The Israeli raid sends a message that the military option
could yet be pursued. The rebels who based their overall strategy on a foreign
military intervention have recently discovered that the only outside
intervention they were able to get was from the international network of
al-Qaeda and the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood. No
surprise then that the frustrated Syrian rebels are loosing ground, momentum
and morale.
An Israeli military intervention would undoubtedly revive
their morale, but temporarily, because it does not potentially guarantee that
it will succeed in improving their chances where failure doomed the collective
efforts of all the "Friends of Syria," whose numbers dwindled over time from
more than one hundred nations about two years ago to about fifty in their last
meeting in Paris.
Such intervention would only promise more of the same,
prolonging the military conflict, shedding more of Syrian blood, exacerbating
the humanitarian crisis, multiplying the numbers of those displaced inside the
country and the Syrian refugees abroad, postponing an inevitable political
solution, and significantly rallying more Syrians in support of the ruling
regime in defending their country against the Israeli occupier of their Syrian
Golan heights, thus isolating the rebels by depriving them from whatever
support their terrorist tactics have left them.
More importantly however, such an Israeli intervention risks a
regional outburst if not contained by the world community or if it succeeds in
inviting a reciprocal Syrian retaliation. Both Syrians and Israelis were on
record in the aftermath of the Israeli raid that the bilateral "rules of
engagement" have already changed.
All the "Friends of Syria" have
been on record that they were doing all they could to enforce a "buffer zone"
inside Syria; they tried to create it through Turkey in northern Syria, through
Jordan in the south, through Lebanon in the west and on the borders with Iraq
in the east, but they failed to make it materialize. They tried to enforce it
by a resolution from the UN Security Council, but their efforts were aborted
three times by a dual Russian -- Chinese veto. They tried, unsuccessfully so
far, to enforce it outside the
jurisdiction of the United Nations by arming an internal rebellion, publicly on
the payroll of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, logistically supported by Turkey and the
U.S., British, French and German intelligence services and spearheaded mainly
by the al-Qaeda -- linked Al-Nusra
Front , a rebellion focusing on the peripheral areas sharing borders with
Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, after the failure of an early attempt to make
the western Syrian port city of Latakia on the Mediterranean play the role the
city of Benghazi played in the Libyan "change of regime."
Now,
On February 3, British "The Sunday
Times" reported that Israel is considering creating a buffer zone reaching up
to ten miles inside Syria, modelled on a similar zone it created in southern
Lebanon in 1985 from which it was forced to withdraw unconditionally by the
Hezbullah -- led and Syrian and Iranian -- supported Lebanese resistance in 2000.
Israeli mainstream daily Maariv ("evening" in Hebrew) the next day confirmed
the Times report, adding the zone would be created in cooperation with
local Arab villages on the Syrian side of the UN-monitored buffer zone, which
was created on both sides of the armistice line after the 1973 Israeli -- Syrian
war.
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