[Peace-discuss] Pleas for attacking Syria and Iran

[C. G. Estabrook]

[In addition to the direct Israeli killing, the anti-war movement needs 
also to oppose US plans to widen the war to Syria and Iran.  Here are 
two examples: from The New Republic, "Why Israel should bomb Syria," and 
from the Financial Times, "Why Bush should go to Tel Aviv - and confront 
Iran."  The former is written by Michael B. Oren, who recently produced 
a pro-Israeli account of the Six-Day War (June 1967); the latter is from 
William Kristol, editor of the neocon journal The Weekly Standard. --CGE]

[1] WHY ISRAEL SHOULD BOMB SYRIA.
Attack Add
by Michael B. Oren
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 07.17.06

Nearly 40 years ago, Israel and the Arab world fought a war that altered 
the course of Middle Eastern history. Now, as the region teeters on the 
brink of a new and potentially more violent cataclysm, it is important 
to revisit the lessons of the Six Day War, a conflict that few Middle 
Eastern countries wanted and none foresaw.

By 1967, ten years after the Sinai Campaign, the Arab-Israeli dispute 
had settled into an uneasy status quo. The radical Egyptian regime of 
Gamal Abdel Nasser still proclaimed its commitment to liberating 
Palestine and throwing the Jews into the sea, as did its conservative 
rivals in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but none of these states made any 
attempt to renew hostilities. On the contrary, Egypt remained quiescent 
behind the U.N. peacekeeping forces deployed in Sinai, Gaza, and the 
Straits of Tiran since 1957. Jordan maintained secret contacts with the 
Israelis. Israel, for its part, had long learned to ignore bellicose 
Arab rhetoric and to seek backdoor channels to even the most 
vituperative Arab rulers. As late as April 1967, officials at Israel's 
foreign ministry were speculating whether Nasser might be a viable 
partner for a peace process.

But one Arab state did not want peace. Syria, then as now under the rule 
of the belligerent Baath Party, wanted war. Having tried and failed in 
1964 to divert the Jordan River before it crossed the Israeli 
border--IDF jets and artillery blasted the dams--the Syrians began 
supporting a little-known Palestinian guerrilla group called Al Fatah 
under the leadership of Yasir Arafat. Using Lebanon as its principal 
base, Al Fatah commenced operations against Israel in 1965 and rapidly 
escalated its attacks. Finally, at the end of 1966, Israeli officials 
felt compelled to retaliate. But, fearing the repercussions of attacking 
Soviet-backed Syria, they decided to strike at an Al Fatah stronghold in 
the Jordanian-controlled West Bank.

The raid unfortunately led to a firefight between IDF and Jordanian 
troops, and to Jordanian claims that Nasser had not done enough to 
protect the West Bank Palestinians. Desperate to restore his reputation, 
Nasser exploited a spurious Soviet report of Israeli war plans to evict 
U.N. peacekeepers. He closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, 
concentrated 100,000 of his troops along the Israeli border, and forged 
anti-Israeli pacts with Syria and Jordan. The Arab world rejoiced at the 
prospect of annihilating Israel, and even the Soviets, eager to find 
some means of distracting American attention from Vietnam, were pleased. 
Israeli leaders had no choice but to determine when and where to strike 
preemptively.

And so, suddenly and unexpectedly, a regional war erupted that the 
principal combatants--Israel, Egypt, and Jordan--neither desired nor 
anticipated. The lesson: Local conflicts in the Middle East can quickly 
spin out of control and spiral into a regional conflagration.

The lesson is especially pertinent to the current crisis. Then, as now, 
the Syrians have goaded a terrorist organization, Hezbollah, to launch 
raids against Israel from Lebanon. Then, as now, the rapid rise of 
terrorist attacks has forced Israel to mount reprisals. If the Soviets 
in 1967 wanted to divert America's attention from Vietnam, the 
Iranians--Syria's current sponsors--want to divert American attention 
from their nuclear-arms program. And once again Israel must decide when 
to strike back and against whom.

Back in 1966, Israel recoiled from attacking Syria and instead raided 
Jordan, inadvertently setting off a concatenation of events culminating 
in war. Israel is once again refraining from an entanglement with 
Hezbollah's Syrian sponsors, perhaps because it fears a clash with Iran. 
And just as Israel's failure to punish the patron of terror in 1967 
ultimately triggered a far greater crisis, so too today, by hesitating 
to retaliate against Syria, Israel risks turning what began as a border 
skirmish into a potentially more devastating confrontation. Israel may 
hammer Lebanon into submission and it may deal Hezbollah a crushing 
blow, but as long as Syria remains hors de combat there is no way that 
Israel can effect a permanent change in Lebanon's political labyrinth 
and ensure an enduring ceasefire in the north. On the contrary, 
convinced that Israel is unwilling to confront them, the Syrians may 
continue to escalate tensions, pressing them toward the crisis point. 
The result could be an all-out war with Syria as well as Iran and severe 
political upheaval in Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf.

