War this Year – Yes or No – Newspaper Pros and Cons!
June 8, 2007
http://www.tribulationoeriod.com/
In my opinion, there will be no major all-out-war in the Middle East as long as U.S. troops remain in Iraq, and not until Iran develops a nuclear bomb arsenal that can be delivered by missile to Israel. I am also of the opinion that Iran’s primary objective in obtaining a deliverable weapon is as a deterrent to cause Israel not to launch its mighty nuclear arsenal when the major war begins. My guesstimate, as to the point in time Israel will be attacked to start this major war, is that it will occur after 2007, and before 2013 begins.
The following two articles from THE INDEPENDENT and HAARETZ, offer a long discourse on the pros and cons of the possibility of a variety of scenarios.
Begin Excerpt from HAARETZ Article
Chronicle of a war foretold
June 8, 2007
Amir Oren
The Israel Defense Forces this week pressed the button on the stopwatch for the next war with Syria.
The act of starting the clock does not necessarily mean that a war is un avoida
ble next month, but it does have an element of a countdown – like in the launching of a space shuttle – that can be reversed and stopped. This time, the army’s statements do not contradict the actual intention to issue the draft of the order (No. 001) to prepare for war. Defensive preparedness – that is, as opposed to a call-up of reserves, preemptive strike, or an attack.
For almost 20 years, from January 1964 until April 1983, the head of the Northern Command had an advantage over his colleagues from the Southern and Central Commands in the competition to be appointed Israel Defense Forces chief of staff. Yitzhak Rabin, David Elazar, Motta Gur, Rafael Eitan – all shared the formative experience of the confrontation with Syria.
(Haim Bar-Lev was an exception in that he never served as GOC but was the Northern Command Chief of Staff). This streak, interrupted for about a generation, was recently renewed with the appointment of Gabi Ashkenazi as chief of staff.
For a war with Syria, much of which would be expected, nevertheless, to take place in the air and deep inside the two countries, far from the line of contact between the forces at the front, a chief of staff such as Ashkenazi would bring the asset of years of experience in planning and drilling. One can expect that, in a confrontation with Syria’s 68-year-old chief of staff, General Ali Habib, he will come prepared.
Not that Ashkenazi wants to get to a war, but in his statements this week he contributed to the escalation that he seeks to avoid. He is not eager for an unnecessary battle, and sounds wary of its potential cost. In discussions within the military establishment and in its contacts with the political echelon above it, he takes a moderate line, which is shared by GOC Northern Command Gadi Eisenkot, Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin and other generals; at present there is no general who clearly embraces the opposing, combative approach.
This is a contrast with the situation in Gaza, where GOC Southern Command Yoav Galant, and Division Commander Moshe (Chico) Tamir are advocating a more aggressive approach.
Officers who’ve been listening to him get the sense that the chief of staff, on the job for nearly four months now, is already looking forward to the autumn.
The summer of 2007 – which was first cited as a potential time for war in the strategic assessment of the Planning Branch made last November, back during the tenure of Ashkenazi’s predecessor – took on a magical, fateful significance as time went on, something between a ticking bomb and the anticipated Y2K bug of the turn of the millennium, which all awaited with bated breath until the threat just evaporated.
There is no precedent for a war that is announced in advance, like a summons to a duel, but Ashkenazi cannot rely on precedent; who should know better than he, before whom no reserve major general had ever been appointed chief of staff, that for everything there is a first?
Contrary to popular conception, there was no major difference between the basic military approaches of Moshe Ya’alon and Dan Halutz: In the Syrian context, they were practically a single chief of staff, “Ya’alutz,” and Ashkenazi, Ya’alon’s top deputy, was involved in formulating the IDF’s operational concept, which was adopted primarily under Ya’alon and then finalized under Halutz. And part of the assessment, even before the hostilities of last summer between Israel and Hezbollah, was the understanding that Syria would seek to wage a war of attrition. That war would begin with a sudden move and continue with an erosion that would undermine the Israeli home front, and eventually launch a diplomatic process that would lead to the return of the Golan Heights of Syria.
Of Syria’s three “arms,” its armored branch would be used to confine IDF forces, while its missiles (and perhaps also biological and chemical warheads) would strike deep in Israeli territory, and be aided by the terror and guerilla activities of Hezbollah and Hamas. The Israeli threat, over the years, was to view the ruling Assad family, which maintains power with the help of the Alawite minority, “as a clear address [operating] politically in a logical manner,” and to pay it home visits that would strike at the assets that are “most precious” to it personally and that serve as props for its authority. Meaning, practically, that the traditional missions of destroying enemy forces and conquering territory would be superseded by an attempt to strike at the regime’s stability, at its economy and at the system that protects the rulers from being overthrown.
Begin Article from THE INDEPENDENT
The Big Question: Is Israel heading for a peace deal with Syria – or another war?
By Donald Macintyre, Jerusalem Correspondent
Published: 08 June 2007
Why are we talking about this now?
Because Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has seemingly put Syria at the top of his foreign policy agenda. He convened a Cabinet meeting this week to discuss it, insisted that Israel wanted peace and not war with Syria, and sounded warmer than in the past about the possibility of negotiations with Damascus. This was in response to a series of suggestions in interviews by President Bashar Assad that this was what the Syrian leader wanted.
At the same time, however, the Israeli military has been cranking up well publicized preparations for any possible war with its north-eastern – and until now – most unremittingly hostile neighbour. This is partly the result of what Israeli military intelligence says are movements of troops and rockets close to Israel’s current north-eastern front. And part of the job Olmert gave the Cabinet committee he set up on Syria this week was to review the Israeli military’s state of readiness for a war with Syria.
