Syria: America and Israel can no longer look the other way
Israel does not want to fight what is now a two-front war with Iran – over its nuclear programme and over Syria – alone. The US-Israel conversation is being conducted openly, and in militaristic terms, says Richard Spencer.
On Friday Israeli jets hovered inside the Lebanese border raining smart missiles on a strategic foe Photo: AFP
Strike hard, strike without mercy. One war, two blows of intense ferocity, the first an act of medieval barbarism, the second an exemplar of 21st century precision warfare; but the line that connects them is becoming ever clearer.
A pile of corpses lies sprawling, arms akimbo, against the wall of a house.
We have seen women and children dead in Syria before, but not in this sort of random pile, untended, blood still coming from the toddlers’ wounds, their mouths yawning, their limbs twisted under their bodies.
The photograph is too distressing to publish: the mentality of the men who swept through Sunni villages in north-west Syria on Thursday and Friday night with knives and guns, stabbing and slashing and shooting these people, is even harder to depict.
At the same time, 100 miles to the south, a hi-tech, considered action, as Israeli jets hovering inside the Lebanese border rained smart missiles on a strategic foe. They destroyed advanced mobile anti-aircraft batteries that if transferred into Hizbollah’s hands would threaten the very air superiority that allows Israel to operate in this way with such impunity.
For Israeli tacticians, who regard Hizbollah as the principal conventional threat, this is a useful piece of work. For Israel’s political leaders, there is a broader strategic goal.
Something has changed in Israel’s calculations over how far to involve itself in the Syrian disaster, and perhaps in America’s too. Part of that comes from an understanding of what lies behind events such as the massacres of Sunni Syrians by Alawite militias in the villages of Baydah and Ras al-Nabaah, near Baniyas.
This was no random act. Survivors told The Sunday Telegraph that attacks had been expected, and that the consequence, a flight of Sunni families from this largely Alawite region, was intended. As President Bashar al-Assad loses his grip on the Sunni north-west and south, and the Kurdish north-east, his troops are carving out a fortified zone, where Sunni fifth columns are not welcome.
The highways connecting Alawite and Shia villages to Damascus and Homs are reinforced, the lebensraum of the regime extended as far as possible. The rest of the country is held back by air strikes and attrition.
President Assad may still hope that if this goes on long enough the opposition will implode but, in any case, he is fortifying a protective arc around what remains of his authority.
For 18 months or more, Israel tried to turn the other way. It had no love for Syria’s regime, which considered itself the “heart of the resistance”, and supported both Hamas and Hizbollah, but the Golan border was one of the few with which it seemed to have little trouble. It was a miscalculation all the same. As Iran became ever more closely involved, and America and the West stood by and watched Syria fell apart, events crystallised into what Israeli officials now start to describe as a perfect strategic storm.
It was uncomfortable with the victorious rebels taking over the north, dominated by Islamists. The use of chemical weapons is an even more unpredictable and nightmarish possibility.
But it has lived with the threat of jihad for decades, and chemical weapons, hard to use and ensuring a swift and overwhelming military response, are always treated by military thinkers as a paper tiger.
The new Assad mini-empire, though, is another matter. It would be bad enough if this were just an attempt to save himself by President Assad, who might lash out from his new enclave like wounded prey. But this is also about Iran. Gradually drawn closer into the Syrian war, sending advisers and Revolutionary Guard ground forces to bolster the regime, it is insistent that both Assad and their joint protégé Hizbollah survive to fight another day.
President Bashar al-Assad during a visit to a Damascus campus on Friday
President Assad’s new “heartland” will be a “resistance” rump state, a Shia-Alawite enclave. It will also be far more dangerous than the old state, which, thanks to its Sunni majority and ideology of nationalism, socialism and secularism, had a vaguely credible identity to sell to its people.
That loss of balance and the clear failure of its ideology mean its only purpose will be as a pawn in other people’s war games, as a base for Iran’s ambitions in Lebanon and Israel.
We can tell that Israel’s considerations have changed because it has almost openly told us so.
It was outspoken, unexpectedly so, in confirming British allegations that the regime had used sarin gas on its people, despite American reluctance to say the same. Then, in the wake of Thursday night’s air attack, its officials were open in their admissions within hours, rather than hiding from the spotlight as they have done before.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, instinctively understands Barack Obama’s concern not to involve himself in the Syrian crisis. But Israel does not want to fight what is now a two-front war with Iran – over its nuclear programme and over Syria – alone.
The admission of the convoy attack is a response to America’s own belated confirmation that it held the regime responsible for the sarin finds – a question, if you like, asking: “So what do you do now?”
Nothing is certain: Mr Obama repeated on Friday that he still could not envision “boots on the ground”. But Washington authorised a leak of details of its new “bunker-busting bombs”, that could drill deep into the mountains that hide Iran’s uranium-enriching centrifuges. This is a US-Israel conversation that is being conducted openly, and in startlingly militaristic terms.
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