Syria's Nuclear Problem Eliminated By Israel?

All the silence about what happened in Syria on September 6 continues to provoke interesting theories and the latest seems to confirm what many suspected - the Israelis hit a nascent Syrian nuclear facility.

The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state. The Bush administration was divided at the time about the wisdom of Israel’s strike, American officials said, and some senior policy makers still regard the attack as premature.

The attack on the reactor project has echoes of an Israeli raid more than a quarter century ago, in 1981, when Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq shortly before it was to have begun operating. That attack was officially condemned by the Reagan administration, though Israelis consider it among their military’s finest moments. In the weeks before the Iraq war, Bush administration officials said they believed that the attack set back Iraq’s nuclear ambitions by many years.

By contrast, the facility that the Israelis struck in Syria appears to have been much further from completion, the American and foreign officials said. They said it would have been years before the Syrians could have used the reactor to produce the spent nuclear fuel that could, through a series of additional steps, be reprocessed into bomb-grade plutonium.

Many details remain unclear, most notably how much progress the Syrians had made in construction before the Israelis struck, the role of any assistance provided by North Korea, and whether the Syrians could make a plausible case that the reactor was intended to produce electricity. In Washington and Israel, information about the raid has been wrapped in extraordinary secrecy and restricted to just a handful of officials, while the Israeli press has been prohibited from publishing information about the attack.

The New York Times reported this week that a debate had begun within the Bush administration about whether the information secretly cited by Israel to justify its attack should be interpreted by the United States as reason to toughen its approach to Syria and North Korea. In later interviews, officials made clear that the disagreements within the administration began this summer, as a debate about whether an Israeli attack on the incomplete reactor was warranted then.

That's why so many are so silent over what happened. If Syria admits to the nukes, then the Nobel Prize winners at the IAEA and elBaredi look foolish because nonproliferation is supposed to be their purview.

Syria, which probably should be screaming from every mountaintop over Israel's attack and casus belli thereon is silent because they know that their supposed vaunted Russian air defense system worked like crap and Iran knows that they're screwed too since they too rely upon the same systems. If Israel could do it, they know that the US could do it to the Iranians in spades.

The debate over just how far along the nuclear facility is shows that the lessons of 9/11 are still not quite fully understood. The problem is dealing with such threats before they become imminent. Attacking a nuclear facility before it becomes operable is far more preferable than allowing it to come online and then have to deal with the repercussions of the operable facility. Airstrikes on an incomplete nuclear facility will not cause release of radioactivity as an airstrike on an active nuclear facility might.

It also sends a strong message to those that seek nuclear weapons that they will not be tolerated. However, the flip side is that it will push such rogue regimes to literally bury their facilities so that they cannot be attacked via airstrikes.

Also, the final decision about the airstrikes wasn't to be made by the US, but by the Israelis who have to live in the neighborhood. Allowing Syria to go live with a nuclear program means that the threat is very real and too close for comfort. With only a modicum of effort, the Syrians could attack with its rockets or take out Israeli intel facilities in the Golan, essentially blinding the Israelis to a coming attack. It wouldn't take many nuclear weapons to reduce Israel's defense posture dramatically, let alone what would happen to the Israeli population (those Palestinians killed in the attacks would simply be considered cannon fodder and collateral damage - martyrs in the parlance of the Islamists who seek the elimination of Israel altogether).