither were limits placed on the Egyptian troops' operations and movements.
There is little doubt in the IDF's high command that the Egyptian troops are in Sinai to stay, whereas Israel's forces on the their side of the border are seriously undermanned for dealing with an unforeseen cross-border flare-up.
Some of the Egyptian units have taken up positions along the main coastal highway from El Arish in northern Sinai to Qantara on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, DEBKAfile's intelligence sources report. Other units have taken control of the Philadelphi corridor between the Gaza Strip and Sinai, as well as the Rafah, El Arish and Sheikh Suweid police stations which Hamas and Bedouin gunmen overran and torched during the riots in Cairo. Their officers warned the Bedouin chiefs of northern Sinai that their orders were to shoot all lawbreakers.
Israel's easy and unconditional consent to an Egyptian military presence in Sinai
paved the way for Cairo to ignore Israel's concerns about permitting an Iranian war flotilla pass through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean and up to Syrian military ports, even when an Israeli request to deny Tehran permission was routed through and supported by Washington. The military rulers brushed Israel's request aside and did not bother to reply.
By Friday, Feb. 18, Jerusalem had discovered that Cairo's explanation for its North Sinai deployment was the need to guard from further attacks the pipeline supplying Israel and Jordan with gas, which was blown up by Hamas on Feb. 5, was nothing but a pretext. For now, Egypt is not repairing the damage or offering to resume supplies. The Netanyahu government missed its chance to make consent for the troop deployment contingent on the resupply of gas.
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