5 Feb. 2010
Ø ISRAELI…1
Ø TURKISH & BRITISH…2
Ø AMERICAN…………..…………...3
Ø Assad sits comfortably on his throne………………………..4
Ø Wooing Damascus to isolate Teheran ……………………....7
Ø Jerusalem tones down Syria rhetoric ………………………..9
Ø Frustration in Damascus …………………………………...13
Ø Syria is blowing off steam, not rattling sabers……………..16
Ø Peace with Syria still in Israel's sights……………………..18
Ø Israel's dual reality………………………………………….21
Ø Feltman and Abrams Explain US Policy ………………....24
Ø POLITICALCARTOONS……12
ISRAELI MEDIA BRIEFING
TURKISH & BRITISH BRIEFING
AMERICAN BRIEFING
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Assad sits comfortably on his throne
Assad has become the pivotal player in the rapidly realigning Middle East.
By BY AMIR MIZROCH
Jerusalem Post,
05/02/2010
In 2008, President Bashar Assad was a worried man.
The UN probe into the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri pointed at direct involvement of senior members of the Assad regime. Hariri’s long-time friend, French president Jacques Chirac, was clamoring for Assad’s head. The International Atomic Energy Agency was pursuing a probe of a Syrian nuclear facility, which, according to foreign media, had been bombed by the Israel Air Force. Damascus was being linked with Pyongyang, Assad with Kim Jong Il.
Assad was also nervously watching for any last-minute surprises by a departing George W. Bush, who hated the Syrian regime with a passion and wanted to avenge the deaths of US soldiers killed by foreign fighters who had reached Iraq via Syria’s borders. In the final stretch of the Bush presidency, about 25 percent to 30% of the Syrian army was deployed along the Iraq border in a defensive posture for this reason.
In addition, Assad was warily watching the back of departing prime minister Ehud Olmert, who had already, according to foreign reports, attacked his nuclear facility in al-Kibar and who he believed had ordered the assassination of Hizbullah’s top general, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus – a major embarrassment for the Syrian president.
Finally, one of Assad’s top military advisers and liaison to Iran and North Korea was killed by a sniper’s bullet.
Syria’s leader also had some serious internal headaches, which have not receded since then. Unemployment is rampant, with over one million Syrians living abroad in Lebanon and the Gulf states due to a lack of work back home. Syria’s economy, while growing steadily, is doing so at a slower rate than the Middle East as a whole. The country has a drastic water shortage, and it doesn’t have enough money or expertise to build desalination plants. There are some neighborhoods in Damascus where you can’t get water at night. Syria’s oil is also running out, and Assad still hasn’t figured out how to supplant that cash cow.
But despite all of these factors, the young Bashar Assad has not been shaken off his seat. 2009 was a much better year for the Syrian president. With the West trying to pry him away from Teheran, and the Iranian regime wooing him to stay, Assad became the pivotal player in the rapidly realigning Middle East and gradually ended his country’s isolation.
He has made good friends with former enemy Turkey; a new, more approachable American president has reinstated his ambassador in Damascus; and Assad has been welcomed with open arms by a more forgiving French president. US Middle East envoy George Mitchell has also come calling, gauging Syria’s readiness for peace talks with Israel.
Assad now has leverage over both the pragmatic camp and the radical axis. Both sides want him to come over fully. Europe sees him as part of the solution. At present, Assad is skillfully playing both sides against each other, but is not really moving in any direction, and he still has to decide where along the East-West axis he wants to position his country.
With so much to gain, Bashar Assad entered 2010 with a smile on his face. And it is precisely this smile that Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is now trying to wipe off, by threatening Assad’s crowning achievement: his hold on power.
In our contemporary parlance, Lieberman put Assad on a very low couch on Thursday. But the problem is that all the signs show Assad is currently sitting on a very high stool.
