At the brink: the ‘limited’ strike


To all those cheering along from the sidelines (Arab League) and hoping the US ‘limited’ strike on Syria would somehow tip the scales in favor of the Syrian opposition and the Free Syrian Army, think again! This foolhardy strike would have truly ‘catastrophic’ consequences as the Russians have warned. Iran is prepared to retaliate should the US strike Syria, but not against US military targets against Israel. An attack on Syria “means the immediate destruction of Israel,” said General Mohammad Ali Jafari, chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Even if Iran does not retaliate, Syria could and probably will. Many seem to think that because the regime did not retaliate against Israel whenever the later bombed targets within Syria that the regime would absorb the US hit and not strike back. The regime was always wary to maintain a tense stand off at all times with Israel, not wishing to give the US or Israel any excuse to attempt regime change in Syria, but this proposed strike will be a game changer.

There is no doubt the Syrian regime has the capability to strike back. It has the advanced P-800 Yakhont supersonic anti-ship missile which has a 300km range and can in theory target and hit US warships now stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean. Syria could also fire surface to surface missiles at Israel, and Syria’s air defense missile system, reportedly the best in the world after China and North Korea, could shoot down low-flying, subsonic Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from US warships.

It can be in the Syrian regime’s interest to turn this limited fight into a wider regional conflict, this way it could conceivably turn moral and diplomatic support from Russia into tangible, direct military and logistics support. If Russia is not prepared to go to war over Syria I wonder what it would take for Russia to actually go to war. If Iran strikes Israel as it promises to do if Syria is hit, would the United States retaliate and strike Iran? And if the US strikes Iran would Russia stand on the sidelines or would it step in to support its main Middle East ally Iran?

The question that everyone is asking above all is: “Can the US and Russia fight a limited conventional war in the Middle East without using nuclear weapons against each other?” I think they can and they probably will sooner or later. Since the end of the Second World War the balance of global power has been frozen in time, so to speak, the victors in the war are still nominally the official global military powers. I think many lesser powers are eager to fight a conventional war, even a limited war in the Middle East, to shake up the global balance of power, should that happen the US would be relegated to minor power status at best and a lot of countries would have to start learning Farsi, Chinese or Russian!

There is no doubt that we stand at a crucial historic juncture for human civilization, one that could define what the next two hundred years would be like. It is likely that the deserts, towns and cities of Arabia will be the battlefield where such a future war will be fought.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Orosdi-Back: A lost Beyrouth department store from an elegant age

Image
My mother told me it was located on ‘ Banks Street ’ in Down Town Beirut , the road that leads up to Riad el Solh Square . On most maps the street is also named after Riad el Solh. The store was located opposite Bank Intra, or so I was told. Presumably the location of the store was indicative of the high end goodies on sale inside. The closest comparison to Orosdi Back is the old Allied’s department store in Dubai , for those who remember Dubai in the 1980s. But Orosdi Back was a store from a different age, an age of elegance as opposed to the vulgar modern excesses of the nouveau-riche, something Beirut ’s Down Town is synonymous with! A wonderful blog dubbed ‘language hat’ published some information about the founders of this chain of department stores. According to the blog the chain of stores came about as a result of a partnership between Adolf Orosdi, a Hungarian army officer and his sons who opened a clothing store in Galata in 1855, and the Back family, who were Aust...
Read more

A Reluctant Resistance: Will They, Won't They Strike, Who Knows

Image
It’s hard for anyone to admit that they have wasted their life believing in an idea that was unrealistic and naïve even at its inception. The idea that Palestine could be liberated is one such idea that just won’t die, it keeps recirculating and reinfecting us with hope. Every 20 or 30 years some regional power decides to use this idea of liberation to achieve some kind of political success over the populations of countries in its region that it wishes to dominate.   Palestine is the perfect idea and cause, pure and good and just, just like the tale of the crucified Jesus. A story of gross injustice and cruelty heaped on a man preaching a new age religion. Same with the plight of the Palestinian people, gross injustice and cruelty. Jesus actually preached and healed and drove out demons in the very environs over which fanatical Western Jews are fighting and burning out farmers and villagers of the West Bank who have more Semitic and Canaanite DNA than many European Jews that ru...
Read more

Palestine's 100 Years War: How Our Militant Past Predicts Our Future

Image
Palestine’s 100 Years War The Past Rarely Predicts the Future, Except in the Middle East   “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” — Ernest Hemingway, 1946   For as long as I can remember my region has been at war. Everyone alive today can attest to the veracity of such a statement. We cheer the men at arms as they go off to fight, we condemn the failure to find a peaceful solution, we admire the fighter, we condemn the terrorist. We are the same people, the great mass of seated spectators, they whom we cheer and condemn, are also the same, the same breed of angry and desperate men and who can blame them, their lives have been hell.   Searching the vast archives of the internet for one of my own, a distant cousin who was one of those angry desperate men, I found an article dated March 22, 1973, in the El Paso Herald-Post titled “Middle East prediction: the worst is yet to come”. It was earie and ...
Read more