Israel, the U.S., and the attack on Syria

September 21, 2007

Ordinarily, when a reporter asks the president to comment on a subject he’s not comfortable with, Bush will dodge pretty well. He’ll note his unwillingness to discuss the matter, but he’ll do so artfully (albeit unpersuasively) with some vaguely credible explanation. Yesterday, however, NBC’s David Gregory asked Bush about Israel’s bombing raid on a target in Syria earlier in the month.

“I’m not going to comment on the matter,” the president said with a stoic impression. When Gregory followed up with a related question, Bush repeated, “I’m not going to comment on the matter.”

As a rule, I don’t find Charles Krauthammer’s work to have any value, but his initial description of the events in Syria earlier this month were on the mark: “On Sept. 6, something important happened in northern Syria. Problem is, no one knows exactly what. Except for those few who were involved, and they’re not saying.”

The WaPo’s Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright shed some additional light on the subject today with a provocative front-page piece.

Israel’s decision to attack Syria on Sept. 6, bombing a suspected nuclear site set up in apparent collaboration with North Korea, came after Israel shared intelligence with President Bush this summer indicating that North Korean nuclear personnel were in Syria, U.S. government sources said.

The Bush administration has not commented on the Israeli raid or the underlying intelligence. Although the administration was deeply troubled by Israel’s assertion that North Korea was assisting the nuclear ambitions of a country closely linked with Iran, sources said, the White House opted against an immediate response because of concerns it would undermine long-running negotiations aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear program.

Ultimately, however, the United States is believed to have provided Israel with some corroboration of the original intelligence before Israel proceeded with the raid, which hit the Syrian facility in the dead of night to minimize possible casualties, the sources said.

This bears watching. As the Post’s editorial board noted the other day, “[L]ike a subterranean explosion, the event is sending shock waves through the Middle East and beyond.”

Syria has protested to the United Nations, though it hasn’t been very clear about what it’s protesting. On Tuesday, a front-page editorial in Damascus’s main government-run newspaper criticized the United States for not condemning the attack. An Israeli newspaper, meanwhile, noted triumphantly that no nation other than North Korea had come to Syria’s defense, rhetorically or otherwise.

What happened? Media accounts are beginning to converge on a report that Israel bombed a facility where it believed Syria was attempting to hatch its own nuclear weapons program with North Korea’s assistance. The Post’s Glenn Kessler reported that the strike came three days after a ship carrying material from North Korea docked at a Syrian port and delivered containers that Israel believes held nuclear materials. It’s not clear whether U.S. intelligence agencies concur with Israel’s conclusion, and independent experts have said that Syria lacks the resources for a credible nuclear weapons program.

It nevertheless is beginning to look as if Israel may have carried out the boldest act of nuclear preemption since its own 1981 raid against Iraq’s Osirak nuclear complex. If so, its silence is shrewd. It has allowed Syria to avoid a military response and every other Arab state to pretend that nothing happened. So far, the most serious fallout may be China’s abrupt and unexplained postponement of scheduled “six-party” talks on North Korea’s nuclear program.

At this point, there are far more questions than answers. We don’t know if there was a nuclear threat here, nor why North Korea would risk damaging ongoing diplomatic talks with the West, nor what the North Korean ships that arrived in Syria were containing.

We wouldn’t even know for sure that there was an attack, were it not for former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu concession that the incident occurred, a comment he made during a media interview Wednesday, much to the consternation of Israeli officials.

Interesting. Stay tuned.

To me, the secrecy involved lends credibility to the idea that there is a One World Government in the works.

They’re basically telling the people of the world that events that happen on the world stage do not deserve the attention, scrutiny, or even the knowledge of the inhabitants of this planet. To me, that is totalitarianism on a global scale.

The “just trust us” methodology is working wonderfully for the world elites.

  • Wait. You’re telling me a White House Correspondent asked a serious question about a serious matter? As a not-viewer of the evening news, has NBC done anything with this, or just let it drop?

  • Yes, U.S. intelligence is always a highly sought-after product when a country wishes to attack another, but has no particular reason for doing so – the U.S. has pretty much set the gold standard there. The original commenter (in WaPo) on the Krauthammer story wrote; “A North Korean freighter? Gee, was Mohammed Atta the captain? Did he dock in Prague first?”

    Krauthammer’s logic is always heavily slanted in favour of Israel, but that fits well with the current administration’s agenda, although Bush himself probably doesn’t know where it is.

  • Unfortunately, because of the authoritarian tack both the Israeli and American government have taken in recent history, I’m forced to view this with extreme skepticism. If Bush was involved especially, no one gets the benefit of the doubt.