The answer lies in delivering an unequivocal blow to Syrian ground 
forces deployed near the Lebanese border. By eliminating 500 Syrian 
tanks--tanks that Syrian President Bashar Al Assad needs to preserve his 
regime--Israel could signal its refusal to return to the status quo in 
Lebanon. Supporting Hezbollah carries a prohibitive price, the action 
would say. Of course, Syria could respond with missile attacks against 
Israeli cities, but given the dilapidated state of Syria's army, the 
chances are greater that Assad will simply internalize the message. 
Presented with a choice between saving Hezbollah and staying alive, 
Syria's dictator will probably choose the latter. And the message of 
Israel's determination will also be received in Tehran.

Any course of military action carries risks, especially in the 
unpredictable Middle East. But if the past is any guide, and if the Six 
Day War presents a paradigm of an unwanted war that might have been 
averted with an early, well-placed strike at Syria, then Israel's 
current strategy in Lebanon deserves to be rethought. If Syria escapes 
unscathed and Iran undeterred, Israel will remain insecure.

Michael B. Oren is a senior fellow at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem and 
the author most recently of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of 
the Modern Middle East (Oxford University Press).


[2] Why Bush should go to Tel Aviv - and confront Iran

By William Kristol

Published: July 16 2006 17:38 | Last updated: July 16 2006 18:51

Why is this Arab-Israeli war different from all other Arab-Israeli wars? 
Because it’s not an Arab-Israeli war. Most of Israel’s traditional Arab 
enemies have checked out of the current conflict. The governments of 
Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are, to say the least, indifferent 
to the fate of Hamas and Hezbollah. The Palestine Liberation 
Organization (Fatah) isn’t a player. The prime mover behind the 
terrorist groups who have started this war is a non-Arab state, Iran, 
which wasn’t involved in any of Israel’s previous wars.

What’s happening in the Middle East, then, isn’t just another chapter in 
the Arab-Israeli conflict. What’s happening is an Islamist-Israeli war. 
You might even say this is part of the Islamist war on the West--but is 
India part of the West? Better to say that what’s under attack is 
liberal democratic civilization, whose leading representative right now 
happens to be the United States.

An Islamist-Israeli conflict may or may not be more dangerous than the 
old Arab-Israeli conflict. Secular Arab nationalism was, after all, also 
capable of posing an existential threat to Israel. And the Islamist 
threat to liberal democracy may or may not turn out to be as dangerous 
as the threats posed in the last century by secular forms of 
irrationalism (fascism) and illiberalism (communism). But it is a new 
and different threat. One needs to keep this in mind when trying to draw 
useful lessons from our successes, and failures, in dealing with the 
threats of the 20th century.

Here, however, is one lesson that does seem to hold: States matter. 
Regimes matter. Ideological movements become more dangerous when they 
become governing regimes of major nations. Communism became really 
dangerous when it seized control of Russia. National socialism became 
really dangerous when it seized control of Germany. Islamism became 
really dangerous when it seized control of Iran - which then became, as 
it has been for the last 27 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

No Islamic Republic of Iran, no Hezbollah. No Islamic Republic of Iran, 
no one to prop up the Assad regime in Syria. No Iranian support for 
Syria (a secular government that has its own reasons for needing Iranian 
help and for supporting Hezbollah and Hamas), little state sponsorship 
of Hamas and Hezbollah. And no Shi’ite Iranian revolution, far less of 
an impetus for the Saudis to finance the export of the Wahhabi version 
of Sunni Islam as a competitor to Khomeini’s claim for leadership of 
militant Islam - and thus no Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and perhaps no 
Hamas either.

It’s of course true that Hamas - an arm of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood 
- is at odds ideologically with Shia Iran, and that Shia and Sunni seem 
inclined to dislike, even slaughter, each other elsewhere in the Middle 
East. But temporary alliances of convenience are no less dangerous 
because they are temporary. Tell the Poles of 1939, and the French of 
1940, that they really had little to worry about because the Nazi-Soviet 
pact was bound to fall apart.

The war against radical Islamism is likely to be a long one. Radical 
Islamism isn’t going away anytime soon. But it will make a big 
difference how strong the state sponsors, harbourers, and financiers of 
radical Islamism are. Thus, our focus should be less on Hamas and 
Hezbollah, and more on their paymasters and real commanders - Syria and 
Iran. And our focus should be not only on the regional war in the Middle 
East, but also on the global struggle against radical Islamism.

For while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of 
the United States. We have done a poor job of standing up to them and 
weakening them. They are now testing us more boldly than one would have 
thought possible a few years ago. Weakness is provocative. We have been 
too weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak.

The right response is renewed strength - in supporting the governments 
of Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime 
change in Syria and Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering 
this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian 
nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be 
contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It 
would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be 
repercussions - and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America 
that has rejected further appeasement.

But such a military strike would take a while to organize. In the 
meantime, perhaps President Bush can fly from the silly G8 summit in St. 
Petersburg - a summit that will most likely convey a message of moral 
confusion and political indecision - to Jerusalem, the capital of a 
nation that stands with us, and is willing to fight with us, against our 
common enemies. This is our war, too.

William Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard; this article appears 
by arrangement with that publication

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006