He has skillfully navigated his country’s interests over the past few years. According to Western assessments, Assad does not currently want war and is unlikely to attempt a symmetrical battle with Israel. He knows his army and country are vulnerable, and he doesn’t want his regime to collapse.
With so much recent progress, Assad has much to lose. When his country runs out of oil, his regime will be dependent on the country that supplies him with his energy needs, and Iran is very willing to fill that role. Assad, however, doesn’t want to be seen as an Iranian client state, and thus be weak and isolated.
Western intelligence assessments posit that to get the Golan Heights back, Assad would pay the price of keeping the strategic plateau demilitarized. He might even allow some Israeli villages and vineyards to stay where they are under some arrangement.
As long as he takes only small steps in both directions – toward the West and toward Iran – and signals his intention to resume talks with Israel, the international community will not support an aggressive Israeli action against Bashar Assad.
Avigdor Lieberman is not nearly as welcome as Bashar Assad in many of the world’s capitals. And Thursday’s comments by the foreign minister will most likely not shake the Syrian leader’s hold on power.
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Wooing Damascus to isolate Teheran
The IDF still believes that it has more to benefit from peace with Syria than it does from keeping the Golan Heights.
By BY YAAKOV KATZ
Jerusalem Post,
05/02/2010
The IDF’s deployment along the Golan Heights did not change on Thursday, despite the escalation in rhetoric on both sides of the Israeli-Syrian border.
Relations between the countries took a turn for the worse on Monday, when Defense Minister Ehud Barak told a gathering of senior IDF officers that in the absence of a peace deal with Syria, Israel could find itself at war with its neighbor to the north. The war, he said, would be pointless since its conclusion would likely be followed by immediate peace talks that would focus on the same issues that are currently separating the two states.
The response from Damascus came the next day, when Foreign Minister Walid Moallem warned Israel not to test Syria’s resolve. Israel quickly fired back with its own foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who warned Thursday that not only would Syria lose a war with Israel, but the Assad family would lose the presidency.
While the rise in tension is worrying, the assessment in the IDF is that it will not lead to a wider conflict, which is currently against the short- and long-term interests of both sides. The scenario in which the IDF believes war with Syria could break out? Following an American or Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. If this happens, Syria might be urged by its strategic ally to retaliate.
The strategic alliance between Syria and Iran is exactly the reason why Barak, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and Military Intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin have been pushing for the past three years to launch peace negotiations with Syria.
This is due to a change in Israeli military thinking. Twenty years ago, Israel was genuinely threatened by Damascus. The need for peace then was in order to prevent war. In the past 10 years, though, the military balance has dramatically shifted, largely due to the major technological advantage the IDF now has over the Syrian military. While the Syrian military should not be underestimated, it does not really have an air force, it has outdated artillery and armored corps, and its air defense systems were ineffective in the September 2007 strike against its nuclear reactor.
The main damage to Israel in the event of a war with Syria would be on the battlefield between IDF infantry and Syrian commandos, and on the Israeli home front which Syria could easily penetrate with its assortment of Scud C and D ballistic missiles.
Ultimately, though, with the IAF, Israel would have the upper hand and would be able to inflict major damage on Syrian military installations, government buildings and basic infrastructure.
A war with Syria would also be very different to a conflict with Hamas or Hizbullah, both terror groups that operate inside states. While in those conflicts Israel has traditionally made a distinction between the governments and the terror groups, in Syria’s case this would not apply. As Lieberman said Thursday, Assad would lose his presidency.
But despite this military advantage, the IDF still believes that it has more to benefit from peace with Syria than it does from keeping the Golan Heights. Since taking up his current post three years ago, Ashkenazi has been a silent proponent of peace talks with Damascus. He backed the previous government’s indirect peace talks with the Syrians in Turkey and has said on more than one occasion that in his opinion, a peace treaty with Syria could have a positive ripple effect through the region and help isolate Iran and stabilize Lebanon.