    Until proven otherwise, I believe this was just testing the international and Syrian reaction to such a strike. The developed a narrative, much like the WMD narrative Bush used to fool the American people and send our soldiers to die. The leaders of Israel and the USA seem hellbent on goading the entire Arabic world into war.

  • Something smells fishy here. It’s difficult to believe that Syria would attempt a nuclear program given its available resources and money. It’s even more difficult to believe that they’d attempt such a program, given the extensive facilities involved when they’re subject to constant spying by Israel.

    If North Korea did provide nuclear materials to Syria then why isn’t Bushco trumpeting the fact from the rooftops and rattling their worn out saber at both North Korea and Syria? The US non-response is telling: with all of our available troops tied up in Iraq a war with North Korea would be suicide and any expansion of conflict in the ME would break the thin ice on which we stand in Iraq.

  • Let me see if I understand this story. 1)We (and/or Israel) bomb a site mysteriously and without comment. 2) Judith Miller-style sources offer an unconfirmable explanation through WaPo. 3) If true, it looks good for the war mongers who attacked Iraq without confirmable explanation. 4) If nothing turns up, it’s Israel’s fault and the “liberal” WaPo is wrong again. In other words it’s a no-lose situation.

  • You’re telling me a White House Correspondent asked a serious question about a serious matter?

    David Gregory, who asked the question, is often aggressive. He’s far and away the best TV news reporter up there, both in his reportage and his willingness to ask some real questions.

    If you’re only used to seeing transcripts, soundbites, or quotes pulled out of context it’s often difficult to tell from whence a question came. But if it was irksome or dogged, there’s a good chance it was Gregory or the amazing Helen Thomas (who often is “ignored” on purpose by this administration). Many of the stammering, incoherent denials by departed administration stooge Scotty McClellan were forced by these two. Ah, those pressers were fun to watch.

    At any rate, kudos to Gregory. Even if it didn’t yield anything.

  • Bush’s refusal to say anything about whatever it was that happened only means he isn’t lying about it yet. The Israeli’s seem determined to incite a wider conflict than Iraq and to have the US do the fighting, largely for their benefit, as we are in Iraq.

    It isn’t hard to believe that provoking Syria, Iran, North Korea, China into hard line positions isn’t part of an Israeli plan to become the dominant presence, with our unflagging support, in the region. The Middle East has become the Europe of 1914 when an assassination by a lone gunman in Sarajevo proved to be the match lighting the tinder of war. The Israeli’s are not to be trusted, Bush doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, and Cheney is itching for war with Iran. And secrecy rules.

    Can we expect anything good to come out of this situation?

  • Let me take my turn as the outsider on this one.

    I agree there is something odd here, and I agree it somewhat unlikely that Syria and NK were doing nukes – per a fairly thorough report from someone at Jane’s on NPR, it doesn’t sound like there is much precedent. It does, however, seem fairly well accepted that Syria has a very sophisticated chemical program, and what was coming from NK may have been missile technology.

    I agreed with Israel’s strike on Iraq in 1981 (and I trust that Kuwait and Iran are secretly exceedingly thankful for that strike). There are not enough facts yet to know if this strike was appropriate or not. (Some will likely argue that ‘preemptive’ war, like the current Iraq fiasco, is never justified. But here, Syria has long and often been an aggressor against Israel – have they ever rescinded their declaration of war? – and unlike the situation in Iraq they pose a logistically hones threat to Isreal, Lebanon and others in the region).

    One fact, however, really does stand out and seem more fishy than the rest. It isn’t the silence of Israel or the US – it is the silence of Syria. Every country in ME has, in almost every opportunity, taken the PR battle against Israel and the US as far as they can (and often with great success – see Nasrallah and Hezbollah last year re Israel). It is highly out of character for Syria to file a quiet and vague protest with the UN rather than trying to move world opinion with how the Zionist Alliance engaged in a wholly unprovoked attack on their peaceful sovereign nation. It certainly suggests that Syria has something to hide in all of this, and knows it.

    This is a pretty anti-Israel board, but Syria ain’t exactly a bunch of saints, either (ask reform parties in Lebanon). Syria’s silence is suspicious; it might do well to suspend judgement and conclusions for a while on this one.

  • My guess — and this is all just pure speculation of course, just like everything the newspapers have “reported” so far — would be that the Israelis bombed a shipment of medium range missiles with conventional warheads, with greater range, accuracy and payload than the types Hezbollah was shooting up Israel with last year. NK is pretty good at making those and it’s something Israel would certainly not want any more of in their neighborhood, particularly if there were reason to believe they were destined for Lebanon.

