WarSclerotic

Time for Israel to do a little warmongering in Syria – Opinion – Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper.

Only by convincing Assad and his allies that Israel is actually itching for a fight can we successfully deter Syrian retribution, now and in the future.

Rebels burn photo of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Photo by Reuters

In the past 48 hours, Israeli officials have gone to great lengths to emphasize that Israel is not interested in escalating the conflict with Syria. Israel is not coming to the aid of the rebels, officials stress, but rather is only attempting to prevent strategic arms transfers to Hezbollah (pursuant to UN Security Council resolution 1701).

Yet the constant refrain that “Israel is not interested in escalation” will only guarantee… right, further escalation.

How so? It is hard to take issue with the assessment that Assad is too busy with his domestic opponents to divert most of his armed forces to an all-out war with Israel. Hezbollah, too, is wading neck-deep in the Syrian civil conflict, its fighters taking substantial casualties in the process, and so it is also in no position to rehash the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

The problem is that Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria may all conclude that they could get away with a very limited strike on Israel—perhaps firing a few long-range missiles to score a few points domestically and regionally—and then with lightning speed try to issue their own version of “Syria is not interested in escalation.” Given that Israel, like its adversaries, is really not itching for a fight, such a calculation may be accurate. As a result, instead of Assad just taking the airstrikes “on the chin” (as he has done for years), this time it could end with Israel suffering a few Syrian missiles and then having to “turn the other cheek.”

There is a way to deter Syrian retribution: Start to realize (out loud, that is) that this might actually be an opportune moment to provoke a war.

One day, we should remember, the Syrian civil war will end and our two immutable nemeses will re-coup. In the meantime, however, two years of bloody fighting have left both Syria and Hezbollah at their weakest point in the past decade, if not longer.

Moreover, given the endless atrocities committed by the Assad regime in the past two years, the Syrian opposition is not about to “rally ‘round the flag”—even in the case of a war with Israel. In fact, if Israel were to use its air force and anti-aircraft capacities to set up a no-fly zone in Syria’s south, it might make Syrians question long-held assumptions and create an opening for a new kind of relationship with the future Sunni regime in Damascus.

In Lebanon as well, Hezbollah is walking on egg shells. Lebanese Sunnis, Christians and others have long been far outgunned and organizationally outmatched by Hezbollah. These communities’ impotence was laid bare during Hezbollah’s lightening ‘mock takeover’ of Western portions of Beirut during two days in May 2008. But now, as Lebanese Sunnis also have begun taking part in the battle for Syria, their capacities for fighting will continue to grow, precisely as Hezbollah’s are weakening.

Regionally and globally as well, the Assad regime’s atrocities have eliminated what little legitimacy the autocratic regime once possessed. This is especially true following its small-scale use of chemical weapons against its own citizens over the past few months. When taken with the West’s continued inaction, there would be more than a few citizens in the wider neighborhood who might actually cheer Israel on. Wide-scale Israeli military action in Syria would, with a big public wink from Washington, would also help Obama out of his predicament about how to respond to Assad’s crossing his big red-line.

In short, this might be a once in a generation opportunity to destroy two of our eternal foes, and it is time to start thinking about how to take advantage of this situation to forever secure our northern border.

Or, at least, this is the signal we should be transmitting to Assad and Nasrallah. Instead of the mindless mantra “Israel is not interested in escalation,” the only way to actually prevent further conflict is to convince Assad and Nasrallah that Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon is actually a reincarnation of Ariel Sharon, vintage 1982.

The paradoxical bottom line: only by convincing Assad and his allies that Israel is actually itching for a fight can we successfully deter Syrian retribution, now and in the future. If, on the other hand, Israel continues to stress that it only wants to return to quiet, this only encourages Assad to engage in small-scale retaliation.

Cameron S. Brown is Neubauer Research Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), Tel Aviv University.

This entry was posted on May 7, 2013 at 1:13 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.