By Larry Gordon
Over the next few months and years, the pundits will be doing a great deal of analyzing over what should have and should not have been done with the multiple conflagrations in the Middle East.
It is now abundantly clear that Israel is a big winner as well as, tragically, a loser in this regard.
Now that the situation is getting closer to its conclusion, it will become crystal clear to what extent aspects of the post-October 7 battles were bungled by President Biden and his foreign policy advisors, who were torn between not wanting the terrorists to lose conclusively, while not wanting the Israelis to score a decisive victory.
Had the Biden team not been taking direction from Barack Obama and people like Secretary of State Antony Blinken, there is no way that the larger and the smaller mini wars would have dragged out so long, while costing the lives of so many fine young people.
Let’s work our way backward for a moment. No one was anticipating the fall of the Syrian government and that Bashar al-Assad would have to escape with his life to Russia as a guest of Vladimir Putin.
The fall of Syria comes amidst regional conflicts, which include Syria acting as an Iranian front in their war against Israel. While Israel and Syria have been at odds since the Israelis annexed the Golan Heights in 1967, there was stability under the Assad regimes that could now be disrupted by the rise of radical Islamists.
So, what was the value to Iran these last many years of having Syria on Israel’s border if they were not engaging directly with the Jewish state? The primary purpose of keeping Syria and Assad afloat was to use the country as a conduit to ship arms between Iran and Lebanon.
Now, with Israel bombing and destroying Syrian ammunition storehouses and disabling their air force arsenal, knocking out airfield runways and ports where ships can dock, the Israelis have effectively cut off the route used by Iran to ship missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Even better is the fact that, even though Syria is a vassal state of Russia, due to the war in Ukraine and the manner in which their arms and personnel are being depleted, Putin will not be able to assign additional resources to protect Syria from the Israeli onslaught. His buddy Bashar is safe in Moscow for now, safe from extradition to the International Criminal Court, but perhaps not so for his generals and other officials who were involved in war crimes and other atrocities.
On the other side of this violent equation, the damage Israel inflicted on Iran in their defensive attacks on the world’s terror kingpin means the Iranians could not protect Assad from his eventual defeat.
All of this leads us to consider that it might have been best to do away with the corrupt Syrian leader first and then deal with Hezbollah and the Mullahs later.
Now it’s suddenly clear why it was so important for Donald Trump to declare that “the United States recognizes that the Golan Heights are part of the State of Israel.” Last weekend, Israel moved forces quickly onto both sides of the Golan Heights and into the demilitarized zone between the two countries, which has been relatively quiet since 1974.
Bashar al-Assad and his father were brutal dictators who murdered hundreds of thousands of their own citizens if there was a whiff of an uprising or a challenge to their leadership. They joined forces with Jordan, Egypt, and a few other countries in 1967 believing that their combined might would wipe out the Jewish State. Instead, the entire Syrian Air Force was wiped out within days as Israel reclaimed the Golan and established a demilitarized zone between the two countries.
There are still a great number of objectives to be achieved. Chief among them is the release of the hostages being held in Gaza. Only after that can the “day after” scenario that has so troubled Biden and Blinken be enacted. Both of these men lived with the obsessive thought that Israel might remain in Gaza to put a stop to the missiles that have been fired directly onto Israeli population centers for the last twenty years.
Now their concerns can be broadened as history will leave these two bunglers with Israeli military forces in parts of Lebanon and Syria as well. Observers are marveling at how so much has occurred in this transitional phase since Mr. Trump was elected on November 5. These events illustrate what real leadership can accomplish and the sad state of both domestic and international affairs during the Biden-Harris administration. For more than a few months, Trump has been saying that his plan is to end the Russia-Ukraine War before being sworn in on January 20th. He also made it clear to whoever is running Hamas there will be “hell to pay” if the hostages are not released by his inauguration.
We are witnessing and living through tumultuous times. While there is unfathomable sadness and pain being experienced by so many families who lost loved ones (parents who lost children and children who lost parents), the country still perseveres.
In a sense, that is the story of the Jewish people. We are charged with producing a home for G-d in the world that He created. But Hashem’s holiness seems to be at odds with the mundane physical world that man inhabits. And it is precisely this dichotomy that represents our physical world challenge. There is war with destructive missiles and the potential for nuclear weapons, but we the Jewish people see the hand of G-d and the seeds of our redemption even in the midst of our pain. But the future is getting closer and we hope and pray that we realize this destiny speedily and in our days. n
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