Following last week’s bombing in Damascus, in which multiple leading Syrian regime figures were killed by opposition forces, the NY Times reported that Israel and the U.S. are engaged in talks over whether to launch a pre-emptive mission to secure Syria’s chemical and biological weapons.
As the security situation throughout Syria continues to deteriorate, the West is increasingly concerned that non-conventional weapons, of which Syria purportedly has one of the largest stockpiles in the world, will fall into the hands of Islamic radicals, including the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah terrorist group.
In this respect, according to Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Israel is “closely tracking the possibility that Hezbollah will try to move advanced military platforms or chemical weapons from Syria to Lebanon,” and that the IDF has been “instructed to increase its intelligence preparations so that…[the military] will be able to consider carrying out an operation” if need be to safeguard against illicit weapons transfers.
Although the Times alleges that the US has reservations regarding such intervention—“because of the risk that it would give Assad an opportunity to rally support against Israeli interference”—the matter will be revisited when US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visits Israel later this month.
Compounding the urgency, however, on Monday Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi pledged not to use such weapons domestically, but announced the country’s willingness to use “chemical or bacterial” weapons in response to any “external aggression.” His comments, marking the first time that Syria has acknowledged its possession of biological weapons, came after it was revealed on Sunday that Syrian troops entered the demilitarized buffer zone along the Golan Heights last week during fighting with rebel groups, thereby raising the spectre of a direct confrontation, perhaps even mistakenly, between Israel and its northern neighbour.
In the meantime, the battle for Damascus rages on. And while Israel readies itself for the fallout of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s potential demise, it remains to be seen if, and how, a seemingly impotent United States will act in order to protect its allies, its regional interests, and, above all, the Syrian people.—Charles Bybelezer, CIJR Publications Chairman.
SYRIA’S WAR HITS THE HOUSE OF ASSAD
Fouad Ajami
Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2012
It has to come to this in Damascus: [Last] Wednesday’s rebel bomb attack on a meeting of Bashar al-Assad’s top lieutenants, killing at least three. The war has come to the House of Assad itself. Syria’s dictatorship had rested on a dynasty, and the terror had to be visited on the dynasty. There could be no airtight security for the rulers.
Asef Shawkat, the ruler’s brother-in-law and deputy chief of staff of the armed forces, was a big player in the regime. He was of a piece with this sordid lot. He had risen from poverty, an Alawite soldier who came to power and fortune when he married the late dictator Hafez Assad’s only daughter.…
A maternal cousin, Hafez Makhlouf, was also struck down. The specialty of the Makhlouf cousins was large-scale plunder. They sat astride the crony economy, greedy caterpillars of the realm and bag-men of the House of Assad.
The killing of the defense minister, Daoud Rajha, is of a lower order of importance. A Christian, he was a figurehead in a regime that exalted and trusted only the dominant sect, the Alawites.
The Assads can be said to have brought the Alawites both spoils and peril. They took them—a historically despised community—from the destitution of the mountains, and gave them a dominion of four decades. The edifice was unnatural, a majority Sunni society with pride as to its place in Islamic history submitting to the rule of a “godless” bunch of schismatics.
A merchant-military nexus gave the regime some cover. Sunni and Christian businessmen bought into the Assad enterprise, seeing it as a way of keeping Syria’s fissures from getting worse. The rebellion that broke out some 17 months ago came out of the neglected countryside, the rural Sunni society that had been marginalized and robbed in the rapacious economy of the Makhloufs and the Assads. The regime held on, believing that every new dose of terror would do the trick.
For the good length of this rebellion, Damascus itself was kept out of the fight. There was no love lost for the regime in the warrens and the mosques of that old, broken city. Fear did the trick: The crack units of the regime were based in Damascus. This was, inevitably, where the regime would stand or fall.
An early resolution of this grim war would have kept intact the institutions of the Syrian state, such as they are. It would have enabled the Alawites to walk away from the wreckage, dissociate themselves from the crimes of the Assads, and reach an accommodation with the Sunni majority. But Bashar al-Assad has been sly: He made sure that the Alawites, as a community, were implicated in the recent massacres that have poisoned the well between these two communities.
Alawite villagers were unleashed on their neighbors. They killed at close range. The survivors knew the killers, they had gone to school with them. The fiction that this was regime violence was shredded in the recent horrific massacres. There was method in the cruelty, and this will make itself felt in the phase to come: The Alawite-based regime was rounding out the borders of an Alawite homeland.
The recent killings in the villages of Houla and Tremseh were done on the fault-line between the Alawite mountains and the Sunni plains. In this script, the Alawites would make a run for it, quit Damascus and Homs—cities where their presence had been negligible in past decades—and make a stand in the Alawite mountains and the coast adjoining them. In this scenario, there would be a horrific fight for Damascus. The Alawite military barons and the enforcers alike have grown used to the ease of urban life. The fabled mountains could no longer sustain them.
