A Series of Unfortunate Middle East Events
What's the old saying? "When it rains, it pours."
On Monday a 1/3-ton truck bomb blows up former Lebanese "Prime Minister" Rafik Hariri, a self-made billionaire who had been one of Syria's puppet rulers in Beirut but of late had fallen out with Damascus and was organization Lebanese opposition to Syria's continued occupation of what used to be known as the Levant. Speculation on who was responsible for the attack centered upon Syria, whose Ba'athist government naturally put on a mask of denial (and anti-Israel finger-pointing) that nobody is really taking seriously given that the logistics of even constructing an explosive device that big pretty much demand state sponsorship.
If it was Syria, this may have been an attempt to intimidate its restive Lebanese subjects back into submission in order to enable "Baby Assad" to focus on his burgeoning confrontation with the United States, which just happens to have 135,000 troops next door in neighboring Iraq. If so, Bashir seems to have miscalculated, as hundreds of thousands of Lebanese turned out today to mourn Mr. Hariri and shout, "Syria out!" and "Remove your dogs from Beirut!" a reference to the 15,000 Syrian troops that have occupied parts of Lebanon since 1976. Moreover, the Bush Administration recalled its ambassador to Syria in protest, and even the UN Security Council pretended to demand justice.
Has Syrian complicity been proven yet? Not to my knowledge. But the perception is there nevertheless, and as another old saying goes, "Perception is nine-tenths of reality." And if Boy Assad wants to avoid Saddam Hussein's fate, he's going to have to shift into rapid, major conciliation mode as soon as humanly possible.
But, of course, that isn't what he's doing.
Instead, he's buying more weapons from Russia (which President Putin is trying to pooh-pooh as being no big deal because they supposedly can't be used as shoulder-fired weapons, which would make them useless to terrorists - but definitely not useless for the Syrian military to shoot at U.S. and/or Israeli aircraft) and playing up his regime's long-time alliance with the Iranian mullahgarchy, both moves evidently aimed not so much at the Bush Administration but at its reactionary detractors, both at home and abroad, in order to pre-emptively seize the international "moral" high ground and isolate America and reduce the President's manuevering room.
And sure enough, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said Tuesday he sees no immediate need to change EU relations with Syria over the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Which means if Bush takes military action of any sort against Syria, the domestic DisLoyal Opposition will erupt.
If this White House stays true to its track record, and learns from its "multilateralist" mistakes in the run up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Assad regime's impulsive, desperate actions of the past few days will have been a classic dictator's miscalculation.
On the other hand, it could be that, given the recent world focus upon Iran's all-out drive for nuclear weapons, Syria is causing fresh trouble in order to create a diversion and get American heat off of Tehran, at least for the time being. North Korea's boasting last week of its possession of nukes could be a sibling manifestation of this broader, admittedly hypothetical, strategy.
Still, from my humble little perch, I have to chuckle, because I was declaring the inevitability of war with both Syria and Iran as soon as "major combat operations" in Iraq came to a close. My lib respondents called that declaration "madness," but the thing about this sort of "madness" is that it is rarely, if ever, averted by our declaration that we will not be its initiator. To the contrary, if war is inevitable, it is far better to attack first while your opponent is weaker than he'll subsequently become, and deny him the ability to come up with nasty surprises. Had President Bush heeded that "neocon" advice instead of letting himself be led astray by Colin Powell's UN-filia, we would have found Saddam's WMD, and there'd have been little or no "insurgency" after the main fighting had concluded.
Still another old saying holds that "fortune favors the bold." Since we can ascribe over a thousand U.S. deaths and some 25,000 casualties in Iraq to timidity and half-measures, here's hoping that in the next chapter of the GWOT against "Syran," there'll be no more "fooling around."
Or, in plain Michael Ledeen English, "Faster, please."
On Monday a 1/3-ton truck bomb blows up former Lebanese "Prime Minister" Rafik Hariri, a self-made billionaire who had been one of Syria's puppet rulers in Beirut but of late had fallen out with Damascus and was organization Lebanese opposition to Syria's continued occupation of what used to be known as the Levant. Speculation on who was responsible for the attack centered upon Syria, whose Ba'athist government naturally put on a mask of denial (and anti-Israel finger-pointing) that nobody is really taking seriously given that the logistics of even constructing an explosive device that big pretty much demand state sponsorship.
If it was Syria, this may have been an attempt to intimidate its restive Lebanese subjects back into submission in order to enable "Baby Assad" to focus on his burgeoning confrontation with the United States, which just happens to have 135,000 troops next door in neighboring Iraq. If so, Bashir seems to have miscalculated, as hundreds of thousands of Lebanese turned out today to mourn Mr. Hariri and shout, "Syria out!" and "Remove your dogs from Beirut!" a reference to the 15,000 Syrian troops that have occupied parts of Lebanon since 1976. Moreover, the Bush Administration recalled its ambassador to Syria in protest, and even the UN Security Council pretended to demand justice.
Has Syrian complicity been proven yet? Not to my knowledge. But the perception is there nevertheless, and as another old saying goes, "Perception is nine-tenths of reality." And if Boy Assad wants to avoid Saddam Hussein's fate, he's going to have to shift into rapid, major conciliation mode as soon as humanly possible.
But, of course, that isn't what he's doing.
Instead, he's buying more weapons from Russia (which President Putin is trying to pooh-pooh as being no big deal because they supposedly can't be used as shoulder-fired weapons, which would make them useless to terrorists - but definitely not useless for the Syrian military to shoot at U.S. and/or Israeli aircraft) and playing up his regime's long-time alliance with the Iranian mullahgarchy, both moves evidently aimed not so much at the Bush Administration but at its reactionary detractors, both at home and abroad, in order to pre-emptively seize the international "moral" high ground and isolate America and reduce the President's manuevering room.
And sure enough, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said Tuesday he sees no immediate need to change EU relations with Syria over the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Which means if Bush takes military action of any sort against Syria, the domestic DisLoyal Opposition will erupt.
If this White House stays true to its track record, and learns from its "multilateralist" mistakes in the run up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Assad regime's impulsive, desperate actions of the past few days will have been a classic dictator's miscalculation.
On the other hand, it could be that, given the recent world focus upon Iran's all-out drive for nuclear weapons, Syria is causing fresh trouble in order to create a diversion and get American heat off of Tehran, at least for the time being. North Korea's boasting last week of its possession of nukes could be a sibling manifestation of this broader, admittedly hypothetical, strategy.
Still, from my humble little perch, I have to chuckle, because I was declaring the inevitability of war with both Syria and Iran as soon as "major combat operations" in Iraq came to a close. My lib respondents called that declaration "madness," but the thing about this sort of "madness" is that it is rarely, if ever, averted by our declaration that we will not be its initiator. To the contrary, if war is inevitable, it is far better to attack first while your opponent is weaker than he'll subsequently become, and deny him the ability to come up with nasty surprises. Had President Bush heeded that "neocon" advice instead of letting himself be led astray by Colin Powell's UN-filia, we would have found Saddam's WMD, and there'd have been little or no "insurgency" after the main fighting had concluded.
Still another old saying holds that "fortune favors the bold." Since we can ascribe over a thousand U.S. deaths and some 25,000 casualties in Iraq to timidity and half-measures, here's hoping that in the next chapter of the GWOT against "Syran," there'll be no more "fooling around."
Or, in plain Michael Ledeen English, "Faster, please."
posted by JASmius at 2:32 PM
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