Scuds in Lebanon: Israel’s Déjà Vu, Again and Again

Lenny Ben-David
Pajamasmedia.com
30 April '10

Sitting on my desk is a mangled chunk of steel, a large piece of shrapnel from a Scud missile that hit a Tel Aviv community center in 1991. It serves to remind me of the terror of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein fired 39 long-range Scuds at the Tel Aviv and Haifa regions over a six-week period.

Earlier this month, Arab, American, and Israeli sources all confirmed that Syria transferred Scud missiles to Hizbullah forces in Lebanon. Immediately, several commentators and analysts minimized the Scuds’ dangers. From Time:

Scuds can be easily tracked and destroyed by the Israeli air force before launching.

The Los Angeles Times editorialized:

[The] large 1950s-era missiles are inaccurate, and Israel has the capacity to intercept them.

The Kuwaiti paper Al-Rai reported:

Hizbullah sources confirmed Thursday that the terror group received a shipment of Scud missiles from Syria. … The missiles were claimed to be old and unusable.

American officials hemmed and hawed: maybe the Syrians just “intended” to provide them … perhaps the missiles weren’t “delivered in full” yet.

Déjà vu

The media apparently has long-term memory loss and is incapable of remembering the 1991 Gulf War Scuds crashing down on Israel. But what excuse is there to forget the barrages of Hamas’ Kassam and Katyusha rockets that set off the 2009 Gaza conflagration?

Over a period of eight years, analysts and reporters described the thousands of Kassam rockets fired at Israeli civilians as primitive, inaccurate, homemade, and relatively harmless. They minimized the threats to Israeli citizens, as Jewish children in their playgrounds scurried to bomb shelters or families cowered in “safe rooms” while Kassams — and later, the bigger Katyushas — crashed into their towns.

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Playing with Fire in the Levant

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
15 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

The National, a paper in the UAE, fleshes out the Scud missile story:

Although US officials contacted by The National could not completely confirm that such technology had been transferred to Hizbollah by Syria, one official privy to intelligence briefings confirmed a story previously reported in the Israeli press that in the weeks before Senator John Kerry’s visit to Damascus on April 1, Israel almost bombed what it claimed was a convoy of advanced weaponry headed from Syrian military bases to Hizbollah along the shared border with Lebanon.

“I can’t promise you that planes were actually in the air, but it was close, very close,” said the official. “The White House had to talk them down from the attack and promised that Kerry would use strong language” with the Syrian president, Bashar Assad.

When asked about the outcome of the meeting between Mr Kerry and Mr Assad on the issue, the source tartly responded: “In light of where we are now, what do you think?”

As Tony Badran points out, Bashar Assad “is known to have a penchant for brinksmanship.” In this case, he appears to have been saved from the consequences of a particularly foolish gambit by the Obama administration.

But this doesn’t mean the red line hasn’t been crossed. Syria is in fact now in more danger than the Israelis. The IDF’s Arrow missile-defense system can knock Scuds out of the sky with great reliability, so they don’t pose a tremendous a threat. What they do provide to Israel is an opportunity — and they impose a requirement. The fact that they were transferred to Hezbollah in violation of tacit but well-understood red lines gives Israel clear and credible casus belli, should hostilities break out, to expand any conflict to Syria.

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Israel will preempt

Fresnozionism.org
14 April '10

(Whether this will be the straw that breaks the camels back I would not venture to guess, however it's clear that this does up the ante. Y)

The recent disclosure that Syria has transferred Scud missiles to Hizballah marks a significant turning point. If war on Israel’s northern border could have been avoided — and perhaps it was already a forgone conclusion — that is clearly not the case now.

With the addition of these missiles, which are capable of carrying chemical warheads, Hizballah changes from an irritant to an existential threat to Israel. It is now sufficiently dangerous that it cannot be permitted to strike first. Additional deliveries, such as advanced antitank and antiaircraft weapons — even intelligence that indicates that they will be delivered in the near future — may trigger a premptive response.

In my opinion, the US administration’s tilt away from Israel has caused Iran, Syria, etc. to think that they will be able to hit Israel hard enough to hurt her badly, while the US will step in immediately and prevent Israel from doing more than an acceptable amount of damage in return. And probably Israel’s decision-makers think so too. So this is another reason for Israel to choose to preempt.

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Syrian Scuds to Hezbollah? Obama is on the case!

Elder of Ziyon
14 April '10

In response to reports from various quarters that Syria has been transferring Scud missiles to Hezbollah, which would be able to hit virtually any target in Israel, the Obama administration showed what it's made of. Here is what White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had to say on the matter:

Q Robert, let me ask you a foreign policy question because the Israeli government yesterday contended that Syria is sending long-range Scud missiles into Lebanon into the hands of Hezbollah, a game-changing -- in their words -- military maneuver that they’ve found extremely destabilizing to the region. U.S. officials expressed some other similar concern. Give me the administration’s evaluation of that. And in the context of what some have described as a rough patch in U.S.-Israeli relations, how does this fit?
MR. GIBBS: Well, as I have said many times up here, we are -- we have an unbreakable bond with the Israeli people --

Q Even when they’re wrong?

MR. GIBBS: -- and in ensuring their security. We are obviously increasingly concerned about the sophisticated weaponry that is allegedly being transferred. We have expressed our concerns to those governments and believe that steps should be taken to reduce any risk and any danger of anything from happening.

