Wanneer Israel zijn buren met geweld kan bedreigen is het regionale evenwicht niet verstoord, wel als de gechanteerde tegenstander terug kan slaan. Opmerkelijke visie:
Scuds for Hizbollah? The regional balance is at stake
Emile Hokayem
- Last Updated: April 20. 2010 12:34AM UAE / April 19. 2010 8:34PM GMT
The tenuous, perhaps complacent, sense of quiet is unravelling in the Levant. For the past two weeks, reports that Syria has delivered Scud missiles to Hizbollah, or at least is ready to deploy them across the Lebanese border, have reminded everyone in the area that amid the hubris, a devastating war is only one miscalculation away.
Hizbollah’s possession of such a strategic capability would change the game because it would allow it to target the entirety of Israel from its northernmost bases. The real benefit would be psychological, because Israeli confidence would undoubtedly be shaken if the entire country became vulnerable. How much the missiles would improve Hizbollah’s capability in a war is questionable. Iraq launched Scuds armed with conventional warheads against Israel and Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War, but the destruction was limited.
For Syria, it would help redress a humiliating imbalance that has allowed Israel to ignore Syria when it wishes. For decades, Damascus has been struggling to achieve strategic parity, a quixotic goal made impossible by the demise of its Soviet patron.
It may be that these reports and accusatory statements by Israeli leaders are mere disinformation, timed to derail the wobbly US effort to engage Syria after five years of estrangement or to distract from the tension between the US president, Barack Obama, and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. But this is unlikely, and the Syrian denials must also be evaluated based on recent history. Certainly the revelation in 2007 that Damascus was developing a nuclear military capability has demonstrated that it is much less averse to risks and prone to confrontation than was assumed.
In fact, Hizbollah itself boasts that it has more than replenished its arsenal of rockets and missiles since the 2006 war, when its uninterrupted barrage was evidence of Israel’s military failure. But to ensure a degree of surprise, the group refuses to confirm what kind of armaments it has obtained. The new equipment probably includes anti-tank weaponry and the Igla-S, a shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missile that would erode Israeli air dominance.
If the reports of deployment are true, then the next conflict between Israel and Hizbollah would certainly widen to Syria. The last time Syrian and Israeli forces clashed was in 1982 in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The Syrian military, and in particular its air force, was dealt a crushing blow, but Israel was busy fighting the Palestine Liberation Organisation and had no interest in expanding the conflict. As a result, new red lines were drawn that turned Lebanon into the area of competition by proxy.
This time, however, the language between the two countries is hardening. The Syrian regime is unequivocally behind Hizbollah, and the Syrian president Bashar Assad has told his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas that “the price of resistance is not higher than the price of peace”.
The hawkish Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman has already likened Hizbollah to a division of the Syrian armed forces and stated that bringing down the Assad regime would be an easy affair. It was not an empty threat.
Assuming the Scuds have been deployed, the key question becomes one of command and control. Hizbollah wants a weapon that petrifies Israeli society, Syria a tool to restore parity, and Iran a deterrent against a potential Israeli attack on its nuclear installations.
For Israel, the challenge is not a minor one. Hizbollah has proven very skilled at hiding and using missiles, although deploying several 13-metre Scuds in a time of war would not go undetected by Israeli airplanes and drones.
There is another dimension to the crisis: the extent to which the Lebanese state has become peripheral. After all, the various political leaders were expected to discuss a national defence strategy during the National Dialogue conference, a now-hollow attempt to tackle Hizbollah’s weapons. It is safe to assume that Hizbollah has not shared details about its military preparations with other Lebanese factions, partly because of the need for secrecy but also because it considers itself and its military plans above discussion.
But the next conflict would certainly involve more than just Hizbollah. Its assertion that the dichotomy between the state and the muqawama (resistance) protects the country would be tested the hard way. Indeed, an unpleasant lesson Israel drew from the 2006 war and the Shiite militia’s political dominance since then is that limiting the pain to Hizbollah and its constituency does not work. The next round may witness attacks on critical infrastructure, government buildings and Lebanese military facilities. That would draw the entire country into the conflict, but once again without any national consensus on why to fight or what to fight for.
Another casualty of the crisis could be the US policy of rebuilding ties with Damascus, which is based on the idea that Syria can be lured away from Iran. So far, US efforts have delivered meagre results. After the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said Washington was asking Damascus “to begin to move away from the relationship with Iran”, Mr Assad took a swipe at her, saying “we must have understood Clinton wrong, probably because of bad translation or our limited understanding” during a meeting with the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Damascus in February.
Ultimately, the real victim of a war fuelled by the missile crisis would be Lebanon. It faces massive destruction by Israel, civil conflict if Hizbollah goes after its domestic opponents and possibly a return of Syrian forces if the world once again outsources the Lebanese mess to Damascus. It happened in 1976, and it could happen again.
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=38527
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