Syrian President Bashar Assad
has threatened to ignite a
firestorm in the Middle East by promising an immediate
attack on Israel if NATO takes military action against his
beleaguered government. According to Iran’s Fars news
agency, Assad told Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu at a meeting on Tuesday, October 4, “I won’t
need more than six hours to transfer hundreds of rockets
to Golan to fire at Tel Aviv”.
He went on to say that the attacks will not be limited
to Israel. “All these events will happen in three hours,
and in the following three hours, Iran will attack the US
warships in the Persian Gulf and the US and European
interests will be targeted simultaneously,” Assad said,
according to FARS.
He was not exaggerating; what he threatened may well be
possible. The rockets (and missiles) are there, provided
to Syria and Hezbollah by Iran over the past five years.
Some are already in position.
His words must have fallen on welcoming ears, even
though Turkey is now taking a hard line
against its neighbor. Under the direct leadership of Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
Turkey has been rattling sabers throughout the region,
raising the specter of war that will go beyond the narrow
confines of national borders. In recent weeks, Turkey has
begun a campaign of harassment against Israel’s
merchant marine in the Mediterranean, threatening Cyprus’
off-shore gas exploration site, promising to protect a
planned blockade-busting flotilla against Israel with it
navy, and, yesterday, imposing undetermined
sanctions on Syria’s Assad government.
A third player in the growing list of antagonists is Iran,
which has supported Assad throughout the latest unrest.
Syria has been a client state of Iran for many years,
because of its strategic importance as both a land-bridge
to Lebanon and a seaport on the Mediterranean. Now less
sure of the outcome in Syria, as demonstrations continues
and world opinion lines up against the Assad government, President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has hedged his bets by strengthening Iran’s
position in the Persian Gulf, and by sending at least two
of its ships into the Red Sea. The Red Sea is a long,
narrow dead-end channel which is bordered by Egypt, Yemen,
and Saudi Arabia, and ends at Israel’s southern port,
Eilat. Iran’s presence there is highly inflammatory.
Lebanon is the step-child in the
growing Middle East environment of revolt and retaliation.
Its role has been largely overshadowed by the rolling
revolutions of the past year.
Lebanon has been largely taken over by Hezbollah,
surrogate of Iran’s terror-supporting power network, and
it may actually provide the spark that ends up igniting a
much larger conflict. The recipient of massive transports
of heavy weapons, rockets, sophisticated missiles, and
personnel (thousands of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
troops) from its patron, Iran, Lebanon is positioned to
spearhead a major attack on its neighbor to the south –
Israel.
The threat that Hezbollah poses to the region, however,
goes further, not only targeting Israel, but impacting the
entire Middle East and beyond. Hezbollah possesses tens of
thousands of Iranian-supplied rockets and missiles. Its
vast network of underground tunnels, used to transport
troops and weapons invisibly, and the presence of
thousands of IRGC troops to support Hezbollah soldiers,
represent a major threat, not only to Israel, but to the
larger world arena.
The complexities of the increasingly violent and wide
reaching ‘Arab Spring’ are compounded by the apparent
power struggle playing out on the Middle Eastern stage
between Turkey’s Edgogan and Iran’s Ahmadinejad. This
power struggle is not likely to be contained in the
region, nor limited to Middle Eastern countries. The two
men are both devout Muslims devoted to a violent jihad
and share the dream of creating pan-Muslim community
leading to a global Caliphate, although they no doubt
differ in their views of who should be administering it.
The irresponsible words and actions of these three
leaders can only be interpreted as threats of violence
that must be taken seriously. Whatever their individual
game plans, if their words are followed by actions that
are interpreted as acts of war, then the result will be a
major conflagration that will spread quickly.
An attack on Israel from Iran-backed Syria and/or
Hezbollah will be met with a ferocity not yet seen in the
region, and will not end in a single, cross-border
conflict, as we have seen before. The interference of
Iran, Turkey, and Western states compelled to become
involved will become the most desperate of any war we have
faced yet.
If our foreign policy continues down the road of
interfering without leading, of creating chaos where there
was previously order, it does not bode well for our own
future. Now is the time for strong and insightful
leadership from Washington to defuse the situation as
quickly as possible, and move us back into a time where
international options are decided around a negotiating
table, not on the battlefield