Syria
May 5, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
In the aftermath of Israel’s attacks on Syrian weapons facilities, I’ve seen reports that Israel fears a response from the Assad regime. In such a response, Syria would target nearby areas in Northern Israel — the same ones that were pounded in the 2006 Lebanese War. But according to the Jerusalem Post, residents of Northern Israel are not worried that Assad will bomb them. They see Assad as too weak
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May 4, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
It turns out that those Israeli air strikes inside Syria were directed at a shipment of advanced surface-to-surface missiles from Iran that was intended for Hezbollah. Iran and Hezbollah both back Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war. But the weapons shipment may have been as much or more about strengthening Hezbollah in a post-Assad Syria as about helping Assad retain power. In any event, Israel was not about to
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May 3, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Israeli planes reportedly entered Syrian air space today and bombed Syrian targets. The targets are said to be one or more weapons facility. It isn’t clear whether, assuming the veracity of the reports, the targets were chemical weapons facilities. But if the Syrian government has used chemical weapons, bombing chemical weapons facilities is an appropriate response, for it diminishes the chemical weapons capability of both the Assad regime and its
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April 30, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
At his press conference today, President Obama took the same position on Syria that his spokesmen have previewed. It’s a lawyerly, two-part position. First, we don’t know for sure that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons. Second, even if it has, this is just one factor in our analysis of what to do (or not do). The first part may be true, and after Iraq we should have less
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April 25, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Chuck Hagel has announced that the United States believes, “with varying degrees of confidence” that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against its people. Taken literally, Hagel’s statement makes no sense. No one — and no entity — can believe something with varying degrees of confidence. What Hagel means, I assume, is that the relevant players within our government believe that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against
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April 9, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, writes an op-ed for the Washington Post called “A partner in Iraq.” The most significant thing about the op-ed is that Maliki took the trouble to produce it. By doing so, he goes a ways towards demonstrating that the U.S. does have a partner, of sorts, in Iraq and that, as he puts it, the U.S. has not lost Iraq. Maliki’s piece relies
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March 29, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Elliott Abrams wonders where the hard core jihadists currently fighting in Syria — an estimated 5,000 of them — will go when/if the fighting ends there. Israeli officials naturally are asking the same question. According to Abrams, the Israelis identify the following possibilities: They may go west to Lebanon, to fight the Shiite group Hezbollah. They may go south to try to cross into the Golan, and fight the Israeli
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March 13, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Recently, Iran has been expelling al Qaeda officials who holed up there for years. Bin Laden’s son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, is only the latest example. U.S. officials and terrorism experts tell the Washington Post that these expulsions suggest growing tension between Iran’s Shiite clerics and al Qaeda’s Sunni terrorists. Yet officials and experts also believe that Iran still permits al Qaeda to use Iranian territory as a transit route to
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March 4, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Last week, in a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Marco Rubio called for the United States to provide ammunition to the Syrian opposition. And nearly every week, it seems, John McCain argues that the U.S. should supply arms to that opposition. But Michael Rubin argues, persuasively I think, that the time has passed to take such action because the Syrian opposition is now dominated by radical
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February 16, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Seven Syrians wounded in fighting in that country’s civil war entered Israel today and received medical treatment. The seven were wounded when Syrian troops bombarded the demilitarized zone near Israel on Saturday in reprisal for rebel action nearby. They arrived at the Syrian-Israeli border fence, where IDF soldiers administered first aid on the spot. The seven were then rushed to Ziv Medical Center in Safed in Northern Israel for additional
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February 9, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The White House has explained that President Obama nixed Gen. Petraeus’ plan to aid Syrian rebels — which Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, and Gen. Dempsey all supported — because the CIA concluded that the weaponry Obama was willing to provide wouldn’t “tip the scales” in favor of the Syrian rebels. This is not to say that the CIA thought the plan developed by Petraeus wouldn’t tip the scales. The General
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February 8, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, Leon Panetta testified that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff backed a plan to aid selected groups fighting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Reportedly, the strategy was developed by then-CIA Director Petraeus and supported by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. President Obama rejected the plan, however. The Washington Post’s editors, citing reporting by the New York Times, attribute the decision to Obama’s re-election campaign,
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January 6, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, I wrote that the “Arab Spring” is coming to Iraq. Perhaps I should have said that it has already arrived. As Reuters reports: Over the past two weeks, tens of thousands of Sunnis have staged demonstrations, and in Anbar province they have blocked a highway to Syria in a show of anger against Maliki, whom they accuse of marginalizing their community and monopolizing power. The discontent is real, but
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January 5, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Does the turbulence in the Middle East contain a unifying theme, and if so what is it? A year and a half ago, many would have identified the quest for democracy as the commonality. Today, not so much. For me, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood ties together events in several Middle Eastern countries, most notably Egypt and Syria. But it has no direct relevance to Iran, a vital player
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December 18, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
The Muslim Brotherhood is a virulently anti-Western Islamist outfit committed to the destruction of Israel. Its history of engaging in and supporting terrorism is beyond dispute. President Obama backs the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He backed it, for example, when the military tried to stand up against Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood man who heads the Egyptian government, and when he made Morsi look like the hero of Hamas’ recent mini-victory
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December 11, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal tells us that the Al Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant, an al Qaeda-linked jihadist group, has taken control of the last major Syrian Army base in western Aleppo. The base is believed to be involved in Syria’s chemical weapons program. Agence France Presse (AFP) reported last month that the base “contained clandestine scientific research whose purpose was unknown even to
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December 5, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that the Syrian army is weakening and that the rebels are making gains. I don’t dispute either proposition. However, we’ve seen variations on this story for more than a year, and Bashar Assad’s regime still hasn’t fallen. Maybe the end is near, now that the rebels have gained the ability to counter the regime’s air power by shooting down its helicopters and planes with shoulder-fired missiles.
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