Forgotten in this descent of Syria into the abyss are the hopes once pinned on Assad. He had married well—a Sunni woman of Homsi background, London-born—and he had talked of reform. His country was desperate to believe him and grant him time. The protesters had started out with graffiti and placards, pleading for reform. A handful of boys in the forlorn southern town of Deraa had started it all: Inspired by Tunisia and Egypt, they scribbled anti-regime graffiti on the walls.
But this regime only knew the rule of the gun.… In this first YouTube civil war in our time, the videos tell of a regime that grew more cruel as official panic set in. The Syrians had crossed the Rubicon, for them there would be no return to the servitude of the past.
(Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.)
NO SANCTUARY FOR ASSAD
Lee Smith
Weekly Standard, Jul 30, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 43
…Bashar al-Assad seems to be losing Damascus, as he has lost much of the rest of the country. Reports last week suggested the Syrian president might already be in Latakia, the de facto capital of the Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean coast. But even if he has not already decamped, he will likely find his way there before long. The Assad regime is fighting with its back to the wall. It is a critical moment for Syria. And it is a critical moment for the Obama administration.…
So far, the White House’s response has been timid. Last week it leveled more sanctions against regime officials, and backed yet another U.N. Security Council resolution against Assad. For the third time, the Russians and Chinese vetoed it. And yet again Obama’s U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, evinced shock that Moscow and Beijing would stay with Assad “to the bitter end.…”
Throughout the uprising, the Obama administration has argued that the rebels were no match for the Syrian Army, with its overwhelming firepower and its hundreds of thousands of men under arms. However, this assessment entirely ignored the demographic equation: Sunni Arabs outnumber Alawites by about 5 to 1.
Today, Assad’s forces are stretched impossibly thin. Months ago came the first evidence, as regime troops found that whenever they quelled the uprising in one town, another town rose up. Assad didn’t have enough loyal hands to put the rebellion down everywhere once and for all. The presence of Iranian and Hezbollah troops was further proof that Assad was shorthanded. And now rebel forces are fighting for control of the borders with Turkey and Iraq, while the regime has moved troops from the Golan Heights border to defend Damascus. The mighty Syrian Army is nothing but a sectarian militia defending a shrinking territory.…
The regime seems to be waging a campaign of sectarian cleansing in order to carve out a rump state along the Mediterranean coast, reflecting the geographical contours of the traditional Alawite heartland, with its capital in Latakia. The regime has lost the hinterland and may be on the verge of losing Damascus, but it is still counting on survival. If Assad can’t have all of Syria, then he and his Russian and Iranian backers will console themselves with an Alawite state on the Mediterranean. The Obama administration should ensure that this doesn’t come to pass.
Under the Assad regime, after all, Syria has been a state sponsor of terror, one that has directed its energies against the United States and American allies. The regime’s survival even in reduced form would serve Iranian interests as well, since Assad is a key link in the chain connecting Tehran to its terrorist asset in Lebanon, Hezbollah.
Almost everything that has unfolded in Syria over the last 16 months was predictable. The White House has failed repeatedly to take advantage of the Syrian dictator’s travails. Now with Assad fighting for his life, it’s time for the administration finally to show a killer instinct. If the regime takes flight from Damascus, it should never be allowed to reach safe haven in Latakia.
OBAMA’S SYRIAN EDUCATION
Editorial
Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2012
It only took 17 months, and multiple Russian and Chinese vetoes, but the Obama Administration has finally concluded that the United Nations has failed on Syria. “Failed utterly” is how Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., channelled John Bolton last week, even as the White House now whispers to its media favorites that it suddenly has all kinds of plans to oust Bashar Assad by force.
The Syrian opposition can be forgiven if it asks where the U.S. was when it really needed the help. Now that the opposition is getting arms from others, and has taken the fight to Damascus and the Assad inner circle, the Obama Administration is scrambling to get in front of the parade. If Assad falls, no doubt the President will declare it a triumph of his subtle statecraft of leading without appearing to lead.
The reality is that the U.S. abdication to the U.N. has produced a Syrian mess that will be harder to clean up than if a coalition of the willing had intervened.
Without a haven safe from regime attacks in Syria, refugees are pouring into Turkey and Lebanon. The ferocity of the fighting for so many months will make Sunni revenge more likely against the Alawites who dominate the regime, and maybe against the minority Syrian Christians who have sided with the regime or stayed neutral. Jihadist elements among the opposition have had more time to organize and plot their attempt for post-Assad power.
All of this might have been mitigated if the U.S. had worked from the start with Turkey, Europe, the Saudis and the Gulf states to assist, arm and organize the opposition.
The same goes for Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile, a problem the Administration is busy leaking that it has under control. We can recall during the Bush years when CIA leakers, State Department drop-outs and some leading Democrats attacked Mr. Bolton, then a senior State Department official, for suggesting that Syria’s WMD posed a regional threat. Now we’re learning how right he was.… If they fall into the hands of Hezbollah, Iran’s military arm in Lebanon, or Iran’s Quds Force. They could easily be used as a terror weapon against Israel.
