Why
Did Israel Attack Syria?
By Jonathan Cook
in Nazareth
28 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Israel’s air strike on
northern Syria earlier this month should be understood in the context
of events unfolding since its assault last summer on neighbouring Lebanon.
Although little more than rumours have been offered about what took
place, one strategic forecasting group, Stratfor, still concluded: "Something
important happened."
From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli
warplanes violated Syrian airspace to drop munitions on a site close
to the border with Turkey. We also know from the US media that the "something"
occurred in close coordination with the White House. But what was the
purpose and significance of the attack?
It is worth recalling that, in the wake of Israel’s month-long
war against Lebanon a year ago, a prominent American neoconservative,
Meyrav Wurmser, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s recently
departed Middle East adviser, explained that the war had dragged on
because the White House delayed in imposing a ceasefire. The neocons,
she said, wanted to give Israel the time and space to expand the attack
to Damascus.
The reasoning was simple: before an attack on Iran could be countenanced,
Hizbullah in Lebanon had to be destroyed and Syria at the very least
cowed. The plan was to isolate Tehran on these two other hostile fronts
before going in for the kill.
But faced with constant rocket fire from Hizbullah last summer, Israel’s
public and military nerves frayed at the first hurdle. Instead Israel
and the US were forced to settle for a Security Council resolution rather
than a decisive military victory.
The immediate fallout of the failed attack was an apparent waning of
neocon influence. The group's programme of "creative destruction"
in the Middle East -- the encouragement of regional civil war and the
partition of large states that threaten Israel -- was at risk of being
shunted aside.
Instead the "pragmatists" in the Bush Administration, led
by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the new Defence Secretary
Robert Gates, demanded a change of tack. The standoff reached a head
in late 2006 when oilman James Baker and his Iraq Study Group began
lobbying for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq -- presumably only after
a dictator, this one more reliable, had again been installed in Baghdad.
It looked as if the neocons' day in the sun had finally passed.
Israel’s leadership understood the gravity of the moment. In January
2007 the Herzliya conference, an annual festival of strategy-making,
invited no less than 40 Washington opinion-formers to join the usual
throng of Israeli politicians, generals, journalists and academics.
For a week the Israeli and American delegates spoke as one: Iran and
its presumed proxy, Hizbullah, were bent on the genocidal destruction
of Israel. Tehran's development of a nuclear programme -- whether for
civilian use, as Iran argues, or for military use, as the US and Israel
claim -- had to be stopped at all costs.
While the White House turned uncharacteristically quiet all spring and
summer about what it planned to do next, rumours that Israel was pondering
a go-it-alone strike against Iran grew noisier by the day. Ex-Mossad
officers warned of an inevitable third world war, Israeli military intelligence
advised that Iran was only months away from the point of no return on
developing a nuclear warhead, prominent leaks in sympathetic media revealed
bombing runs to Gibraltar, and Israel started upping the pressure on
several tens of thousands of Jews in Tehran to flee their homes and
come to Israel.
While Western analysts opined that an attack on Iran was growing unlikely,
Israel’s neighbours watched nervously through the first half of
the year as the vague impression of a regional war came ever more sharply
into focus. In particular Syria, after witnessing the whirlwind of savagery
unleashed against Lebanon last summer, feared it was next in line in
the US-Israeli campaign to break Tehran’s network of regional
alliances. It deduced, probably correctly, that neither the US nor Israel
would dare attack Iran without first clobbering Hizbullah and Damascus.
For some time Syria had been left in no doubt of the mood in Washington.
It failed to end its pariah status in the post-9/11 period, despite
helping the CIA with intelligence on al-Qaeda and secretly trying to
make peace with Israel over the running sore of the occupied Golan Heights.
It was rebuffed at every turn.
So as the clouds of war grew darker in the spring, Syria responded as
might be expected. It went to the arms market in Moscow and bought up
the displays of anti-aircraft missiles as well as anti-tank weapons
of the kind Hizbullah demonstrated last summer were so effective at
repelling Israel’s planned ground invasion of south Lebanon.