Together with Yadlin, Ashkenazi believes that peace with Damascus would further isolate Teheran and increase the chance of diplomacy stopping its nuclear program. With the right assurances, peace could also cut off the supply of weaponry to Hamas and Hizbullah, two Iranian proxies that currently enjoy full Syrian support.
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Jerusalem tones down Syria rhetoric
BY HERB KEINON
Jerusalem Post,
05/02/2010
Netanyahu and Barak scramble to offset Lieberman’s war talk.
Concerned that a sudden, nasty war of words with Damascus could spiral out of control and lead to disastrous, unintended consequences, Jerusalem scaled back the rhetoric on Thursday night, with the government’s highest echelon sending out one message: Israel wants peace talks with Syria, not war.
At the end of a day that started with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman responding to bellicose Syrian threats by saying a war with Syria would result in the end of President Bashar Assad’s regime, and a senior Syrian official threatening that a war would be regional and all-encompassing, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Lieberman issued a joint statement saying that Israel wanted to “conduct negotiations with Syria, without preconditions.”
And Defense Minister Ehud Barak called on Assad to “return to the negotiating table, instead of trading harsh words.”
“I and the security establishment feel that an agreement with Syria is a strategic objective for Israel,” Barak said at a Labor Party forum. “Almost every prime minister over the past few decades made efforts to move forward a chance for an agreement with Syria.”
He said that from Israel’s position of strength and power at the start of 2010, “we can allow ourselves to work with determination toward reaching agreements in the Middle East, without giving up or harming in any way Israel’s security interests. We are working toward a diplomatic arrangement and entering negotiations with the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples, and it is fitting that we work toward entering discussions with the Syrians.”
Ironically, it was Barak himself who seemingly triggered the somewhat inexplicable war of words with Damascus, saying at an IDF forum on Monday that if there were no negotiations with the Syrians, there would likely be a war, after which both sides would return to the same point of negotiations that they were at when the talks broke down in 2008.
While the defense minister, who is the leading voice in the government advocating talks with the Syrians as a way of removing them from the Iranian orbit, had meant his words to demonstrate why negotiations were necessary, the Syrians interpreted them in a completely opposite manner, viewing them as a threat.
On Wednesday, in a meeting with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, Assad said that “Israel is not serious about achieving peace since all facts point out that Israel is pushing the region toward war, not peace.”
Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid Muallem jumped into the fray at a press conference with Moratinos, saying that Israel “should not test Syria’s determination” and “should know that a war will move to Israeli cities.”
He also hinted that Syria would not sit idly by if Israel took military action against Hizbullah in southern Lebanon.
These words triggered an unusually harsh response from Lieberman, who, at a forum at Bar-Ian University on Thursday morning, took the rare step of saying that if there were a war, not only would Syria lose, but Assad would lose his power.
“We all heard the sincere call by the defense minister for peace with Syria, and we received a militant response twice – from both Syrian Foreign Minister Muallem and also from President Assad,” Lieberman said.
“Whoever thinks territorial concessions will disconnect Damascus from the Axis of Evil is simply deluding himself and running away from the truth,” Lieberman went on. “And therefore our message has to be the exact opposite – we must bring Syria to the understanding that just as it gave up on the dream of Greater Syria and control of Lebanon... so, too, will it have to give up on its ultimate claims to the Golan Heights.”
Lieberman said that what had to be clear to Assad and Muallem was that their comments represented a dramatic change, because they hinted that if Israel responded to a Hizbullah attack from Lebanon, “Syria would be in the game.”
Saying that this was crossing a red line, Lieberman said that Israel’s message to Assad had to be clear: “In the next war not only will you lose, you and your family will lose control of the government. You will not remain in power, nor will your family. That has to be the message, because the only thing that interests them is not the value of life, or humanistic values; the only thing that is important to them is power, and therefore that value has to be harmed.”
Unfortunately, Lieberman said, in the past there had been no correlation between military defeat and the loss of power.