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NOMOREWAR_FORISRAEL@yahoo.com
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Forwarded:
Highly recommended reading. As usual, Jonathan Cook offers a credible
interpretation. What it all boils down to is that the den of Zionist
neocons (entrenched in D.C.) can still create havoc:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18469.htm
An Opening Shot for War on Iran?
Why Did Israel Attack Syria?
By Jonathan Cook
09/27/07 "ICH" -- -- Nazareth -- 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 neighboring Lebanon.
>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
raid 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 program 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 Defense 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 program -- 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 uncharacteristicall y quiet all spring
and summer about what it planned to do next, rumors 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 neighbors 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 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
behavior 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 neighbor 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 agonized 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
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 fanatics 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 years
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 operatives like Michael Ledeen lost no time in spreading rumors
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 d
Highly recommended reading. As usual, Jonathan Cook offers a credible
interpretation. What it all boils down to is that the den of Zionist
neocons (entrenched in D.C.) can still create havoc:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18469.htm
An Opening Shot for War on Iran?
Why Did Israel Attack Syria?
By Jonathan Cook
09/27/07 "ICH" -- -- Nazareth -- 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 neighboring Lebanon.
>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
raid 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 program 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 Defense 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 program -- 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 uncharacteristicall y quiet all spring
and summer about what it planned to do next, rumors 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 neighbors 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 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
behavior 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 neighbor 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 agonized 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
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 fanatics 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 years
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 operatives like Michael Ledeen lost no time in spreading rumors
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 d