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October 03, 2007

Surprising Ease of Israel's Attack on Syria

By Jack Kelly

What was most important about the Israeli air raid in Syria September 6 was not what was destroyed, but that the attack was conducted with relative ease, Jack Wheeler thinks.

I pay a great deal of attention to what Jack Wheeler thinks. He's the real life Indiana Jones. At age 14, he climbed the Matterhorn in Switzerland. A year later, he swam the Hellespont (which separates Europe from Asia), and then went to live with a tribe of cannibals in the Amazon basin. He's parachuted onto the North Pole, and visited just about every country in the world.

Jack spent much of the 1980s with anticommunist resistance movements in Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique and Nicaragua. He didn't just intellectually conceive of the Reagan doctrine; he lived it.

Jack still leads expeditions to the world's wild and remote places. Last year he was in the Hindu Kush; this year in east Africa. But his principal livelihood is his excellent newsletter on international affairs, To The Point News.

Jack has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Southern California and an encyclopedic knowledge of world history. But what distinguishes his analyses from the customary think tank bilge is less his greater erudition than his focus. While most journalists and academics dwell on America's problems, real and imagined, Jack focuses on the problems of our enemies.

Syria and Iran are sweating bullets just now. The air raid is the reason.

Syria has invested an enormous sum in state of the art Russian air defense missiles and radars. A story which appeared in the Israeli media Aug. 13 described it as the "most advanced in the world."

"Some of these missiles were snatched from the production lines even before being introduced into Russian operation service," wrote Alex Fishman of YNET News.

The Israelis attacked a target near Dayr az Zawr on the Euphrates in eastern Syria, and may have attacked another near Tal al Abyad on Syria's border with Turkey (though all we know for sure about the latter is that Israeli fighters dropped empty fuel tanks there). Both are a long way from Israel.

"And guess what happened with the Russian super-hyper-sophisticated cutting edge antiaircraft missile batteries when that penetration took place on September 6?" Jack asked.

"Nothing. The systems didn't even light up...The Israelis (with a little techie assistance from us) blinded the Russkie antiaircraft systems so completely the Syrians didn't even know they were blinded...They thought they were protected -- at enormous expense -- only to discover they are defenseless."

"During the Syrian bombing operation, reports suggested the entire Syrian communications grid was shut down," wrote James Lewis in the American Thinker. "Even cell phone connections in neighboring Lebanon were disrupted."

The panic is at least as great in Tehran. The Iranians rely on Russian air defense equipment too to protect their nuclear sites and their military bases. But the air defense systems the Iranians possess are older, less capable, and less dense than the Syrian defenses the Israelis so easily penetrated.

"No matter who I talked to, all (Iranian officials) could do was ask me, over and over again, 'When will the Americans attack us?'" an Indian general who'd recently visited Tehran told Jack.

Shortly after publication of the first story on the Israeli raid, the Iranians began making preposterous threats. On September 17, an Iranian Web site said 600 Shahab-3 missiles would be fired at Israel if either Syria or Iran were attacked.

Former Spook, a retired Air Force intelligence officer, chuckled at that on his Web log, In from the Cold:

"Most estimates place the number of Shahab-3 airframes in Iran at no more than 40, with a launcher inventory of less than half of that."

Two days later, General Mohamed Alavi, deputy chief of the air force, announced that "we will attack Israeli territory with our fighter-bombers as a response to any attack."

The Iranian air force consists chiefly of obsolete aircraft, and does not possess the tankers required to get fighter-bombers to and from targets in Israel.

"A sure sign of panic is to make a threat that everyone knows is a bluff," Jack Wheeler said.

If Iran suddenly becomes more tractable at the negotiating table, it will have much more to do with the Israeli air raid in Syria than with the persuasive skills of our diplomats.

"Defenseless enemies are fun," Jack Wheeler said.

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