But if negotiations happened and worked, they would be potentially momentous, eventually involving Israel handing back the Golan Heights, the fertile stretch of Syrian territory it seized exactly 40 years ago in the Six-Day War.
But having held on to the Golan for so long, why give it up now?
Peace with Syria – and Damascus’s recognition of Israel – would be a huge prize in itself, which is one of the reasons that Prime Ministers Barak and Rabin were ready to negotiate with the President’s father in the 1990s – though that ended in failure. But it’s a fair question. Apart from the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when Syria briefly overran the Golan and was then repulsed, Israel’s relations with Syria since 1967 have been of the Cold War variety and Israel has largely lived with that, not to mention enjoying – literally – the fruits of the Heights, not to mention the excellent wine produced by some of its 17,000 Jewish settlers there.
What lends everything fresh urgency – quite apart from the important realization that war might be
the alternative, with heavy civilian casualties as well as military – is what Israel might get in return. The prospect that Syria might detach from Iran and stop its support for Hamas, and even more so Hizbollah in Lebanon, has huge potential attractions
for Israel.
So is Syria serious about making peace
?
That is the question which has been vexing the best minds in Israeli intelligence for months now. Hawks, who at least until recently appeared to include Olmert, have been arguing that Syria is playing games, and simply wants to give itself some bogus legitimacy to deflect the impact of the international tribunal set up to investigate its role in the murder of the Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri. But the counter- arguments are increasingly persuasive, and not just because a senior Syrian official yesterday responded to Israel’s Cabinet meeting by insisting that it was indeed serious.
What Assad – like Olmert – wants to do is survive politically. Not only would recovery of the Golan massively help him to do that, but if it helped bring him in from the cold from the point of view of the West, he might be prepared to pay a real price in return.
Unlike Olmert, who disowned the back-channel negotiations carried out with Syria by former foreign ministry director general Alon Liel that ended two years ago, Assad has made it clear that Liel’s US-based interlocutor Abe Suleiman had his blessing.
And finally while Syria has always insisted on starting negotiations at the point where Rabin left off – namely a full return to 4 June 1967 borders, including on the north-eastern shore of Lake Galilee – it is not insisting that Israel must sign up to this in blood before the negotiations begin.
Ide ally Isr
ael would like a return to the British mandate borders which would guarantee it a wider strip of territory on the Galilee shore.
But the informed view in Jerusalem is that Syria will never renege on the 4 June point. That said, it’s less clear exactly where the border is.
Bill Clinton thought he had finessed this point at the Sheperdstown talks at the turn of the century, but Ehud Barak hardened his position and the talks broke down.
Syria thinks all these amount to real and important concessions, even if it is harder to convince Israeli public opinion reared on dramatic gestures like Sadat’s epoch-making visit to Jerusalem in 1977, paving the way to the historic Israel-Egypt treaty.
What alternative is there to an Israel-Syria deal?
War – though when it might happen is harder to say. Syria is currently modernizing its army with state-of-the-art weaponry funded, Israel believes, from Iran, and this could take up two or three years to complete. One senior Israeli government analyst suggested yesterday that Syria had no intention of initiating a war now, before it is ready. Instead, he said, Damascus has carefully noted comments by Amos Gilad, a key Israeli Defence Ministry spokesman, at the beginning of the year that 2007 was when Israel would have to confront the choice between peace and war with Syria.
The analyst declined to say whether that choice had been resolved, but it was also clear that Syria’s existing rocket arsenal – with a capability to reach much deeper into Israel than anything Hizbollah used in last summer’s war – would put civilians straight into the front line.
What do the Americans think about all this?
At one point Condoleeza Rice told the Israelis that the US doesn’t want them to negotiate with Syria, and there is every sign that President Bush is still, to put it mildly, very wary about anything that could legitimize Syria. Olmert has also several times in the past few months used US hostility to the idea of talks with Syria as an excuse for not embarking on the process. But the increasingly chaotic, Iraq-generated political atmosphere in Washington, coupled with the fact that Bush let Rice talk to the Syrians about Iraq, means he is in a less good position to call all the shots than he might have been.
So will Olmert talk to the Syrians?
It’s still unclear. All the logic points to this being the time to test – at the absolute minimum – the Syrians’ intentions through talks which have the potential to transform the region. Second, it would give Olmert the agenda he desperately needs if he is going to survive his post-Lebanon unpopularity. His right-wing opponents won’t like it but talks would unite the centre and centre-left of Israeli politics behind him, rather as Gaza disengagement did for Ariel Sharon. The question is whether Olmert has the courage, the political imagination, and the sheer belief in the urgent desirability of talking to Damascus that he will need if he is to persuade Bush and other sceptics, including in the supposedly friendlier Arab countries. On all that the jury is still out.
So will Israel really negotiate
?
Yes…
* It would give Olmert the political agenda he badly needs after abandoning his policy of unilateral withdrawals from the West Bank
* There’s a growing view within the Israeli security establishment that now is the time for talks with Syria
* A peace treaty would be the gigantic prize that eluded Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin
No…
* Olmert is, as Damascus Radio said yesterday, too weak and unpopular to pull it off, particularly in the face of US opposition
* Negotiation would lead to a politically dangerous revolt from the Israeli right
* A failure is too big a risk, and could even bring war nearer, with high civilian casualties a likely price
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