Syria accused of killing Mughniyeh

Or is someone just double-daring Damascus to start something? "Minister of Communications Marwan Hamade asked Saturday why wouldn't Syria avenge the assassination of Hizbullah's Imad Mughniyeh who was killed in Damascus not in Lebanon. Mughniyeh's assassination in a Damascus suburb on Feb. 12 was a 'major insult to Syria's national security, unless Syria was involved in liquidating him.'"

The Syrian regime, he charged, is "ready to sell its brother, father, uncle and brother in law." Hamade accused Hizbullah, Syria and Iran of "placing bets on Israel that also places bets on them. Fanatics feed each other."

"We are not collaborators with Israel. We adopt a wise Arab stand and who opts for adventures let him go to adventures alone," Hamade stressed.

The implication of course, is that someone else -- Hizbullah, Syria or Iran -- are in secret league with Israel to do in the other party. Hamade went on to imply that Hizbullah might be trying to provoke Israel for its own purposes.

Hamade declared that he can not exonerate Hizbullah's "logistics branch" in the attempt to assassinate him on Oct. 1, 2004 by a car bomb. He noted that Qatar managed to withdraw its contingent serving with UNIFIL in south Lebanon early in February because "it felt that something is being planned for south Lebanon and because no one wants to go back to the 1980s" in reference to the abduction of foreigners by pro-Iranian factions.

I'm not sure whether to believe any of Hamade's specific allegations, but I think he correctly puts his finger on the practice of blaming Israel as a smokescreen to pursue otherwise nefarious agendas or to use Israel to deal with foes. Many of the conflicts in the Middle East are really mundane ploys to pillage fellow Arab countries or esconsce some faction in power or rackets which would be instantly familiar to Al Capone. However, it is the convention in the region to disguise crime as Jihad against the Jew and the convention in the Western intellectual circles to believe them.

Hamade asked for the "international community" to restrain Israel while the Lebanese Army dealt with preventing "civil strife" and safeguarding the "security and stability" of Lebanon, which I take to mean crack down on the Hezbollah. But taking on Hezbollah would provoke civil strife, which might bring Syria in on the side of Hezbollah and which in turn would bring in Israel.

And so we come back to the first question: did Syria kill Mughniyeh?

Picador

Is Hezbollah preparing to be struck or preparing to strike?

Ynet quotes a Lebanese newspaper which says Hezbollah has gone to full alert following the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, ordered 50,000 of its fighters to high alert, and evacuated most of its openly used buildings in south Lebanon in order to prepare 'to curb any Israeli aggression.'" VOA reports Syrian and Iranian officials met Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal and Ramadan Abdullah of Islamic Jihad presumably do discuss a response to Mughniyeh's death. Hezbollah itself has filled Mugniyeh's vacancy by appointing a new commander in secret.

In the meantime the FBI and DHS warned state and local law enforcement authorities to watch for retaliatory strikes by Hezbollah. The joint bulletin said that "while retaliation in the U.S. homeland is unlikely, Hezbollah has demonstrated a capability to respond outside the Middle East to similar events in the past". This, while Israel's chief of staff has "ordered land, air and naval forces on alert to ensure the defense of the northern border and of other Israeli interests," and its facilities abroad hunkered down.

The question on both sides of the line is who is going to move next. Judging by reactions Mughniyeh's death was both a tactical and strategic surprise. Internal investigations into security breaches indicate Syria, Iran and Hezbollah themselves ares still trying to figure out how Mughniyeh was hit. But the secret appointment of a new Hezbollah head and evacuation of their buildings in South Lebanon suggests they also haven't decided why they were hit. There is palpable uncertainty in Damascus over whether Mughniyeh's death was a one-off or the first blow of a wider campaign against them.

Syria in particular must be nervous, following the recent destruction of a mysterious facility in the Syrian desert in which Israeli cyberwar played a large part and the suspicious outage in undersea fiber optic cables serving the Middle East.

The problem facing Syria and Iran (together with the terrorist menageries based in their capitals) has two aspects: where to strike back and how quickly. In deciding the terrorist leaders must calculate whether their response will provoke a full-scale attack by Israel and or if their return blow will come too late to prevent yet another blow upon them.

The terrorist dilemma is compounded by the 2008 Presidential elections in the US. An attack on an American target would re-energize the conservative base. A war with Israel would force every American Presidential candidate to take a definite stand in the conflict. Either could doom Barack Obama's bid for the White House -- as well as efforts by Congress to defang the surveillance of terrorist suspects. Of course if Syria had any problems estimating possible effects on American politics, Assad could ask his guests. As the NY Sun observed on Feb 15, "one of Mr. Obama's foreign policy counselors, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a long-time critic of Israel, and one of Mrs. Clinton's national finance chairs, Hassan Nemazee, were meeting with President Assad".

It is also complicated by the situation in Lebanon itself. Hezbollah's efforts to take over Lebanon politically could go up in smoke if it provoked a wider war with Israel. At the same time neither Damascus, Teheran or it terrorist minions could afford to appear helpless. They must strike back without being sure how hard or how quickly.

The fear in both Damascus and Teheran today is probably that some other unexpected and unattributed blow will descend on it from out of the blue. A blow hard enough to hurt but a short of war; a blow likely to have come from either America or Israel but not for certain. One that will leave them exactly where they are now, but with a few more teeth missing.