The exposure of the Israeli attacks on Syria's chemical program, as first reported in the Washington Post, came with considerable delay.
The attacks themselves took place a long time ago: the first in March 2020, and the second in June this year.
The Americans knew both well because they received real-time reports from Israel.
More precisely, they knew them even before they were implemented, because Israel also shared with them the intelligence indications that Syria was trying to rehabilitate its chemical capabilities.
It can be assumed, therefore, that the Americans were not behind the publication of the attacks this week.
In any case, they had no interest in doing so;
The Israeli attacks present them as an empty tool.
After all, the United States has explicitly pledged (during the Obama administration, and at every opportunity since) that it will not allow Syria to redevelop its chemical capability, and warned that if Syria does, it will be attacked.
In practice, the Americans contented themselves with an agreement they reached with Russia to export most of the chemical weapons from Syria.
This agreement was reached after in August 2013 the Assad regime killed 1,400 civilians with chemical weapons in Damascus.
Since then, another 200 chemical attacks have been carried out in Syria;
The Americans rolled their eyes, and allowed them because they used chlorine, which is not considered a chemical weapon according to international conventions.
Act big
The Middle East understands only power. The hold survives, even if it commits war crimes along the way. Assad is a living example of this: after killing hundreds of thousands of his people and turning millions into refugees, while committing every possible horror, he is back to being legitimate. The latest evidence of this was last month's visit to Damascus by Emirati Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed, for the first time since the country's civil war broke out exactly a decade ago.
The only one who still challenges this legitimacy is the Biden administration. For him, Assad was and remains a war criminal, and as such is disqualified from marriage or discourse. This is a legitimate approach, based on the idea that there are acts for which there is no forgiveness. It could also have been sided with, had the administration in Washington been a little more serious and consistent, and most importantly - had it also backed up its noble aspirations by decisive actions.
As mentioned, Assad returned to dealing with chemical weapons.
that's a fact.
And as mentioned, the Biden administration (and its predecessor, the Trump administration) rolled their eyes and did nothing when it happened.
This week I asked a senior Israeli source how this is possible.
He replied that we think "Middle Eastern," and they think "Washington."
Explain, I asked.
We attack everything, he said.
Whoever raises his head, we take it down.
Americans do not work that way.
They have no interest in being dragged into response after any interest in the area.
They have a notebook, and they accumulate an account in it.
When they operate, it's big.
I asked for an example.
The assassination of Qassem Suleimani, he replied.
The Iranians attacked the American forces in Iraq, and attacked, and attacked, unresponsive, even when the Americans were killed and wounded.
They thought the Americans were suckers, until they snatched the bomb.
You may like it or not, but that's how the US works.
It seems that those who leaked the story of the chemical weapons attack to the Washington Post believe less in this theory of the use of American force. Or rather: he believes in it less when Joe Biden is sitting in the White House. Whoever declared that for him the use of force would be the last option may have answered the wishes of his voters, who were tired of shedding American blood in foreign fields, but dramatically increased the heartbeat among his friends-partners all over the globe - and especially in the Middle East.
You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to understand that the leak was Israeli, probably one of the top officials to visit Washington recently. Israel has used this tool, of exposing actions through the international media, more than once in the past; The choice of tool was made according to need and specialization: sometimes it was the British press, sometimes the German press, mostly the American press.
The automatic interpretation of the publication was that it was intended for Tehran.
While the parable was about a chemical weapons attack in Syria, the parable was Iran's nuclear weapons.
There is no doubt that the Iranians read this publication with great interest (and so did the Syrians), but it seems that its main destination was actually in the place of publication - in Washington.
Israel made it clear to him to the administration, through his home newspaper, that she really, but really, does not trust him.
Here, too, the parable and parable are simple.
The Americans promised not to allow the chemical weapons to return to Syria, and did nothing when it happened even though they knew about it in real time.
Why, then, should one believe their promises that they will not allow Iran to be nuclear?
It is doubtful whether Washington liked this blow to the nose, but it is legitimate: certainly when the nuclear talks are taking place in Vienna.
The Americans must prove that they mean what they say, and that they hold a great stick behind the soft words, as President Roosevelt summed up American policy at the beginning of the last century.
As for Israel - and unlike the Iranian nuclear program - the chemical weapons attack in Syria was an almost marginal event.
Anyone who has claimed otherwise this week simply does not know the affair.
The attacks were operationally simple, and were carried out almost "on the road", as part of the intensive activities carried out in Syria as part of the MBM. So it is to be hoped, understood his lesson long ago.
Sanctions and naive pacifism
A senior Israeli official, who briefed reporters in Miami last week, is required by the sanctions case imposed by the US Department of Commerce on two Israeli (and several foreign) offensive cyber companies - NSO and Kandiro.
He expressed concern about the affair, and hoped that it could be resolved.
One has to be particularly optimistic to believe that this will also happen. The administration, it seems, has marked the Israeli offensive cyber industry. These two societies (which have no connection, and it is not clear why they were bound together) are a first swallow, followed by more. There are no shortage of reasons: from a pacifist-naive view of the world that sees any invasion of privacy as a bad deed, to a cynical desire to take over this industry and leave it exclusive to the American market.
NSO has in recent years become the "poster boy" of the offensive cyber world.
Now it costs her an existential struggle;
On Tuesday, U.S. lawmakers - including those who are not considered so radical - demanded much stricter sanctions on it, which would lead to its elimination.
It is difficult to see how it emerges from the crisis, which is only getting worse, without significant state assistance.
Twenty years ago, Israel was forced to cancel, under American pressure, the deal to sell a Falcon warning plane to China.
Following the affair, at the request of the United States, the Department of Defense Export Control (AFI) was established in the Ministry of Defense.
The current sanctions show that the Americans do not trust the Israeli supervision;
If they had thought differently, they would have been satisfied with a complaint / demand to the Ministry of Defense to investigate the companies' conduct and restrict them.
This requires Israel to recalculate a route.
Offensive cyber is part of the ecosystem of the high-tech industry.
Hitting it will have security, economic and political implications.
If Israel does not want to lose world leadership in the field, it must wake up immediately.
Were we wrong?
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