The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis by Gareth Porter

Author:Gareth Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510756168
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2020-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

Supporting Israel’s Region-wide Escalation

IN PREVIOUS YEARS, ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES (IDF) had carried out dozens of attacks on what it had identified as convoys of missiles in Syria on their way to Lebanon for Hezbollah’s arsenal, but it had also accepted certain implicit limits on those attacks, including their frequency, intensity and lethality. It had also foresworn any attack within Lebanon itself as risking the near-certainty of provoking retaliation by Hezbollah.157 In mid-2017, however, the Netanyahu government laid the political groundwork for breaking those previously established “rules of the game” to carry out a major military escalation in Syria and even possible strikes in Lebanon. It began arguing that Iran was establishing permanent bases in Syria and secretly building factories in Syria and Lebanon for more precise missiles for Hezbollah’s arsenal. Meanwhile, Israel was establishing its own long-term influence in Southern Syria, especially near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, by supporting anti-government Syrian armed groups.

The new escalation campaign was launched in February 2018 when a Syrian drone launched from the “T-4” Syrian government airbase near Palmyra with Iranian Quds Force advisers was shot down by an Israeli plane. The Israelis asserted that the drone had entered Israeli airspace armed with explosives, implying a rationale for relating, although the Israelis had long refused to observe any limitations on its own air operations in Syria.

The IDF then attacked the drone hanger at the T-4 base with fighter planes, one of which was shot down by Syrian anti-aircraft fire, thus going well beyond the “rules of the game” that had been observed by the two sides in previous years. And it went still further, immediately retaliating for the shoot-down of its plane by hitting the main Syrian army command-and-control bunker near Damascus and five Iranian communications facilities, killing several Iranian officers.

When Iran responded in March by bringing in a new anti-aircraft system to protect the T-4 base against further Israeli air attacks, the Israelis decided to go even further by destroying the system before it could be assembled, along with the hanger in which drones were stored. But Netanyahu faced a political problem: the U.S. government was divided over how to oppose Iranian presence in Syria and elsewhere, because the Pentagon was concerned that such an aggressive attack on Iranian personnel in Syria could result in U.S. troops being expelled from Iraq.158

The Israelis could have carried out the strike during late March or early April, but the Pentagon’s objections could have caused political problems with the Trump administration. Fortunately for the Israelis, however, Trump’s new choice for National Security Adviser, John Bolton, was to begin work on April 9, so the Israelis waited until April 9 to carry out the strike, which killed seven Iranian officers. The Israelis were obviously counting on Bolton’s help in minimizing the impact of the Pentagon’s opposition to the attack.159

The broader Israeli strategy was to escalate the attacks on Iranian personnel in Syria to the point where the Russians would have to intervene forcefully to put pressure on Iran to withdraw its personnel and proxy forces from Syria entirely.

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