Q How has that message been sent and what does this do to the administration’s attempt to engage the Syrians in this more complex discussion about Middle East peace?

MR. GIBBS: Well, again, we have relayed our concerns.

Q At the highest level?

MR. GIBBS: We have.

Q At the highest level?

MR. GIBBS: Yes. And again, obviously this is a -- you heard the President speak yesterday about Middle East peace, his desire to have this nation remain focused on that goal. The potential destabilizing effect, the alarming effect that this has, we’ve expressed our great concern about that.

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Realpolitik in Our Time

J.E. Dyer
Contentions/Commentary
14 April '10

Jennifer’s dissection of the New York Times piece on the emerging Obama Doctrine is masterful. One thing I would observe about “realpolitik,” however, is that its self-conscious practitioners tend to leave big piles of unintended consequences in their wake. In that sense, Obama is indeed in the realpolitik mold. Invoking realpolitik has, moreover, become a form of shorthand for commentators who want to express approval of an essentially weak foreign policy without going to the trouble of explaining why weak is the new strong.

On the unintended-consequences front, Syria has now requited the Obama realpolitik approach with a transfer of Scud missiles to Hezbollah. Syria’s Scuds are old but retain the effectiveness to pose a serious threat to Israel’s population. They are, in fact, a population threat and not a military one: they aren’t accurate enough for precision targeting. They were originally designed to create havoc behind an enemy’s front lines in a theater-scale war. In the hands of a terrorist organization, they will be used to amplify the anti-population threat posed by shorter-range rockets. Scuds carry a significantly bigger payload than the Katyusha rockets frequently used by Hezbollah and can deliver chemical as well as conventional warheads. Syria is known to have a chemical weapons program, but I consider it unlikely that its leadership will supply chemical warheads to Hezbollah – at least for now.

News outlets are not overstating the matter in assessing that this move changes the military balance in the Middle East. It puts state-level military might in the hands of an unaccountable sub-national terrorist group. Israel is now faced with the dilemma of what and how much to do about it. The worst option is to do too little.

A quiescent geopolitical environment – one in which he doesn’t expect to face consequences – is what enables Bashar al-Assad to do this. The Scud transfer is the first of the threatening moves augured by the Arab League summit in March, where indignation over Israeli policy in Jerusalem was the unifying theme. And among Syria’s objectives with this weapons transfer is probing the U.S. reaction. American policy has set boundaries since 1945 on what other nations consider possible in the Middle East. Assad is calculating that the implications inherent in this weapons deployment do not exceed the tolerance limits of Obama’s America.

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Let Them Meet Steel

Michael J. Totten
Contentions/Commentary
14 April '10

As Noah pointed out yesterday, Syria is now being credibly accused of shipping Scud missiles with a range of more than 430 miles to Hezbollah, placing Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and the Dimona nuclear power plant inside the kill zone. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri has been forced under duress to visit Damascus and make amends with his father’s assassins, as has Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, effectively terminating whatever independence Lebanon scratched out for itself in 2005. At the same time, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad contemptuously taunts the president of the United States, whom he clearly perceives as a pushover. “American officials bigger than you,” he said of President Obama’s attempts to talk him out of developing nuclear weapons, “more bullying than you, couldn’t do a damn thing, let alone you.”

Yet the Obama administration still seems to think engagement with Syria and the suggestion of possible sanctions against Iran may keep the Middle East from boiling over.

President George W. Bush lost a lot of credibility when the civil war and insurgency in Iraq made a hash of his policy there. It was eventually obvious to just about everyone that something different needed to happen, and fast. Replacing the top brass in the field with General David Petraeus and his like-minded war critics just barely saved Iraq and American interests from total disaster. The president himself never fully recovered.

If Obama’s squishy policies are misguided, as I think they are, it’s less obvious. The Middle East isn’t on fire as it was circa 2005. But it should be apparent that, at some point, all the pressure that’s building up will have to go somewhere. When and how is anyone’s guess, but there’s little chance it’s just going to dissipate or be slowly released during peace talks.

The Iranian-led resistance bloc is becoming better armed and more belligerent by the month. And the next round of conflict could tear up as many as six regions at the same time if everyone pulls out the stops. A missile war sparked between Hezbollah and Israel, for instance, could easily spread to Gaza, Syria, Iran, and even Iraq.

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The La-La Land Diplomacy of Obama

Farid Ghadry
Reform Party of Syria (RPS)
14 April '10

Reports have surfaced to the effect that the Obama administration insists on appointing Amb. Robert Ford as its envoy to Syria even after learning Assad has clandestinely shipped SCUD missiles to Hezbollah whose intent is to threaten all of Israel directly.

In insisting on appointing the US envoy, no one bothered to ask the question: How will Assad read this?

We can assure you as Syrians who understand Assad better than any one on the Obama Middle East team can that he will see this as proof that his policies of spreading terror are succeeding and no reason exists to change direction, especially that there is no price to pay at all. In Assad's world of real politics, his primary goal is to survive and to spread "resistance" across the Arab world. Obama's diplomacy will not help Assad make any concessions and someone must explain to Obama that Assad is not in the business of being nice or conciliatory. If one simply reads the history of this family, one will realize that their success and their strength emanate from always taking as much and never give anything back. To Assad, Obama is a dream US president because he can always dictate how much he can take and never even bother to calculate what he has to pay for it.

Further, Robert Ford, as good a diplomat as he is, will not reverse the SCUD shipments.

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