Wrong Airport

We rang a wise veteran observer of the Middle East scene yesterday only to find him in a state of distress that Israel's actions in Lebanon were playing into the hands of the enemy. Instead of making Syria feel pain for attacking Israel through its Hezbollah proxy, Jerusalem seems to be letting Damascus get off with no penalty, while retaliating instead against Lebanon. "Instead of shutting down Beirut airport, how about shutting down Damascus airport?" our source said.

Syria is now in the position of being able to boast all over the region that had the newly free Lebanon allied with Iran and Syria instead of with America, it would have escaped retaliation the same way that Iran and Syria have. "You wanted Syria out of Lebanon?" the Syrians can say. "We left, and look what happened. The Israelis bombed you, but they are afraid to bomb us."

Israel, this individual said, is in danger of losing the credibility of its strategic deterrence against Syria and Iran. Hezbollah wouldn't have launched a raid into Israel and kidnapped the two Israeli soldiers without the approval of Iran or Damascus. But the Syrians and the Iranians have felt no penalty for that action. It's the Damascus airport, not the Beirut airport, that is used as a point for transshipment of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah. The government in Jerusalem said yesterday that it was Syrian-made weapons that landed in the Israel's northern port city of Haifa.

The Jewish State defends its attack on the Beirut airport, along with its naval blockade of Lebanon, as a way of ensuring that the captured Israeli soldiers aren't spirited out of Lebanon. But the likeliest route out of Lebanon is over land, to Syria.

If Israel bombs Lebanon to smithereens without defeating Syria or Iran, there's a risk that Lebanon will be rebuilt after the war with Iranian petrodollars, instead of by the funds that were starting to be generated by a recovering free Lebanese economy. That, in turn, could put Lebanon under greater Iranian domination and influence, in the same way that the West Bank, Gaza, and Iraq are under Iranian sway.

Israel has plenty of experience dealing with Lebanon, and there are officials within the Israeli government who understand the need to choke off Hezbollah in Damascus rather than merely in Lebanon. Here's hoping Prime Minister Olmert listens to them. Certainly the American government has declared that Syria and Iran bear responsibility for the actions of Hezbollah and Hamas. It is Damascus that is the strategic fulcrum between Iran and Southern Lebanon. Any truce that is reached without solving the problems in Damascus and Tehran will be merely a temporary ceasefire, not a true peace.