Call me a warmongering, neocon armchair general if you like, but why in the name of heaven isn’t Israel bombing Syria at least back into the Bronze Age, if not an even earlier epoch? Syria (along with Iran, of course) is one of the primary reasons there is a war going on in the Middle East right now due to its support of the Hezbollah terrorist outfit.
Does it make any sense at all that Lebanon and Israel have to suffer all the damage while Syria, which is guilty as sin, gets off scot free? But Israel has issued repeated pledges not to attack Syria. The question of the hour, of the day, of our time is: Why?
The standard explanation is that Israel doesn’t want to risk a wider war. The problem is, rockets are raining down over much of Israel and when this is all over, if Syria skates, it has absolutely no disincentive to do its part in fomenting another proxy war against Israel whenever it feels like it (or whenever Iran calls on it to help in that regard).
Bombing Syria is something that everybody in the world who isn’t actually part of the Axis of Evil should want, including poor, hapless, long-suffering Lebanon. After all, Hezbollah, with the support of Syria, is the reason Lebanon is getting wrecked.
The brainwashed and the brain-dead will bloviate that Hezbollah is the only deterrent against Israeli occupation, but every thinking person on earth knows that without the presence of Hezbollah, or some similar terrorist group, Israel would never set foot on Lebanese soil probably for as long as the universe continues to exist.
Hezbollah, which is entrenched in Lebanon, is waging a terror war against Israel. Israel has no choice but to respond by doing grievous damage to Lebanon. Syria supports Hezbollah and serves as a conduit for weapons coming from Iran. Therefore, Syria should be bombed.  (Should Iran be bombed as well? We’ll get to that in a moment.)
There’s little chance of Syria putting up much of a fight given that it has a dilapidated military that could be largely decimated in an afternoon. Combine that with a little shock and awe over Damascus and Bashar Assad, the bumbling and rather deranged-looking dictator, would probably come to his senses rather quickly. He might even call it quits with his country’s sugar daddy, Iran. Talk about a toxic relationship. As columnist Mark Steyn said, Syria is basically Iran’s Sunni Arab prison bitch. Not much good can ultimately come from that relationship for Syria, unless it just likes getting slapped around by the Iranian Bubba.
If Israel really is concerned about a wider war, then its primary concern would be with Iran, since Iran has pledged to come to the aid of Syria should she be attacked. But does that mean it would put an army in the field to protect the Syrian hussy? Doubtful, since defeating Muslim armies has always been one of Israel’s specialties.
And doing so might also bring the U.S. into the fight, and Iraq or no Iraq, America still has the capability of bombing Iran back into . . .  Well, at the very least, the pre-atomic age. In other words, despite whatever trash talk Iran would issue about fighting the Great Satan, the last thing they would want is a war with the U.S. because they could kiss their nuclear ambitions goodbye. Any bombing campaign against Iran would include every known or suspected piece of its dispersed nuclear program.
Would Iran then unleash an army of terrorists against America and Israel? Maybe, but if they were to overplay their hand, they would risk being completely overthrown and their dreams of Middle Eastern hegemony could go up in smoke. If they instead just sit back and play it cool and continue to play the West for fools in their nuclear “negotiations,” they eventually become a nuclear power and they’re in the driver’s seat.
Hey, it’s not exactly the last word in geopolitical/war strategizing, but bombing Syria seems like a no-brainer, not to mention exactly what it deserves.
Greg Strange provides conservative commentary with plenty of acerbic wit on the people, politics, events and absurdities of our time. See more at his website: http://www.greg-strange.com/
