In Syria, Israel Finds A 'Blessed War'
Much of the world reeled in horror at the scenes of destruction that accompanied the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s. But as Iraqi jets pounded Tehran, and Iran struck back by sending waves of indoctrinated youth into the teeth of Iraq’s artillery, the Israeli government sat back and watched its ideal scenario play out. Two of its fiercest foes were grinding one another down in a war of attrition, with its patron in Washington providing both sides with everything from mortar rounds to assistance with chemical weapons.
“We used to call the Iran-Iraq War the blessed war,” reflected Caroline Glick, a right-wing Israeli commentator and former aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “May it go on for a hundred years.”
Now Israel finds itself in a remarkably similar -- and equally advantageous -- situation. The civil war in Syria has turned major population centers from Homs to Aleppo into rubble, degrading the Assad regime’s military capacity. Its Lebanese client, Hezbollah, has suffered thousands of casualties in a counterinsurgency campaign across the Syrian border. Rebel forces press on but show no sign that they can topple Assad without aggressive U.S. intervention -- a scenario that the Obama administration has explicitly ruled out with its pledge of “surgical strikes,” and that the Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus appears to oppose as well.
Thus President Bashar al-Assad remains firmly in place, but as a weakened figure loathed by his former friends in the U.S. and Europe, and presiding over a country fragmented by sectarianism and infected with imported Muslim fundamentalists. For Israel, the situation represents the fulfillment of a strategy outlined by the neoconservative scholar Bernard Lewis, a favorite of Netanyahu and many of his advisers. “[A] possibility, which could even be precipitated by [Islamic] fundamentalism, is what has of late been fashionable to call ‘Lebanonization,’” Lewis wrote in an influential 1992 essay in Foreign Affairs called “Rethinking the Middle East.” “If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity … The state then disintegrates -- as happened in Lebanon -- into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and parties.”
MORE...
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/14/in-syria-israel-findsaablessedwara.html