WarSclerotic

Israel Hayom | Israel can only watch.

Dan Margalit

Sometimes, history repeats itself. In May, 1974, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger concluded a round of shuttle diplomacy in which he met Israel’s defense minister at the time, Moshe Dayan, and then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. Kissinger was able to secure a cease-fire agreement between the sides, which has held until today.

Some two years later, a senior official in Washington showed me a photocopy of a document from his country’s embassy in Damascus, which reported that a Syrian army battalion was participating in the civil war in Lebanon.

A day later, Haaretz published a low-key report on the matter. There was concern that the story was an American trial balloon, intended to gauge the Israeli government’s reaction as well as public opinion in Israel. This was not exactly the purpose. As the Syrian army steadily made its way toward Lebanon, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin pondered whether to ignore the violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty by an enemy army, or hope that this army would be able to rein in the terrorist groups there, primarily Yasser Arafat’s PLO.

Also prevalent was the mind-set that it was preferable to see the Syrian army whittled down in Lebanon as opposed to channeling the bulk of its forces toward the Golan Heights. Whether it wanted to or not, Israel came to terms with the Syrian army’s presence in Lebanon, and demanded that Damascus stop its advance there according to an imaginary line a considerable distance from Israel’s border. The rest, as they say, is history.

Is the same scenario now repeating itself, only in reverse? Hezbollah has entered Syria to fight the rebels, which both reduces its fighting forces along the border with Israel and raises the chances of the Syrian regime retaining control over the country, instead of a lawless entity with no internal system of control such as a rebel victory would portend.

This time, too, the answer is not cut and dry. The more the West accepts the claim, first made by Israel, that Assad is using chemical weapons, the more it exhibits weakness toward him. The forecasts of Assad’s imminent demise are soon to be updated: a stalemate with a slight advantage for the regime’s army will now characterize the civil war in Syria.

If Assad is truly close to winning territorial continuity from the south to the north and retaking the ancient city of Homs, then the Iran-Damascus-Hezbollah axis of evil will have emerged from the fighting with the upper hand. U.S. President Barack Obama, meanwhile, will be perceived as the crutch facilitating the turning tide, just when Turkey — Assad’s bitter enemy — is mired in an internal crisis that could potentially escalate into an Ottoman civil war.

Just as in the 1970s, Israel is studying the picture of the battlefield and cannot do much else but enjoy the relative quiet provided by the war its enemies are fighting. Regardless, Israel does not know what its best course of action is because it has no idea which of these two bad options is preferable

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