What's It all About, Mahmoud?

This is what the Presidential election is all about. Like it or not. The worst message you can send to our Islamic enemies is "anti-war" despite events on the ground.  The worst message. It's a message of preemptive surrender. If you are really, truly anti-war, you don't tell the enemy that you won't fight. If you are truly anti-war, you must show strength, character, balls. Appear unafraid and invulnerable, or you are toast.  Power is all they understand and respect.

Tjis Presidential election will send a clear message to enemies of the West.

 

Iran launches first space research rocket Safir 1 DEBKA (hat tip Michael)

The Safir (Emissary) was launched into space Monday, Feb. 4, on top of the improved Shahab-3 which has a 4,000 km range. DEBKAfile's military sources report that the Iranian launch was Tehran's rejoinder to Israel's test of a new long-range missile propulsion engine on Jan. 17. Western experts reported at the time that Israel's newly-powered missiles could reach "any point on earth."

The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was present for the test Monday.

DEBKAfile's military sources report Safir-1 was fired from a missile base in the Semnan Desert southeast of Tehran.

He also inaugurated Iran's first space research center and announced that the Ormid ("Hope") satellite would be placed in orbit "in the near future."

Our military sources disclose that while Tehran's space program is in its infancy, the Iranians are capable of a crash program for cutting down the gestation period for producing a military space satellite, as they proved in their nuclear effort.

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Shin Bet chief reports: Masses of high-quality weaponry, such as long-range rockets, roll into Gaza through the breached Sinai border

The domestic security agency's director, Yuval Diskin, warned the Israeli cabinet Sunday, Feb. 3, that the Palestinians exploited the chaos on the Gaza-Sinai border to smuggle in quantities of long-range rockets, anti-tank and anti-air rockets and high explosives for missiles. Hundreds of Palestinian terrorists have headed south into Sinai. According to Western intelligence sources, they are spread out along the 220-km Israeli border.

DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources disclose the figure omitted from the cabinet's official communiqué to avoid alarming the public: The number of armed terrorists at large in Sinai is estimated in the region of a thousand. Hamas prepared at least 30 tracks for them to use when it bulldozed the Gaza-Sinai border ten days ago.

Defense minister Ehud Barak therefore told the cabinet that a border barrier must be constructed urgently at two sections of the unfenced Israel-Egyptian border – Nitzana and Eilat.

However, he is too late. Insistent demands by senior IDF officers to fence the border were neglected for too long by the Olmert government. Now, the Egyptian-Israel border is wide open to terrorists and they have been presented with a safe haven in Sinai for hit-and-run attacks.

Diskin also reported that many Palestinian terrorists returning from Iran, Syria or Egypt used the border mayhem to gain entry to Gaza. Among them were members of various terrorist organizations who trained in Iran and other places and who arrived with fresh combat skills.

When Egyptian border police failed to stem the Palestinian surge out of Gaza last week, senior Israeli officers applied for permission to send up three combat helicopters, which they said would have been enough to stem the mass exit and the smuggling in of long-range rockets and returning terrorists. But permission was withheld. It was denied in the same was as the high command was held back from embarking on an effective military operation to cut Hamas and its war machine down to size, when it was still readily feasible.

The Olmert government's blunders over Gaza, military experts estimate, are potentially more ruinous to Israel security than even the mismanagement of the Lebanon War.

A-Bomb in 3-Dn iran, outer-space by jeffrey

Greetings from … Belgium, I think. I am in Europe this week — Den Haag, Bruxelle, Paris and London. Four cities in seven days.

I came back from my meetings today to discover, according to A-bomb, that "Iran has joined the world's top 11 countries possessing space technology to build satellites, and launch rockets into space" by launching a missile, opening a space center and donning a pair of bitchin' 3-D glasses. (The Lede really outdid itself with the picture (above) and the rundown on the press coverage.)

As far as I can tell, the missile is a Shahab-3 and the "Space Center" is co-located with Iran's Shahab-3 test site. But, hey, did you see those specs?

Looks Like a Shahab-3

David Wright sent a note to the Space Sanctuary working group noting that, working from the picture provided by ISNA (below), the missile appears to be a Shahab-3 — which would not capable of placing a payload into orbit:

The url that Brian sent has a picture of a group of people standing around the base of a missile. If that missile is similar to the one that was launched (the coloring is different, but the structure seems to be the same), you can get a rough length scale. Applying that to the missile in the launch video on the Reuters site, I find a diameter of something over 1 m and a length of roughly 13 m. This is consistent with a missile the size of a Nodong/Shahab 3, with a range of 1,000-1,300 km with a 700 -1,000 kg payload. That range corresponds to a burnout speed of about 3 km/s, which is well under orbital speed for LEO.

This isn't surprising — Iranian officials, in the past, have described the Shahab-3 in terms of the country's space aspirations although the missile itself isn't a space launcher:

"We are on the threshold of entering the international space club," Nasser Maliki, Iran's deputy defence minister for space affairs and deputy director of the state-run Aerospace Industry Organisation, declared in Tehran on 7 October 2004. "Until 1998 we were producing short-range missiles and today we are into the production of long-range surface-to-surface missiles like Shahab 1 and 2 which deter the enemy. Very certainly we are going to improve our Shahab 3 missile and all our other missiles."

Ed Blanche, "Iran claims Shahab 3 range now 2000 km," Jane's Missiles and Rockets, 2004.

Space Center in Semnan Province

According to ISNA, the new Space Center is located in Semnan Province. (At least that is what AFP says; I can't read the original in Farsi.)

Semnan Province is also the location of the test facility for the Shahab-3. Various articles in Jane's locate at least five Shahab-3 flight tests (Numbers 3, 5-8 in 2000, 2002-2003) at Semnan. So, the location of the Space Center there makes sense with the visual identification of the missile as a Shahab-3.

I (and others) even found a suspect site — though we were not the first. Someone seems to have ordered a massive number of commercial satellite images of this spot near 35.238 N, 53.951 E (with many revetted buildings to the West) over the past few years.

If I had to guess, this is a pretty good candidate.

Check out China Confidential's: SEEING IRAN PLAIN

Comments

[songdongnigh]

What it's all about is preparation for a three front attack against Israel: From Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, with direct support from Iran.