Israel Bombs Syria and Nobody Cares

When was the last time you can remember Israel bombing another Middle Eastern country and nobody cared? The answer is this month. The Middle East has changed. To what extent is still unknown, and what the root causes of this change can be debated, but clearly we live in a strange time in history. Despite an unpopular war in Iraq, a 24/7 news satellite TV news cycle, and a robust print media active in propaganda somehow the Middle East is giving Israel a pass. The details remain very sketchy regarding the air strike by Israel against Syria, with rumor driving most of the story so far, but what we do know tells us a lot.

There are a number of theories and angles to this story, but few have been verified. Every story talks about the censorship, yet all the stories then go on about reported details and few distinguish which are rumor and which is accurate. The silence is helping propagate the myths, which is probably an intentional side effect. The Times story is the best narrative, but it raises even more questions.

Rumors to date include commandos, a North Korean Ship, the possibility the target was a nuclear facility, there is an Iran and Hezbollah link, and that there may have been 2 strikes instead of one. There are also a number of noteworthy facts including assistance by the Turkish military in some capacity for Israel and a lack of outrage in the Middle East.

That second point can't be stressed enough.

On the political side is it noteworthy that North Korea, Iran, Syria, and a few voices in Turkey is about the only outrage you can find, unless you are counting Ron Paul and the Jewish military industrial complex conspiracy angle. Both China and Russia have been mute, in fact China canceled the upcoming nuclear talks with North Korea without explanation, adding more to the nuclear angle mystery. With Israel continuing down its path of peace negotiations with Syria despite the event, things appear to be settling down.

Syria originally filed a protest at the UN, but withdrew the protest when they realized the UN wanted to see what happened up close. Syria appears to have something to hide, and that took the wind out of their outraged sails.

Assuming Syria has something to hide, Israel did something serious enough not to talk about, North Korea is angry about something, Iran got quiet really quickly, and everyone in the US has a different opinion regarding what happened, I'm starting to buy a combination of two theories.

The first comes from the conclusion following a detailed summery to date in the Wall Street Journal:

Could we have just lived through a partial reprise of the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor?

It certainly looks like that might be what happened, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Kenneth Pollack at the Brookings Institution tells the rest of the story:

"But no one knows what the Syrians were up to," he says. "People are wondering if it was a very nascent nuclear program and no one wants to see that."

Those two statements sum up how I see this saga to date. BTW, I'd love to know which country helped Israel insert the commandos (if they were even involved), unless you actually believe they deployed directly from Israel to north Syria. In my opinion, that is the most interesting story yet to be told, more so than the bombing itself.