Middle East

Mini-Book Review — Ross — The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad

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Ross, Michael with Jonathan Kay, The Volunteer: A Canadian’s Secret Life in the Mossad, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2007. 278 pp.

Recommended by Ishmael Jones, author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Culture, reviewed here on chicagoboyz.

In late 1982, 21 year-old Michael Ross arrived in Israel to escape cold weather. After a three year hitch in the Canadian Army, tackled right out of high school, he was on vacation. Backpackers visiting Europe on a budget often traded their wintertime labour at Israeli kibbutzim for free room and board. Michael was soon headed for one in the Beit Shean valley.

Hailing from Victoria, British Columbia and a mildly Anglican religious background, even being in Israel was a stretch. Far more likely that he’d be kayaking, or mountain-biking, or growing dope up in the Rockies. Short of the North Island of New Zealand, or perhaps Marin County, California, there’s hardly a more heavenly place in the English-speaking world than the Gulf Islands between the city of Vancouver and Vancouver Island. It’s “Lotus-land” to eastern Canadians. A young man just out of an army should have found all the pleasure and excitement he could want in the Pacific Coast lifestyle.

Michael’s background certainly didn’t suggest a future in one of the most respected, yet constantly imperiled, clandestine services in the world — the Mossad. Nor could it predict that he would take a side in one of the nastiest confrontations between the modern industrialized world and its neighbours. Yet for almost two decades “Michael Ross” was to serve in a variety of military and intelligence roles for his adopted home under conditions of unimaginable danger. How he came to do so is both fascinating and rather unsettling.

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Oman the Honest Broker

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Our friend Curzon, at Coming Anarchy has a post up about the little-discussed role of Oman as a trusted middle man in the Persian Gulf, with the recent hostage release being only one example of this role. An earlier post on the personal life of the Sultan provoked an interesting discussion.

You don’t see much written about Oman. One book I would like to read is Ian Gardiner, In the Service of the Sultan: A First Hand Account of the Dhofar Insurgency. The Dhofar conflict was a rare example of a successful counterinsurgency campaign, yet you don’t hear much about it. Jan Morris’ book about the current Sultan’s father is also on my heartbreakingly, impossibly long “list” of books I’d like to read.

I will mention here that Coming Anarchy is a favorite of mine, which I commend to your attention. Curzon’s recent move to Dubai has led to many good posts about the region.

Charles Cameron on “In a Time of Religious Arousal”

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Originally posted at zenpundit.com:

Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere. Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute:

In a Time of Religious Arousal

by Charles Cameron

We live in times of considerable religious arousal – witness the Manhattan mosque and cultural center controversy, the on-again, off-again Florida Quran burning, last week’s Glenn Beck rally at the Lincoln Memorial, Hindutva violence against Muslims in India, Muslim violence against Christians, the wars ongoing or drawing to an end in Afghanistan and Iraq, the threat of an Israeli or American attack on Iran, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and peace process… In each of these instances, religious arousal has a role to play.

It would require considerable care, research, and craftsmanship to produce a nuanced and appropriately balanced view of human nature, the current state of the world, American, European and Islamic popular, polite and political opinions, the global admixture of peoples and approaches that characterize Islam, the history of violence, religious and otherwise, the braiding in different times and places of religion with politics, the roots of violence, the roots of peace and its meanings both as a state of cessation of conflict and as a state of contemplative calm…

Such a presentation would require at least a book-length treatment, and cannot be trotted out every time some new spark emerges from the ancient fires… but perhaps I can lay out some of my own considerations about the topic here, in somewhat condensed form.

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After Iran Gets The Bomb

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The decision by President George W. Bush in 2006 to forgo hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities has made Iran acquiring the atomic bomb, and worldwide catalytic nuclear proliferation, inevitable. This will have horrid consequences for the world and for American liberty at home. It will leave the world we live in an unrecognizable dystopia.

To use the May 16, 2006 words of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger:

“… The world is faced with the nightmarish prospect that nuclear weapons will become a standard part of national armament and wind up in terrorist hands. The negotiations on Korean and Iranian nuclear proliferation mark a watershed. A failed diplomacy would leave us with a choice between the use of force or a world where restraint has been eroded by the inability or unwillingness of countries that have the most to lose to restrain defiant fanatics. One need only imagine what would have happened had any of the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, London, Madrid, Istanbul or Bali involved even the crudest nuclear weapon.
 
…An indefinite continuation of the stalemate would amount to a de facto acquiescence by the international community in letting new entrants into the nuclear club. In Asia, it would spell the near-certain addition of South Korea and Japan; in the Middle East, countries such as Turkey, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia could enter the field. In such a world, all significant industrial countries would consider nuclear weapons an indispensable status symbol. Radical elements throughout the Islamic world and elsewhere would gain strength from the successful defiance of the major nuclear powers.
 
…The management of a nuclear-armed world would be infinitely more complex than maintaining the deterrent balance of two Cold War superpowers. The various nuclear countries would not only have to maintain deterrent balances with their own adversaries, a process that would not necessarily follow the principles and practices evolved over decades among the existing nuclear states. They would also have the ability and incentives to declare themselves as interested parties in general confrontations. Especially Iran, and eventually other countries of similar orientation, would be able to use nuclear arsenals to protect their revolutionary activities around the world.

That was said in 2006. It is now 2010. Kissinger’s world is now upon us.

Aircraft can fly between North Korea and Iran via China and Pakistan. If they don’t land in Pakistan at bases where we can inspect them, America will have little and unverifiable information about their contents, such as weapons-grade fissionables and nuclear weapons components. So Iran can assemble its nukes in North Korea, using North Korean fissionables, fly them to Iran via China and Pakistan, and test them in Iran.

The real question here is not whether Iran has working nuclear weapons – they certainly have that capability given that North Korea produced more than 60kg of weapons-grade plutonium – but the status of their warhead fabrication capability, i.e., can they put working nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles?

I think the answer is “Yes” and I gave my reasons why in a post titled Count Down to Iran’s Nuclear Test Revisited on the Winds of Change blog in April 2006.

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Your Tax Dollars, Funding Palestinian Propaganda

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The U.S. government is funding an ad campaign in Israel featuring billboards of Palestinian officials asking: “We are partners — what about you?” The Agency for International development “invested” $250,000 toward the billboards.

Via Michelle Malkin, who notes that a Democratic Congressman has been circlating talking points about how great this administration’s support for Israel has been.

Meanwhile, Palestinian terrorists have murdered four more Israelis, right down the road from Daniel Jackson’s house.