The New Black Hole of the Eastern Mediterranean

Until awfully recently, Lebanon was the country in the Eastern Mediterranean that acted as a gravitational black hole that sucked in the neighbors. The Israelis, the Syrians, the PLO, the Iranians, and even the non-neighboring French and Americans have been involved militarily there during my lifetime.

That gravitational black hole has now moved from Beirut to Damascus. It’s fascinating to watch. And few are covering the Syrian war better than Michael Weiss at NOW Lebanon.

It’s been edifying to see how quickly the international press has discovered that Syrian air defense systems are not quite so “formidable” as they were once described by senior Pentagon officials. It apparently takes a heavily-subsidized American client state to demonstrate via mushroom clouds the flaws in American strategic thinking now that leading from behind has become a happy conceptual partner to being led by the nose by forty years of Ba’athist propaganda about Syria’s military might. But then, the Israelis have openly mocked Washington’s failure to uphold its own “red lines” and they never tire of reminding their American patrons that when it comes to human intelligence and dealing with state actors in the Middle East, the heavy lifting is really best left to them.

In the hours between Thursday and Friday last week, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) struck a convoy of Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles destined for Hezbollah that being warehoused near Damascus International Airport, as well as Russian-made Yakhont shore-to-sea cruise missiles. Then, between Saturday and Sunday, the IAF waged nine more air strikes on the Syrian capital, including on the Jamraya chemical research facility in north Damascus (a target it already struck in a similar raid last January), the Fourth Armored Division Headquarters in Mezzeh, southwest Damascus, and the Republican Guard’s 104th Brigade in the Qasioun mountain region, which was engulfed in flames. Syria claims that more than 100 of its soldiers were killed by these attacks, and many more injured. (The Fourth Armored Division and Republican Guard are Assad’s praetorian divisions, without which his conventional military would virtually cease to exist.) 

[…]

Michael Ross, an ex-Mossad officer, told me that the key to Israel’s in-and-out operations is its advanced electronic warfare system, which was constructed by Unit 8200 (“Israel’s NSA”) and is an advanced form of the “Suter” network that blinded Syrian radars during the IAF’s 2007 attack on Syria’s nuclear facility at al-Kibar. “The software identifies emitters and entry into enemy communications networks,” Ross said. “Then it shuts down some or all enemy emitters or injects misleading information or even malware. To control the skies, you must first control the electromagnetic spectrum. This is now IAF doctrine.”  Ross also said that the Fateh-110 missiles had been delivered by Iran no more than a week before they were destroyed, which indicates that either the Islamic Republic is remarkably lax with its shipping manifests or that Israeli assets come and go in Syria like I do my own living room.