As the renowned Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld reluctantly
conceded earlier this year, US policy was forcing Damascus to remain
within Iran’s uncomfortable embrace: "Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad finds himself more dependent on his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, than perhaps he would like."
Israel, never missing an opportunity to wilfully misrepresent the behaviour
of an enemy, called the Syrian military build-up proof of Damascus’
appetite for war. Apparently fearful that Syria might initiate a war
by mistaking the signals from Israel as evidence of aggressive intentions,
the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, urged Syria to avoid a "miscalculation".
The Israeli public spent the summer braced for a far more dangerous
repeat of last summer’s war along the northern border.
It was at this point -- with tensions simmeringly hot -- that Israel
launched its strike, sending several fighter planes into Syria on a
lightning mission to hit a site near Dayr a-Zawr. As Syria itself broke
the news of the attack, Israeli generals were shown on TV toasting in
the Jewish new year but refusing to comment.
Details have remained thin on the ground ever since: Israel imposed
a news blackout that has been strictly enforced by the country’s
military censor. Instead it has been left to the Western media to speculate
on what occurred.
One point that none of the pundits and analysts have noted was that,
in attacking Syria, Israel committed a blatant act of aggression against
its northern neighbour of the kind denounced as the "supreme international
crime" by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.
Also, no one pointed out the obvious double standard applied to Israel's
attack on Syria compared to the far less significant violation of Israeli
sovereignty by Hizbullah a year earlier, when the Shia militia captured
two Israel soldiers at a border post and killed three more. Hizbullah's
act was widely accepted as justification for the bombardment and destruction
of much of Lebanon, even if a few sensitive souls agonised over whether
Israel’s response was "disproportionate". Would these
commentators now approve of similar retaliation by Syria?
The question was doubtless considered unimportant because it was clear
from Western coverage that no one -- including the Israeli leadership
-- believed Syria was in a position to respond militarily to Israel’s
attack. Olmert’s fear of a Syrian "miscalculation" evaporated
the moment Israel did the maths for Damascus.
So what did Israel hope to achieve with its aerial strike?
The stories emerging from the less gagged American media suggest two
scenarios. The first is that Israel targeted Iranian supplies passing
through Syria on their way to Hizbullah; the second that Israel struck
at a fledgling Syrian nuclear plant where materials from North Korea
were being offloaded, possibly as part of a joint nuclear effort by
Damascus and Tehran.
(Speculation that Israel was testing Syria's anti-aircraft defences
in preparation for an attack on Iran ignores the fact that the Israeli
air force would almost certainly choose a flightpath through friendlier
Jordanian airspace.)
How credible are these two scenarios?
The nuclear claims against Damascus were discounted so quickly by experts
of the region that Washington was soon downgrading the accusation to
claims that Syria was only hiding the material on North Korea’s
behalf. But why would Syria, already hounded by Israel and the US, provide
such a readymade pretext for still harsher treatment? Why, equally,
would North Korea undermine its hard-won disarmament deal with the US?
And why, if Syria were covertly engaging in nuclear mischief, did it
alert the world to the fact by revealing the Israeli air strike?
The other justification for the attack was at least based in a more
credible reality: Damascus, Hizbullah and Iran undoubtedly do share
some military resources. But their alliance should be seen as the kind
of defensive pact needed by vulnerable actors in a Sunni-dominated region
where the US wants unlimited control of Gulf oil and supports only those
repressive regimes that cooperate on its terms. All three are keenly
aware that it is Israel’s job to threaten and punish any regimes
that fail to toe the line.
Contrary to the impression being created in the West, genocidal hatred
of Israel and Jews, however often Ahmadinejad’s speeches are mistranslated,
is not the engine of these countries’ alliance.
Nonetheless, the political significance of the justifications for the
the Israeli air strike is that both neatly tie together various strands
of an argument needed by the neocons and Israel in making their case
for an attack on Iran before Bush leaves office in early 2009. Each
scenario suggests a Shia "axis of evil", coordinated by Iran,
that is actively plotting Israel’s destruction. And each story
offers the pretext for an attack on Syria as a prelude to a pre-emptive
strike against Tehran -- launched either by Washington or Tel Aviv --
to save Israel.
