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Israel wants focus on chemical weapons, not Syria's civil war

 
The National (UAE)
September 17, 2013
Jonathan Cook
 
President Barack Obama may have drawn his seemingly regretted "red line" around Syria's chemical weapons, but it was neither he nor the international community that turned the spotlight on their use. That task fell to Israel.
 
It was an Israeli general who claimed in April that Damascus had used chemical weapons, forcing Mr Obama into an embarrassing demurral on his stated commitment to intervene if that happened.
 
According to the Israeli media, it was also Israel that provided the intelligence that blamed the Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, for the latest chemical weapons attack, near Damascus on August 21, triggering the clamour for a US military response.
 
It is also worth remembering that Mr Obama's supposed "dithering" on the question of military action has only been accentuated by Israel's "daring" strikes on Syria - at least three since the start of the year.
 
It looks as though Israel, while remaining largely mute about its interests in the civil war raging there, has been doing a great deal to pressure the White House into direct involvement in Syria.
 
That momentum appears to have been halted, for the time being at least, by the deal agreed at the weekend by the US and the Russians to dismantle Mr Assad's chemical weapons arsenal.
 
To understand the views of the White House and Israel on attacking Syria, one needs to revisit the US-led invasion of Iraq a decade ago.
 
Israel and its ideological twin in Washington, the neoconservatives, rallied to the cause of toppling Saddam Hussein, believing that it should be the prelude to an equally devastating blow against Iran.
 
Israel was keen to see its two chief regional enemies weakened simultaneously. Saddam's Iraq had been the chief sponsor of Palestinian resistance against Israel. Iran, meanwhile, had begun developing a civilian nuclear programme that Israel feared could pave the way to an Iranian bomb, ending Israel's regional monopoly on nuclear weapons.
 
The neocons carried out the first phase of the plan, destroying Iraq, but then ran up against domestic opposition that blocked implementation of the second stage: the break-up of Iran.
 
The consequences are well known. As Iraq imploded into sectarian violence, Iran's fortunes rose. Tehran strengthened its role as regional sponsor of resistance against Israel - or what became Washington's new "axis of evil" - that included Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
 
Israel and the US regard Syria as the geographical "keystone" of that axis, as Israel's outgoing ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, told the Jerusalem Post this week, and one that needs to be removed if Iran is to be isolated, weakened or attacked.
 
But Israel and the US drew different lessons from Iraq. Washington is now wary of its ground forces becoming bogged down again, as well as fearful of reviving a cold war confrontation with Moscow. It prefers instead to rely on proxies to contain and exhaust the Syrian regime.
 
Israel, on the other hand, understands the danger of manoeuvring its patron into a showdown with Damascus without ensuring this time that Iran is tied into the plan. Toppling Mr Assad alone would simply add emboldened jihadists to the troubles on its doorstep.
 
Given these assessments, Israel and the US have struggled to envision a realistic endgame that would satisfy both of them. Mr Obama fears setting the region, and possibly the world, ablaze with a direct attack on Iran; Israel is worried about stretching its patron's patience by openly pushing it into another catastrophic venture to guarantee its regional hegemony.
 
Instead, Israel has focused on using the civil war to box Mr Assad into his heartland. That way, he becomes a less useful ally to Hizbollah, Iran and Russia.
 
Israel would have preferred a US strike on Syria, a goal its lobbyists in Washington were briefly mobilised to achieve. The intention was not to remove Mr Assad but to assert what Danny Ayalon, a former deputy Israeli foreign minister, referred to as "American and Israeli deterrence" - code for signalling to Tehran that it was being lined up as the next target.
 
That threat now looks empty. As Silvan Shalom, a senior government minister, observed: "If it is impossible to do anything against little Syria, then certainly it's not possible against big Iran."
 
But the new US-Russian deal to dispose of Syria's chemical weapons can probably be turned to Israel's short- and long- term advantage, so long as Israel prevents attention shifting to its own likely stockpiles.
 
In the short term, Israel has reason to fear Mr Assad's loss of control of his chemical weapons, with the danger that they pass either to the jihadists or to Hizbollah. The timetable for the weapons destruction should help to minimise those risks - in the words of one Israeli commentator, it is like Israel "winning the lottery".
 
But Israel also knows that Damascus is likely to procrastinate on disarmament. In any case, efforts to locate and destroy its chemical weapons in the midst of a civil war will be lengthy and difficult. Israel, it can safely be assumed, will quietly meddle, trying to persuade the West that Mr Assad is not cooperating and that Hizbollah and Iran are implicated.
 
In a vein Israel may mine better, a Syrian opposition leader, Selim Idris, claimed at the weekend that Damascus was seeking to conceal the extent of its stockpiles by passing them to Lebanon and Iraq.
 
Mr Obama is not the only one to have set a red line. Last year, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, drew one on a cartoon bomb at the United Nations as he warned that the world faced an imminent existential threat from an Iranian nuclear weapon.
 
Israel still desperately wants its chief foe, Iran, crushed. And if it can find a way to lever the US into doing its dirty work, it will exploit the opening - regardless of whether such action ramps up the suffering in Syria.
 
Jonathan Cook is an independent journalist based in Nazareth
 
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| Ander Nieuws week 40 / Midden-Oosten 2013 |