    I’m basing this mainly on the assumption would be that if this had been anything nuclear in nature the White House would be crowing about it from every mountain top, so their coyness about it suggests that’s not the case. However a lot of wild speculation about nukes would probably tend to suit their political purposes nearly as well as actual nukes, so it’s entirely plausible they would be in no rush to put that to rest. Just a guess, but it fits what little actual information that’s been made public at least as well as anything else I’ve heard so far.

  • Correction: “I’m basing this mainly on the assumption that if this had been anything nuclear in nature…”

  • I don’t know about you guys, but I think it’s about time congress stood all in a row and vowed allegiance to Israel no matter what it does inside anyone else’s borders, because international law only applies to everyone but us and them.

    I mean really, WTF? Has Syria actually done anything except get bombed? Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and the hardware to deliver it anywhere on the planet. Are we supposed to believe that they would be threatened if one of their neighbors ever got a nuke?

    We need to make up our minds if “preemptive war” is OK or not. If it is, then any country that thinks we might attack them someday can attack us. Unless we’re just a huge nation of hypocrites, which of course is what we are.

  • I dunno, RacerX. When you say “preemptive war” are we talking about full-on invasions or does that extend all the way down to the occasional raid? I’d personally find it a lot easier to get up in arms about a raid like this if there were more good guys to be found on either side of the Arab/Israeli argument. But in truth the entire landscape seems to me to consist mainly of bad guys on both sides and innocent bystanders in the middle. So I tend to favor the things that look like they get the smallest number of innocent bystanders killed, maimed, displaced, etc. For example, if there were choice were between sinking one ship in an unprovoked attack vs. the possibility of a dozen or so tactical missiles getting lobbed into Tel Aviv and the likely Israeli response to same, I’d have to go with sinking the ship.

  • Clearly, one cannot discount that the story of a Syrian nuclear program is just so much Cheney agitprop. Are there any inconsistencies or implausible claims in the story which would indicate that this is the case? One point jumps out at me.

    the strike came three days after a ship carrying material from North Korea docked at a Syrian port and delivered containers that Israel believes held nuclear materials.

    Now it is possible that the Israelis didn’t learn that the ship contained nuclear material before it docked, but I would think this would be highly unlikely. The Korean peninsula must watched more closely by the US, than Brittany Spears out on the night on the town is by the pazratti. Hence it is very hard to imagine that Korea could load nuclear material onto a ship without us knowing about it. If they did that means our intelligence community is incompetent or too preoccupied with domestic spying to do its real job.

    I think it is fair to say that odds are that the US, and therefore Israel, would a have know that there was nuclear material on the ship while it was in transit. Why then wasn’t the ship interdicted before it docked? They would have then stopped the transfer and would have had the evidenced needed to make the case to the world that Syria has nuclear ambitions.

    By bombing the facility there is no evidence of such a program. Very convenient. Now all there is to go on is anonymous administration leak that this was about nukes. This leads me Cheney agitprop as my preferred explanation of this event.

  • Great.

    With the lack of a negative world reaction, the White House will say “THAT WAS EASY!!”, and start bombing Iran.

    Kind of like how early successes in Aghanistan led the neocons to think Iraq would be a cakewalk.

  • It is highly out of character for Syria to file a quiet and vague protest with the UN rather than trying to move world opinion with how the Zionist Alliance engaged in a wholly unprovoked attack on their peaceful sovereign nation. -Zeitgeist

    Maybe, and a huge maybe, but they are just trying to do things right and make use of the proper channels?

    I’m basing this mainly on the assumption would be that if this had been anything nuclear in nature the White House would be crowing about it from every mountain top… -CalD

    This is what I find most suspicious about the whole situation, as well. If White House intelligence (an ox and a moron) resulted in the destruction of nuclear weapons (or even tubes that might at one point in the future possibly be made to have nuclear warheads) then we would be hearing about it nonstop. They tout non-successes like it is the natural progression of sliced bread, so an actual success would result in total Administration priapism.

  • I would add to doubtful’s post that historically Israel doesn’t exactly like to keep its success quiet either – Moshe Dayan’s approach that was well learned by most of the folks who are today’s leaders there was to engage in big, bold deterrence, to make an example.

    Syria made no media play and took several days to protest at all, and then the protest is vague and uninformative. Israel doesn’t grab a megaphone and scream “you could be next!” Other anti-Israel countries don’t start marching in the streets burning flags. The US doesn’t take credit for its wonderful intelligence.

