Did Israel Do It?
- 02.13.2008 - 4:39 PMBy a simple process of elimination, it seems implausible that anyone other than Israel was behind the operation that killed Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus last night.
For starters, the Syrian regime can be eliminated. If the bombing had happened anywhere other than Damascus, there might be a slight chance that Syria, as so many people are speculating, knocked off one of its own heroes as part of a secret deal with America. But the bombing happened in the heart of Damascus–”the car bomb exploded . . . in Tantheem Kafer Souseh, an upscale neighborhood of Damascus, close to an Iranian school and a police station,” reports the NYT — and the embarrassment today to the Assad regime and its allies, Hizballah and Iran, could not be greater. Damascus is an extraordinarily well-surveilled city, and the Assad regime is fanatical about internal security. Even if somehow the Syrians did decide that they needed to kill Mughniyeh, doing so in Damascus, or even elsewhere in Syria, would be an unimaginably stupid way to carry it out.
So did a group of Lebanese Christians do it in retaliation for years of Syrian assassinations of March 14 leaders? There is motive — but there isn’t much in the way of means. As Tony Badran told the New York Sun, “To say that any faction in Lebanon is behind this is to greatly misstate reality. They don’t have the operational capacity. They don’t have the intelligence capacity. It is extremely unlikely that anyone in Lebanon has anything to do with this.” Moreover, had Lebanese Christians been able to do it, they would have bombed Damascus three years ago, when Syria started killing people in Beirut.
What about America? This is probably the likeliest scenario other than the Israelis, as Mugniyah’s fingerprints are on a litany of terror operations spanning well over two decades that have killed hundreds of Americans. But it’s also true that America appears to have largely given up the hunt for Mugniyah, and has also downgraded its confrontation with Syria and Iran. It is also not clear that the CIA today is enamored of the spirit of daring necessary to carry off such an operation, or that it even maintains the kind of resources in Syria that would enable it to assassinate someone if the interest arose.
And that leaves Israel, which has many obvious reasons for conducting such an operation combined with the intelligence capabilities necessary for carrying it out. We know from the 2006 war with Hizballah that Israel has reliable networks of operatives within southern Lebanon and Syria which enabled Israel to monitor the medium- and long-range missiles that were supplied to Hizballah, almost all of which Israel was able to destroy in the opening hours of the war.
Ultimately, it almost doesn’t matter who did it, because Israel will remain the presumed culprit. And that is a very good thing.
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February 13th, 2008 at 9:38 PM
Don’t forget, the confrontation with Hamas has reachd a new level in the past few weeks. This is a warning to the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad that they are not safe anywhere.
February 13th, 2008 at 11:32 PM
“And that is a very good thing.”
Yes, Noah, it is a good thing. The most effective power is that which remains less visible, and is often conjectural in the minds of its enemies. Arab societies, largely because of Islam’s overweening “otherization” of non-Islamic humanity, remains peculiarly vulnerable to conspiracy thinking. For an aggressive intelligence agency like Mossad, unabashed in its willingness to use covert power, this has an important multiplier effect–as you well know, *every* assassination, weird death, unexplained fire, building collapse and so forth, is attributed by the Street, in print or on Arab television, to the “Jews.”
Jews never had so much power in all their history! (Indeed, the United States once had such power. Do you remember when leftist and third world circles were obsessed with CIA activities? It is one measure of Langley’s decline that today, so few even discuss it is as a mover and shaker in clandestine affairs.)
Who killed Mughniyeh (yemach shemo)? We’ll probably never know. But what really matters is not what Arabs think, but what they think they think… and as long as they believe that Mossad did it, Israel’s power has been extended by another inch. We should be as lucky with the CIA.
February 14th, 2008 at 11:23 PM
Look at the technical aspects! Parking a car, presumably loaded with explosives, in an upscale neighborhood, leaving it — with someone, nearby, watching, ready to detonate the car when Mughniyeh walks by.
Just figuring out that he was likely going to be walking by is a difficult problem.
Of course, as soon as the bomb went off, then the team had the problem of exfiltration — not an easy job in that part of the world. (I wonder if has people in nearby residences?) That only makes sense.
I hope no one has forgotten Eli Cohen — eventually he paid for his mistake with his life but helped Israel very greatly, and several times, too.
And I hope has not forgotten the lessons either!
Noah is right — it had to be Israel, and we Americans should be greatful for their actions in this matter!, because peace in that region depends on them.
February 16th, 2008 at 10:48 AM
A good thing for Israel to be blamed? Isn’t it going to put them at risk for more attacks if they just come out and admit it? I agree that it’s a great thing if they did it but being coy about doing it is probably a good idea.
Maybe the reaction by Iran to this can give us a small scale idea of how they’d react to a hit on their nuclear facilities.
June 18th, 2008 at 9:48 AM
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