Playing with Fire in the Levant

 

by Noah Pollak

 

The National, a paper in the UAE, fleshes out the Scud missile story:

 

Although US officials contacted by The National could not completely confirm that such technology had been transferred to Hizbollah by Syria, one official privy to intelligence briefings confirmed a story previously reported in the Israeli press that in the weeks before Senator John Kerry's visit to Damascus on April 1, Israel almost bombed what it claimed was a convoy of advanced weaponry headed from Syrian military bases to Hizbollah along the shared border with Lebanon.

 

"I can't promise you that planes were actually in the air, but it was close, very close," said the official. "The White House had to talk them down from the attack and promised that Kerry would use strong language" with the Syrian president, Bashar Assad.

When asked about the outcome of the meeting between Mr Kerry and Mr Assad on the issue, the source tartly responded: "In light of where we are now, what do you think?"

 

As Tony Badran points out, Bashar Assad "is known to have a penchant for brinksmanship." In this case, he appears to have been saved from the consequences of a particularly foolish gambit by the Obama administration.

 

But this doesn't mean the red line hasn't been crossed. Syria is in fact now in more danger than the Israelis. The IDF's Arrow missile-defense system can knock Scuds out of the sky with great reliability, so they don't pose a tremendous a threat. What they do provide to Israel is an opportunity — and they impose a requirement. The fact that they were transferred to Hezbollah in violation of tacit but well-understood red lines gives Israel clear and credible casus belli, should hostilities break out, to expand any conflict to Syria.

 

The crossing of the Scud-missile red line carries its own inexorable logic: since Syria has chosen to become a provider of military-grade weapons to Hezbollah, Israel has little choice but to include Syria in any future war with Hezbollah. And if Israel goes to war with Syria, there will be little rationale, given the risks involved and the immense reward of ridding the region of Iran's only ally, from going for regime change.

 

Badran:

 

The Syrian president made a telling remark at the last Arab League summit to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. He observed that "the price of resistance is not higher than the price of peace." And therein lays the problem. Assad has not been made to feel that the costs of continued destabilization can be prohibitive. Instead, all he gets from Washington are weak statements in response to his actions.

What Barack Obama appears not to understand is that the harder he presses Israel and the more he protects Syria, the more self-reliant Israel has to become — and that is going to involve things that Obama might discover he dislikes more than close relations with the Jewish state.

 

 

Noah Pollak

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