11th
June 2007
Intelligence
and Middle East sources take a look at the actions
behind the words issuing from Damascus officials
affirming Syria’s willingness to go into peace talks
with Israel.
During
most of last week, two high-ranking Iranian delegations
spent time in Damascus. One was composed of generals who
held talks with Syrian leaders on coordinated
preparations for a Middle East war in the coming months.
At the
Iranian end, a similar high-ranking Syrian military
delegation called in at Iranian army and Revolutionary
Guards headquarters to tighten operational coordination
between them at the command level, as well as inspecting
the Iranian arsenal. The Syrian general staff will draw
up a list of items it is short of for a possible
military confrontation with Israel this summer.
Sources
report that last week, Tehran sent Moscow a check for
$327 m to pay for assorted missiles consigned to
Damascus. A further $438 m has been pledged by the end
of June for more hardware to Syria.
Iranian
foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki’s three days of
talks in Damascus at the end of May further consolidated
the strategic partnership between the two governments
under the mutual defense pact they signed a year ago.
Their
deliberations produced concurrence on the following
issues:
1.
Expanded economic cooperation, i.e. an enlarged Iranian
aid package for Syria including monetary assistance and
an extra 5 million tons of oil gratis per annum on top
of the one million already guaranteed.
Syrian
president Bashar Assad drove a hard bargain: He demanded
a larger slice of economic aid as the price for entering
into strategic cooperation with Iran for the coming war.
2. The
Assad government agreed not to take any military - or
other steps with military connotations - without prior
notice to Tehran and its assent. This clause applies
equally to activating the Lebanese Hizballah and the
Palestinian Hamas’ Damascus headquarters.
3.
Reciprocal visits by Syrian and Iranian generals and
political officials will be stepped up.
4. In
Iraq, Iran and Syria agreed to jointly intensify their
terrorist operations against US and British troops.
The
regime heads in Tehran are basing their common front
with Damascus on intelligence reports whereby the US and
Israel have drawn up plans for coordinated military
action against Iran, Syria and Hizballah in the summer.
According to this hypothesis, Iranian leaders foresee
the next UN Security Council in New York at the end of
June or early July ending with an American announcement
that the sanctions against Tehran are inadequate because
Russia and China has toned them down. Therefore, the
military option is the only one left on the table. The
ayatollahs have concluded that US president George W.
Bush is determined to bow out of office on the high note
of a glittering military success against Iran to eclipse
his failures in Iraq.
They
believe he will not risk the lives of more Americans by
mounting a ground operation, but rather unleash a broad
missile assault that will wipe out Iran’s nuclear
facilities and seriously cripple its economic
infrastructure.
According to the Iranian scenario, the timeline for
hostilities has already been fixed between Washington
and Jerusalem - and so has the plan of action. The US
will strike Iran first, after which Israel will use the
opportunity to go for Syria, targeting its air force,
missile bases and deployments, as well as Hizballah’s
missile and weapons stocks which Iran replenished this
year.
Officials in Tehran and Damascus find confirmation of
their intelligence evaluations in the visit Israel’s
transport minister Shaul Mofaz paid to Washington last
week at the head of a large military delegation. They
are certain Mofaz, a former defense minister and chief
of staff, used the strategic talks to tie the last ends
of the planned offensive. They were perturbed in
particular by the Israel minister’s reported advice to
secretary of state Condoleezza Rice of the importance of
setting a deadline, beyond which the US will abandon
sanctions as ineffective and turn to its remaining
options for dealing with Iran’s advance towards a
nuclear weapons capability.
Considering the climate in Damascus and Tehran and their
active pursuit of preparations for imminent attack, it
is not surprising that Israeli prime minister Ehud
Olmert received no reply to the note he sent to Assad
proposing peace talks and offering the Golan as an
incentive. Assad was not inclined to take the Israeli
prime minister seriously. According sources in
Jerusalem, Olmert did not really expect him to. The
offer was more in the nature of clearing the decks ahead
of Olmert’s White House visit later this month.
