WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- Syria, under the Assad reign (father and son), has been involved in all the wars and tensions of the Middle East since 1970 when Air Force chief Gen. Hafez al-Assad launched his country's 22nd coup d'etat since World War II. For its inaugural issue in 1985, Insight magazine ran Assad on the cover as "The World's No. 1 Terror Broker."
Defeated in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Assad bounced back with the help of his 14 different intelligence agencies, all involved one way or another in general Middle Eastern skullduggery. When the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, Maronite Christians were reeling under the blows of a state within a state, which was then the PLO under the late Yassir Arafat. Assad sent his army across the frontier into Lebanon -- always considered a protectorate by Damascus and never recognized as an independent state -- to protect the Maronites. Syrian troopers duked it out with the Palestinians to ease the pressure on the Maronites before switching sides to ease the pressure on the Muslims.
By war's end, every party had allied with and then betrayed every other party, sometimes more than once. Today, faced with scenes of destruction in south Beirut, Lebanese are reminded of their capital city in ruins during the previous Israeli invasion in 1982 that evicted the PLO from the country -- all the way to exile in Tunis. At first, when Gen. Ariel Sharon's Patton-like blitz reached Beirut, exhausted Lebanese greeted them with cheers and flowers. Not for long. The twin massacres of some 2,500 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Israel's rightwing Lebanese militia allies ended the brief honeymoon.
By 1989, when the principal protagonists signed the Taif peace agreement, Israel held a security buffer zone in southern Lebanon, policed by its Lebanese surrogates. But in 2000, tired of constant skirmishes with Hezbollah on its northern border, Israel's new Labor prime minister, Ehud Barak, decided to abandon the buffer it had held for 18 years. The Syrians stepped into the vacuum only to be forced out of Lebanon completely under international pressure in 2005 for suspected involvement in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the man who rebuilt Beirut to its former glory.
Evidently ignorant or blasé about the business of betrayal and the alliance merry-go-round in the Arab world (Libya and Morocco once merged their states -- for 48 hours), no one appears to have noticed Syrian and Israeli interests silently converging. Damascus wants a weak and subdued Lebanon and Israel wants a quiescent northern neighbor. The destruction of the country's modern infrastructure as well as its multi-billion-dollar tourist industry sets Lebanon back 20 years. Lebanon's strong currency probably will also collapse.
The most immediate winner of the latest Middle Eastern war is Syria. Israel's success will take longer to assess. But Dr. Condoleezza Rice doesn't want to talk to Syria, still a key player in the current three-dimensional chess game.
The original consensus among regional experts was that Hezbollah could not have mounted an operation to capture an Israeli prisoner without a green light from both Damascus and Tehran. Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah now says he informed the Lebanese government of the plan to abduct Israeli soldiers for a subsequent prisoner exchange. Israelis have been taken prisoner before, only to be exchanged in 100-to-1 deals that favor terrorist organizations. Israel's massive retaliatory campaign was probably the last thing Hezbollah expected. But Hezbollah's fighters were well prepared.
Western intelligence agencies and journalists have been writing about Hezbollah's 10,000 to 15,000 Syrian-supplied Katyusha rockets and Iran-supplied Fajr missiles for at least the past five years. Israel knew it would have to move sooner or later before Hezbollah got 30,000 or 50,000 such weapons, including ones that could reach Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion International Airport and Jerusalem.
Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others were totally unexpected. But it gave Israel the opportunity to launch what was only a matter of time. The retaliatory campaign now underway required the mobilization of some 10,000 reservists and the moving of several hundred tanks and tracked vehicles to the north for this week's ground offensive. It will be a long hard slog and a cease-fire is probably still two weeks away. Israel also knows that the NATO force it says it would accept to police a buffer zone is beyond NATO's present out-of-theater capabilities, stretched to the limit in Afghanistan and Africa.
World opinion is understandably up in arms about several hundred Lebanese killed and 800,000 displaced people, made homeless by the wanton destruction of entire sections of Beirut, Sidon and Tyre, and critical infrastructure. While some precision-guided bombs frequently hit innocent targets, there are many that hit caches of rockets and missiles hidden in apartment buildings or modest houses along a highway or dirt road. Large swaths of southern Lebanon are a maze of tunnels and foliage-covered revetments that conceal truck-mounted batteries of six to eight Katyusha rockets.
Hyperbole and the fog of war are usually synonymous. It's hard to sift facts from fiction. The result is usually "faction," or a blend of fact and fiction. Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador at the United Nations and a Fox News favorite, told NewsMax, a conservative website, Israel "is a convenient surrogate for the larger enemy Iran perceives -- the West." Now president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Gold says Iran is building long-range missiles to cower London and Berlin, not just Tel Aviv. These missiles are designed to force the Europeans to sit on their hands as Iran takes on Israel with its WMD-tipped 1,300-kilometer Shahab missiles. Far-fetched? Israel could not afford to take a chance.
Hezbollah's Iranian Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 medium-range missiles had already turned Haifa, Israel's third largest city with 250,000, into a ghost town as air raid sirens drove people into their bomb shelters. Tens of thousands quickly moved out of the Israeli port city to stay with relatives and friends out of Fajr range.
For Gold and the Israeli right, the current crisis is reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The G8 meeting in St. Petersburg, rather than discussing Iran's illegal nuclear program, which was supposed to be the main item on the summit menu, focused instead on the Israeli war with Hezbollah.
Meanwhile, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent another bizarre 10-page missive to Germany's Angela Merkel (President Bush's version ran 18 pages), this time drawing parallels between Iranian and German history since 1945 and their alleged oppression by Zionism and the "international Jewish conspiracy." Nary a word about Iran's nuclear ambitions or its Hezbollah protégé.
