Iran's Pressure Points: Syria Comes Back Into the Spotlight

Syria is coming back around as a leverage point in our efforts to alter the strategic landscape of the Middle East in our favor. As wiser commentators observed nearly a year ago, Syria is intimately tied to everything we've been talking about here the past month, most especially Israel and Iran. Michael Ledeen, has this highly educational piece in NRO on Iran's alliance with Syria and Hezbollah and the ethnic vulnerability they have in a repressed ethnic minority in their richest oil region. (H/T: Fausta at Bad Hair Blog):

In short, the Assad family's grip on Syria is weakening, and this is welcome news indeed, both for the long-suffering Syrian people and for us. The Iranians are obviously desperate to keep Assad in power, and Hezbollah armed to the teeth. Should things go the other way, Iran would lose its principal ally in the war against us in Iraq. As is their wont, the Iranians have been paying others to do much of their dirtiest work, and they have awarded Assad tens of millions of dollars' worth of oil, as well as cash subsidies, to cover the costs of recruiting, training and transporting young jihadis, who move from Syria into the Iraqi battle space (and, according to Jane's, a serious publication, the Iranians have also sent some of their WMDs to Assad for safekeeping). That deadly flow has been considerably reduced in recent months, thanks to an extended campaign waged by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Anbar Province, and further along the Iraq/Syria border. The Syrians have accordingly sent radical Islamists into Lebanon, perhaps to link up with Hezbollah in a new jihad against Israel.

And as we noted last April from a NYTimes article on the CIA's final but incomplete report on WMD in Iraq, Syria may well have provided (and may still be providing) similar 'safekeeping' services on behalf of Iraq:

...a group formed to investigate whether WMD-related material was shipped out of Iraq before the invasion wasn't able to reach firm conclusions because the deteriorating security situation limited and later halted their work. Investigators were focusing on transfers from Iraq to Syria. [emphasis added]

Others have noted further pieces of the same story. Iraq did have WMD - how many we are not sure. Some of them were discovered. The rest went... somewhere. One caller on a radio show I happened to catch yesterday had an isolationist, Bush-bashing axe to grind in this vein, observing that tracking WMD in the Middle East seems like a shell game. His question: When does it stop? His implication: Aren't we the suckers here? Our response: We are suckers only to the extent that we agree to look under one shell. That's usually the way the game works. But then in the carnival version, the huckster hiding the coin is the one in control. This particular set of hucksters has shown the world quite clearly that they ought not to be (in control).

As we speculated yesterday in a comment, the most likely scenario for an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel will originate not from a 'suitcase' (for all practical purposes a Jack Baueresque myth) but from a cargo container - on a ship, a truck, or a civilian airliner. And at least for the latter two, having a nearby partner (nearby to Israel, that is) would make sense. Syria. As we noted last March, Syria "may be a flashpoint".

Missiles are something that Iran would like to have, and is probably developing or purchasing, but they don't need them. Thinking in those terms is a classic case of imposing our paradigm (human life is precious) in a context where the base assumption is false. In short: they have hundreds if not many thousands of willing 'drivers' for nukes. We only had one... and he was fictional. I can even imagine that the competition for that role would be fierce... among those who are into that sort of thing.

Ledeen at NRO continues:

Should the jihadist traffic into Iraq and Lebanon cease, we and the Iraqis would be free to concentrate our attention on the Iranian border, especially in the oil-rich south, where Revolutionary Guards forces are very active, both to contain the anti-regime rage of the Ahwaz Arabs on the Iranian side of the border, and to infiltrate the Iraqi side, both in support of Zarqawi's terror network, and to agitate for an Islamic republic in the Shiite region around Basra. The Iranians have been hyperactive in that area ever since the fall of Saddam, and it would be a very good thing to start to turn the tables on them. For, just as many Iraqi oil fields, and millions of Iraqi Shiites are vulnerable to Iranian maneuver, the reverse is also true: the bulk of the Iranian oil fields, and millions of Iranians, are vulnerable. And the strategic balance is definitely in our favor.

The population of the Iranian oil region is largely Arab, and they have been brutally oppressed and ethnically cleansed by the mullahs. Tehran has gobbled up thousands of square kilometers of land on the pretext of building industrial parks or expanding military facilities, and the locals have been protesting on and off for many months. As I wrote last week, the regime is so nervous about disorder in the spinal cord of the Iranian economy that they sent Lebanese Hezbollahis and members of the Badr Corps (Shiites of Iraqi origin trained in Iran for the past two decades and then sent into Iraq to fight the Coalition).

In other words, working on toppling Syria's brutal regime (method TBD, but I'm open) may be one of our best strategic options, accomplishing several things at once. It would eliminate an immediate, easy avenue for Iran to reach Israel with nukes, i.e., the map-wiping it says it desires - potential missile programs notwithstanding. It would turn over yet one more highly plausible WMD shell in the area. It would put Iran and others on notice that we ain't screwin' around. It would, as Fedeen notes, free up some of our resources to focus on the Iranian border area which is sure to be an increasing source of trouble under almost any scenario. And finally, it would free a people crushed under brutal oppression - a desirable but neither sufficient nor absolutely essential element in my neocon world view. (For those unfamiliar with just how brutal Syria under the Assads has been check out - believe it or not - the World Socialist Website and try to overlook the BS about bourgeosie and imperialism:

[In 1980 Hafez el-] Assad was targeted in a grenade attack. In revenge, his brother Rifaat, head of Syria's security forces, gunned down more than 250 religious opponents in their prison cells. In February 1982 a Muslim Brotherhood revolt broke out in Hama. Ba'ath Party officials were killed and appeals were broadcast from the mosques for a national insurrection. Assad's retribution was ruthless. The military levelled [sic] half of the city, slaughtering an estimated 10,000 to 25,000 people. It is estimated [by Amnesty International] that between 1982 and 1992 thousands were arrested for political dissent and 10,000 were executed.

(Tom Friedman outlines the same story in his 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem but I couldn't find a convenient link to its content.)

Wretchard at The Belmont Club has this to say, about the unfortunately atrophied capabilities and therefore limited options we have between feckless, flaccid talk and raining down metal and heat and death:

Perhaps one of the reasons the US adopted the military approach against terrorism and struck at targets amenable to the application of force was that it was obliged to use the only instruments of national power which reliably worked. They had a bureaucratic repertoire which in any case was all they could play. All the talk about "nuanced" or "sophisticated" approaches evaded the fact that there were no effective policy instruments between a diplomatic note and sending in the Marines. After you composed a nuanced and literary diplomatic demarche there was nothing left but to order in the Third Infantry Division. If American society really wanted the capability to covertly upend mentally disturbed dictators it would take the trouble to build up the mechanism to do it. Instead, General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency recently had to explain before a hostile audience at the National Press Club why it was necessary to wiretap Al Qaeda. [emphasis added]

Part of the capability IMHO involves a more sustained and forthright case (playing on offense instead of defense) on the need for prudent national security measures that the ACLU routinely opposes. Wretchard harmonizes with (without duplicating) things that Tom Barnett has been preaching for years.

And then, for those inclined to such things, there is the eerie prophesied confluence of Syria, Iran and Russia supporting a major attack on Israel before the end of the Hebrew year 5766... which equates with the end of March... this year. As we've warned: fasten your seatbelts.