WarSclerotic

A single Patriot anti-missile battery was stationed Monday, May 24, at Morag in northwestern Poland, less than 40 miles from the Russian naval and air bases in the enclave of Kaliningrad. A hundred US troops were attached to the site for training Polish soldiers in its use.
Although the Patriot was a pale relic of the missile shield President George W. Bush planned for East Europe, it drew deep frowns in Moscow. Seekers of comments were referred to the Russian foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko‘s statement of a month ago that such unilateral moves by the US cannot be left unaddressed.
Russian pundits specializing in US-Russian relations took a somewhat sharper tone, describing the move as a deliberate attempt to undermine Russian-American relations.
What would the Russians have said if the United States, or any foreign power, had parked not a single air defense Patriot, but 800 Scud-D surface-to-surface strike missiles with a 700-1,000-mile range, capable of carrying chemical or nuclear warheads – not 40 miles, but less than 16 miles from their territory?
That is exactly what Syrian President Bashar Assad has done, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s military sources reveal here. They are not part of the Syrian Army’s array of missiles for deterring an Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Syria, but parked on the Syrian-Lebanese border, painted in Hizballah battle colors and assigned Hizballah store serial numbers. Each battery has its own Hizballah unit, attached after learning how to operate them at Syrian bases for the past half year.

Unparalleled bonanza for Hizballah

Wednesday and Thursday, May 26-27, tensions shot up several notches when Beirut lined up behind Damascus and Hizballah and boosted its army units on the South Lebanese-Israel border “against any emergency” and the Syrian army placed all its units on war preparedness, ordering its ballistic missile units to switch to firing positions.
Israel, which ended its homeland defense exercise against missile attack Thursday, May 27, prepared to join Greece next week in a joint naval and aerial exercise for practicing in-flight refueling.
(For details, see also HOT POINTS below)

The stages of the buildup approaching its peak were progressively covered in DEBKA-Net-Weekly and DEBKAfile‘s reports. Even so, all our experts were astounded to learn that the unheard-of number of 800 Scuds had been assigned to Hizballah, a fact never disclosed until now.
The entire Scud D behemoth is now positioned ready for removal into Lebanon at one and-a-half hour’s notice from Assad’s green light. The Hizballah crews have been taught to launch them on the move at predetermined Israeli targets.
Syria, Iran and Hizballah have made military history – and that is why the Middle East is teetering on the brink of war. Four armies were on combat readiness Wednesday, May 26 after the Lebanese Army lined up behind Syria and Hizballah against Israel’s Defense Forces and Syrian ballistic missiles were placed in firing positions.
Never has any army, least of all a terrorist organization like the Shiite Hizballah, ever commanded so many surface-to-surface strike missiles and held them ready to fire on a neighbor’s cities.
By comparison, North Korea’s arsenal is also estimated at around 800 ballistic missiles. They include long-range systems which could one day strike South Korea and Japan. But even that rogue nation has never placed those weapons in firing position at points abutting the borders of South Korea and Japan.

Deeply ingrained collaboration with North Korea

And how would the strategic position of the 100,000 US troops fighting in Afghanistan be affected if the Pakistani government were to suddenly and covertly let Taliban have 800 Ghauri surface-to-surface missiles (similar to the Scud D) for firing at Kabul from its South and North Waziristan sanctuaries?
This scenario would sound absurdly unreal anywhere in the world – even in trouble spots. Yet, in the Middle East, it is a cruel reality.
The Scud concentration on the Syrian-Lebanese border came off Syrian military industry production lines, our military sources report. Their manufacture is based on North Korean technology, diagrams and licenses. They are in fact a Syrian adaptation of the North Korean Rodong-1 missile, whose 1,000-mile range brings Japan within firing distance.
This missile is essentially a hybrid: Its Isayev 9D21 engine was upgraded with the help of Russia’s Makeyev OKB industries as well as China and Ukraine, while the new TEL uses an Italian Iveco truck chassis and an Austrian crane.
Pyongyang’s Rodong program was itself largely financed by Iran in return for permission to reproduce it as the Shahab-3 ballistic missile.
Iranian-Syrian military collaboration with North Korea is thus deeply ingrained with Hizballah now brought into the equation for the first time.
Yet for reasons outlined in the next article, no Western power has hindered the coming together of these hugely destabilizing elements.