That these stories appear to have been planted in the American media
by neocon masters of spin like John Bolton is warning enough -- as is
the admission that the only evidence for Syrian malfeasance is Israeli
"intelligence", the basis of which cannot be questioned as
Israel is not officially admitting the attack.
It should hardly need pointing out that we are again in a hall of mirrors,
as we were during the period leading up to America’s invasion
of Iraq and have been during its subsequent occupation.
Bush's "war on terror" was originally justified with the convenient
and manufactured links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as well as, of course,
those WMDs that, it later turned out, had been destroyed more than a
decade earlier. But ever since Tehran has invariably been the ultimate
target of these improbable confections.
There were the forged documents proving both that Iraq had imported
enriched uranium from Niger to manufacture nuclear warheads and that
it was sharing its nuclear know-how with Iran. And as Iraq fell apart,
neocon ideologues like Michael Ledeen lost no time in spreading rumours
that the missing nuclear arsenal could still be accounted for: Iranian
agents had simply smuggled it out of Iraq during the chaos of the US
invasion.
Since then our media have proved that they have no less of an appetite
for such preposterous tales. If Iran's involvement in stirring up its
fellow Shia in Iraq against the US occupation is at least possible,
the same cannot be said of the regular White House claims that Tehran
is behind the Sunni-led insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few
months ago the news media served up "revelations" that Iran
was secretly conspiring with al-Qaeda and Iraq's Sunni militias to oust
the US occupiers.
So what purpose does the constant innuendo against Tehran serve?
The latest accusations should be seen as an example of Israel and the
neocons "creating their own reality", as one Bush adviser
famously observed of the neocon philosophy of power. The more that Hizbullah,
Syria and Iran are menaced by Israel, the more they are forced to huddle
together and behave in ways to protect themselves -- such as arming
-- that can be portrayed as a "genocidal" threat to Israel
and world order.
Van Creveld once observed that Tehran would be "crazy" not
to develop nuclear weapons given the clear trajectory of Israeli and
US machinations to overthrow the regime. So equally Syria cannot afford
to jettison its alliance with Iran or its involvement with Hizbullah.
In the current reality, these connections are the only power it has
to deter an attack or force the US and Israel to negotiate.
But they are also the evidence needed by Israel and the neocons to convict
Syria and Iran in the court of Washington opinion. The attack on Syria
is part of a clever hustle, one designed to vanquish or bypass the doubters
in the Bush Administration, both by proving Syria’s culpability
and by provoking it to respond.
Condoleezza Rice, it emerged at the weekend, wants to invite Syria to
attend the regional peace conference that has been called by President
Bush for November. There can be no doubt that such an act of détente
is deeply opposed by both Israel and the neocons. It reverses their
strategy of implicating Damascus in the "Shia arc of extremism"
and of paving the way to an attack on the real target: Iran.
Syria, meanwhile, is fighting back, as it has been for some time, with
the only means available: the diplomatic offensive. For two years Bashar
al-Assad has been offering a generous peace deal to Israel on the Golan
Heights that Tel Aviv has refused to consider. This week, Syria made
a further gesture towards peace with an offer on another piece of territory
occupied by Israel, the Shebaa Farms. Under the plan, the Farms -- which
the United Nations now agrees belongs to Lebanon, but which Israel still
claims is Syrian and cannot be returned until there is a deal on the
Golan Heights -- would be transferred to UN custody until the dispute
over its sovereignty can be resolved.
Were either of Damascus’ initiatives to be pursued, the region
might be looking forward to a period of relative calm and security.
Which is reason enough why Israel and the neocons are so bitterly opposed.
Instead they must establish a new reality -- one in which the forces
of "creative destruction" so beloved of the neocons engulf
yet more of the region. For the rest of us, a simpler vocabulary suffices.
What is being sold is catastrophe.
Jonathan Cook is a journalist and writer based in Nazareth,
Israel. He is the author of “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking
of the Jewish and Democratic State” (Pluto Press). His forthcoming
book is "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and
the Plan to Remake the Middle East". His website is www.jkcook.net
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