All of this illustrates the folly of the Obama worldview that the U.S. can act to check the world’s rogues only if the U.N. first vouchsafes its approval.… The result has been that the U.S. has let Russia and Iran set the world’s Syria policy, arming and propping up Assad while his troops shell civilian neighborhoods and his paramilitary operatives slit throats.
The U.S. even acquiesced in the Russian-backed plan to send Kofi Annan, the former U.N. Secretary-General, as an envoy to negotiate a cease-fire between Assad and the opposition. Assad publicly endorsed the cease-fire and a troop withdrawal while continuing the killing.
In what can only be called a self-parody, the Security Council agreed [last] Friday to Russia’s desire to extend the Annan mission for another 30 days. Ambassador Rice voted for this farce even though a day earlier the Russians had vetoed the latest watered-down U.S. resolution to impose economic sanctions against Assad. By the way, Ms. Rice is a leading candidate to be Secretary of State in a second Obama term—lest anyone think this Obama worldview would change.…
A threat of additional military intervention, either by mobilizing a no-fly zone or raids to capture chemical stockpiles, might accelerate military defections from the regime. An internal coup of some kind could avoid a long and bloody siege of major cities and lead to talks for a real transition government. In the event, Mr. Annan shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near that diplomatic effort.
Even at this violent stage, genuine U.S. leadership could contribute to a better outcome in Syria. But Mr. Obama first has to shed his self-applied U.N. fetters.
THE POLITICS OF PREEMPTION
Yaakov Katz
Jerusalem Post, July 20, 2012
Brig.-Gen. Danny Efroni, the IDF’s Military Advocate General, likes books. Behind his desk in the Kirya Military Headquarters in Tel Aviv is a floor-to-ceiling bookcase lined with heavy law books, Supreme Court decisions and analyses of the international laws of war.
On one of the shelves, a black book with yellow writing stands out. It is called Preemption, coauthored by Harvard Prof. Alan Dershowitz. The book analyzes the modern terror threats that the Western world faces and argues that it will need to shift from a policy of deterrence to one of preemption.
This book is sitting on the shelf for a reason. [Last] Wednesday, several hours after a bomb went off in Damascus, killing members of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s inner circle, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz convened a meeting with senior military officers. There were representatives from Military Intelligence, the Northern Command, the Israel Air Force as well as Efroni, the military advocate general.…
Efroni was there to speak about some of the legal questions that could emerge from the upheaval in Syria. One possible scenario could occur if Israel were to learn of Hezbollah plans to move Syria’s chemical weapons out of the country and into Lebanon. Would Israel have the legal right to preempt the move and attack the facility?
The same can be asked about Iran’s nuclear program.… Does [Israel] have justification to launch a preemptive strike against its nuclear facilities?… [Moreover,] Israel could potentially use last week’s attack in Bulgaria to justify retaliatory action against Iran or Hezbollah. Such action could then lead to a larger conflict—one that could ultimately include an Israeli bombing of Syria’s chemical weapons bases and of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The question, though, is whether Israel would want something like that to happen. At the moment, that decision is up to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, which will have to calculate their response to the attack in Burgas.…
The bombing on Wednesday in Syria and Assad’s continued loss of control over the country presents Israel with unbelievable challenges, particularly with regard to the possible proliferation of chemical weapons. Shooting from the gut in response to the attack in Bulgaria could have greater repercussions and ultimately distract Israel from the greater threat it is facing in the North.
Netanyahu and Barak’s phone calls on Wednesday night with US President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta were partly about expressing condolences over the attack but were probably more aimed at gauging what Israel is planning to do. The Obama administration does not want to be surprised.
There is, however, another side to this argument.
If the government does not respond, it will knowingly be contributing to the deterioration and erosion of Israel’s deterrence and will basically be signaling to Iran and Hezbollah that such attacks are tolerated and can continue.…
Either way, the attack comes at a time when, no matter how one looks at it, Israel and Iran appear to be on something of a collision course. With talks between the P5+1 and Tehran not progressing, the possibility that Israel will take unilateral military action might be increasing. Jerusalem’s quiet on the issue—after a year of open saber-rattling—adds to the world’s concern.
The other reason is that we are now in July, just months away from when Barak originally said that Iran would be entering the so-called immunity zone, the point from which an Israeli strike will no longer be effective.… Historically, this is the window that Israel has used to attack two previous reactors—Iraq’s nuclear reactor in June 1981 and Syria’s reactor in September 2007. This is because the summer provides pilots and reconnaissance teams with good visibility for locating targets and post-strike damage assessments.
Another consideration could be the upcoming joint Israeli-US missile defense drill scheduled for October, which will see the deployment of American missile defense systems in Israel and provide the country with an additional layer of defense.
Summer in the Middle East is always hot, but it might be on the verge of getting even hotter.