Barack Obama

For ten days, the US and Israel improbably joined forces with Syria, Lebanon and South Korea for a mighty effort to conceal the mammoth figure of 800 Scud missiles held ready for Hizballah in custom-built Syrian bases a 15-20-minute drive from the Lebanese border.
This effort was exhaustive enough to magic away the only media reference; an item in the Japanese Sankei Shimbun of Sunday, May 23; vanished overnight from the paper’s Web site and the Internet.
But DEBKA-Net-Weekly managed to pin it down. Here is the quote:

North Korea has agreed to Syria’s shipment of long-range Scud missiles to the militant Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah. Syria is reportedly obliged to receive approval from North Korea the technology provider when handing over missiles to a third party. Citing unidentified sources, Japan says the North Korean embassy in Syria said it has “no intention to object to Syria’s transfer of Scud missiles to Hezbollah.” We speculate that the model Syria plans to provide the Lebanese militant group with is the Scud D with a range of 700 kilometers.”

The Japanese item included the disclosure that the Syrian president needed North Korean approval for transferring the Scud Ds to Hizballah. Given the structure of the ruling regime in Pyongyang, the handover would have necessitated a nod from Kim Jong-il in person.

Red faces in Washington

All the parties concerned one way or another found the Japanese disclosure embarrassing enough to kill it.
The United States, for one, DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s Washington and military report, was not prepared to own up to the failure of its every effort (going back to the Clinton and Bush administrations) to curb the massive proliferation of nuclear and missile weapons technology originating in North Korea – most damagingly to the Middle East. Worse still, for the first time, the North Korean ruler actually authorized their transfer to a militia officially listed by the UN and the US as a terrorist organization.
As long as this level of nuclear and other dangerous weapon proliferation goes on unchecked, questions must be asked about the point of the “bold and pragmatic” program President Barack Obama submitted to the Washington summit of 47 world leaders on April 13, asking for their commitment to eliminate or lock down their nuclear materials within four years.
With US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Beijing this week (May 23-25) for discussions centering Iran’s nuclear program and a bid for Chinese support for UN sanctions, Washington could not afford to let it be known that the world’s top nuclear violator Kim Jong-Il had more leverage over war and peace in the Middle East than any other Asian, or even European, leader.
There might also have been quite a few red faces if the presence of 800 Scud D missiles under Hizballah’s hand had been discovered during Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri‘s first White House visit Monday, May 24. It would have signaled the collapse of the Obama administration’s policy of wooing Assad and exposed a US intelligence fiasco, to boot.

How would Netanyahu and Barak explain how it happened?

In any case, no sooner was Hariri home to Beirut when he lined up behind Syria and Hizballah in boosting his southern units against “a war emergency,” despite his promise to the US president to try and abate rising war tensions.
Israeli leaders would also have been seriously discomfited by this discovery (see the separate item on the debate over Israel’s restraint in the missile threat), because the public would demand answers to at least three questions:
1. How did North Korea, a country far from Israeli consciousness, manage to grab a leading role in the schemes for its destruction for the second time in three years? The first time was in 2007, when Pyongyang helped construct the Syrian plutonium reactor at A-Zur which Israel destroyed before it was up.
2. How could Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak let 800 Scud missiles pile up on the Syrian-Lebanese border for no purpose other than to destroy Israel’s cities without stepping in to destroy them? That many Scuds imperils Israel’s very existence no less than the plutonium Syria would have produced had the Israeli Air Force not bombed its reactor in 2007.
3. Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah makes no secret of his plan to devastate Israel’s population centers with hundreds of missiles and rockets while at the same time fighting to capture sections of northern Israel. (See Issue no. 430 of DNW from January 22 – Iran-Hizballah Mark out Patches of Northern Israel for Capture). So is the Netanyahu government sitting on its hands and letting it happen?
Lebanon’s leaders President Michel Suleiman and the prime minister had an obvious interest in keeping the 800 Scuds hidden from sight. Their discovery would have shown them up as the stooges of Syrian president Bashar Assad and Iran’s surrogate Hizballah who are free to manipulate Lebanon according to their interests.

Assad capitalizes on the secrecy for buck-passing on the impending war

As for Bashar Assad, who built up the Scud stockpile, he is exploiting the missile controversy to pass the buck for the flare-up of hostilities he is engineering to the United States and Israel.
In an interview with the Rome newspaper La Repubblica on Monday, May 24, the Syrian ruler said the United States had lost its influence in the Middle East by failing to contribute to regional peace. In his view, US President Barack Obama had “raised hopes” in the region but failed to follow through with substantive peace moves.
Assad also boasted about a new world order which, he said, had cut the United States down in the world by refusing to wait for roles to be handed out by Washington. He was referring to the bloc formed by Turkey, Brazil, Syria and Iran and sponsored on the outside by Russia and aiming a side swipe at Obama’s White House welcome for Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, by showing that Damascus calls the shots in Lebanon – not Washington.
By keeping the 800 Scud D stock poised for handover to Hizballah dark, the United States and Israel played into Assad’s hands and let him get away with engineering the elements of an impending Middle East war while pinning them blame on them.