Bush Pushes For War Between Israel And Syria!

19 August 2007

by Michael Warschawski

Clouds of war cover the skies of West Asia, and newspaper headlines are warning that a military confrontation between Israel and Syria is imminent. During the last weeks, in the Galilee one has been able to see large armored convoys moving further to the north, and in the Golan Heights tank divisions have just finished an important training exercise, heavily covered by the local and international media.

Who is interested to start such a war? President Bashar al-Assad, has stated repeatedly that Syria does not want a war, and, indeed, is ready for immediate peace talks with Israel. According to foreign sources, unofficial talks have already been conducted a few months ago. Any analysis of the local and regional contexts will confirm that Syria, which is desperately trying to be released from the "axis of evil" list of the US neoconservative administration, has no interest in initiating a war against Israel, despite the fact that the Jewish State is occupying, for four decades already, the Syrian Golan Heights.

European diplomats have been conveying to the Israeli government that President Assad is not preparing for war and doesn't want a war against Israel, and, interestingly, Israeli military intelligence assessments confirm this view.

Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, is not interested in a war either, knowing well that, unlike in the past, every Arab state has the operational capacities to hit Israeli territory and its population. Olmert is not very smart, but he has enough memory to recall the retaliatory capabilities of Hezbollah a year ago. And whatever Hezbollah is capable of, Damascus can multiply these results by twenty fold or more: every city in Israel will be a target for Syrian medium-range missiles if Israel initiates a war.

If the two protagonists seem eminently uneager for a military confrontation, why is it that war seems closer than ever?

Because there is a third factor, which has a lot of power in our region and a prevailing influence over and structural connection with the Israeli ruling elites: the neoconservative administration in Washington.

Though the majority of the American leadership is turning its back on the strategy of a "non-ending global preemptive war" (a turn confirmed by the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton report), the small neocon gang surrounding George W. Bush, and supported by the Christian fundamentalist lobby, has not agreed to such a turn in strategy; the reaction of the US President to the Baker-Hamilton report is extremely revealing: he openly rejecting it, deciding instead to immediately send more soldiers to Iraq and to raise his voice against Syria. One can reasonably assume that in the last two years of his administration, Bush may implement his political-theological philosophy of a preemptive war against the “Satanic” forces of Islam.

For decades, the US Superpower has not had such an offensive, ignorant and fanatic leadership as the present administration, armed with a world vision which has much more to do with ideological images than any concrete analysis of the real world. In the neocons’ over-simplistic political philosophy, there are no nuances or secondary contradictions: the world is divided into two—the goodies, identified with the so called Judeo-Christian civilization, represented by American Democracy (with the largest disparity between rich and poor in the western world) and the baddies, identified with "the Muslims, which are always defined as fundamentalists and terrorists.

Bush seems to ignore tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, that a Muslim government is leading one of the most important allies of Washington in Europe (Turkey), and that one of the most fundamentalist Muslim regimes is the key partner of US strategy in the Arabic-Persian Gulf (Saudi Arabia). Yet the US administration’s rhetoric remains one of over-generalizing and threatening jingoism.

The two years left for that primitive and fundamentalist administration may well be dramatic, and plunge the world into bloody chaos. After the American fiasco in Iraq, the Syrian-Israeli border could well be the frontline of such a war, precisely because of the presence of neoconservative hawks at the core of the Israeli decision making centers, who share Bush strategic goals. First of all, Ehud Barak, who is, presently, minister of defense, and one of the main ideologists of "there is no partner, there will be no peace" strategy. Barak is a dangerous adventurist, who believes that what could not achieve by military force will be achieved by more military force, and he is preparing the Israeli military for an offensive against Syria. In addition, there is Benjamin Netanyahu, the archetype of the Israeli neocons. He may well be the next Israeli Prime Minister, after new elections that, undoubtedly, will be anticipated.

In one of the most classical scenario, Israel will be, once again, the armed advance-guard of Washington's war. Isn't this why the US administration just passed a bill which allocates US$30 billion to Israeli military (and not civilian) budget in the next 10 years?

A year ago, Israel got the money and didn't deliver. Despite neoconservative pressures, Ehud Olmert chose to run away from Lebanon after the fiasco of last July. The neocons will not allow this to happen again: like in a cheap Hollywood mob flick, Dick Cheney is presently saying to Olmert: "You got the payment, now you do the job, and don’t give me no flap about what the cost is gonna be to your people!"

And the people of Israel will have to pay the price: according to the Israeli State Comptroller, most of the deficiencies revealed in the last Lebanon war concerning the protection of the Israeli civilian population have not been corrected. Soon, Israeli civilians will die for the sake of the Christian fundamentalist crusade made in the White House.