    It is hard to imagine exactly what was hit that it would be in everyones – aggressor and target – interest to keep completely quiet.

  • Syria’s in no position to go mano-e-mano with Israel, especially given that there are currently about 160,000 US troops to its east in a little place called Iraq*—and enough naval firepower stationed in the Med right now to knock Damascus back into the First Crusade. They also do not have the capability to withstand an “Israeli” nuclear assault.**

    *Given a choice of defending an increasingly-disobedient al-Maliki or defending Tel Aviv, I think I know which way ol’ Georgie would go.

    **Remember those nuke-tipped cruise missiles on the B-52? If they were “air-launch” units, then why were they transported in storage pods usually reserved for “quick-shipping” the type designed specifically for launch from naval vessels?

  • Actually, the Syrians deny that anything was hit at all. They say the Israelis bombed basically a big patch of nothing. Usually if Israel wants to be later vindicated, they take lots of pictures – using gunsight cameras, if they have nothing else. Remember those photos that “proved” the Palestinians were using ambulances to transport missiles (except the “missile” in the photo turned out to be a stretcher)? Where are the target photos? You’re not going to tell me they sent a wild-ass fighter-bomber raid into totally unknown territory at night and blew up something that didn’t even have lights, are you? Where’s the satellite imagery? If the U.S. was helping out, that’d be the likeliest contribution, and others have already pointed out that solid evidence would be shoved down the world’s throat for weeks on end.

    I agree this one is odd, and I’ll also go along with the premise that there are bad actors on both sides. However, when Syria seizes a substantial piece of Israel, occupies it and refuses to give it back in the face of U.N. resolutions that direct it to return to pre-!967 borders, Israel can bitch. I used to be fairly pro-Israel myself, and I was a great admirer of their military. No more. The best way to make Israel get along with their neighbours would be to stop backing them up every time they go off the reservation.

  • Steve; I pointed out, in a linked article CB chose not to explore further, that nuclear cruise missiles are distinctly marked with prominent red signs to distinguish them from non-nukes. They are, similarly, stored in separate areas, and in fact each individual nuclear ACM would have had to be signed out of its bunker. The 5th Bomb Wing at Minot, where the “accidentally” loaded missiles originated, received two service-wide safety awards in 2006. You don’t have to take my word for it – the Air force says so, here: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2007/09/airforce_nuclear_warhead_070905/ . The same source points out that the Defense Department does not transport nuclear warheads by air using B-52’s: they use cargo aircraft such as the C-17 or C-130.

    Other more speculative sites have pointed out that Barksdale (where the “accidentally” loaded missiles ended up) is an American staging point for the Middle East.

  • Mark,

    My brother-in-law works at Minot. Those two “safety awards” were for (1) a reduced number of lost-time hours due to AF personnel work-related accidents, and (2) fewer vehicular accidents involving base personnel. They’ve not a thing to do with nukes—and USAF “alone” handed out a little over 1,700 (that’s “seventeen hundred; note the comma after the seven, followed by three zeros and no decimal points) of these “service-wide” awards in 2006. They’re on track to hit that number before October this year.

    Secondly, the only reason that those nukes got caught at Barksdale is because the Barksdale inspection staff had to open the transport pods to access the missile dataplates (those little adhesive-backed aluminum placards, about the size of a playing card that’s been ripped in half crossways) to confirm serial numbers. The transport pods won’t hold missile carcasses that have bracketing for wing-slings; they’re designed specifically for the bulkier-and-longer, smooth-carcass units launched from tubes—and those are unique to USNV launch systems. Also, a missile carcass cannot be identified by those “red marking” insigniae when it’s inside a transport pod So my question is: Why was a B-52 carrying naval ordnance from Minot to Barksdale—and how in blazes did USN nuclear ordnance get to Minot in the first place? Last time I checked, USN kept their nukes “a wee bit” closer to the coastlines—Like Washington/Oregon, Texas, Georgia, and Connecticut….

  • OK, I’ll buy all that, since your source seems to be much better (although the air force paper was quite specific that those missiles were designed to be transported and launched from B-52’s, and not naval ordnance). Still, if the original article is correct, each of those missiles would have to be individually signed out of its storage, and that storage is allegedly not physically close to storage of the non-nukes. I’m still curious about that.

    The only ALCM I can think of off the top of my head that is shared with the navy and uses the W-80 warhead is the Tomahawk. According to open sources, the ALCM is good for about 1500 km.

    Thanks for the interesting and very thought-provoking reply!

    • Comments are closed.