You Decide

The most interesting point about this article is quoted directly below about Israeli intelligence watching Syria so closely.  Brings it full circle as to how they knew Saddam's WMD's were moved to Syria and Lebanon prior to the US going into Iraq. 

......"Will Syria jump in? How? With its army? Not with its air force (which Israel humiliated and destroyed in 1982). Israel has been taking pictures and gauging the Syrian armed forces for a long time now. It knows things about them that even the Syrians don't know." ......

"The Israeli dismantling of Iran's expeditionary force in Lebanon -- Hezbollah -- began in earnest over the weekend.

Hezbollah played its big card when it carried out the carefully planned kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers.

Now it's Israel's turn.

The bombing of the Beirut International Airport was brilliant. It had heretofore been used routinely to bring in weapons and supplies for Hezbollah and to move forces. It was the main "bridge" between Syria and Iran and its client "army." With the airport down and a naval blockade in place the IDF is able to concentrate on anything that moves on the ground in the Bekka Valley and throughout Lebanon. They have already interdicted the bridges and road system and are now able to use their electronic intelligence (ELINT) assets to watch for any movement off the roads and under the cover of darkness.

It will be interesting over the next few days to see how many large ground-to-ground missiles Hezbollah can fire. Some stores of these missiles have already been destroyed in air strikes and the movement and preparation of these missiles to fire is difficult to hide. Now we will have a firmer sense of just how many missiles Hezbollah has beyond the small rockets which are in effect relatively inaccurate artillery shells.

Hezbollah's Chief, Hassan Nasrallah, who is known as a pompous blowhard even on the Arab "Street," which has always been culturally predisposed to histrionic posturing, is now on the run and may have to decamp to Damascus for relative safety.

If he can get there.

His armed forces, despite all their goose-stepping parade marches and RPG-rattling, will prove to have a lot of "Iraq Republican Guard" hollowness to them. Unfortunately, a lot of gullible, poor, Lebanese kids who have been conned and whipped into a hateful frenzy by Nasrallah and his lieutenants, will lose their lives when they come up against IDF training and firepower. There may be a lucky shot from a shoulder-fired SAM here and there, and there will probably be a lot of mines or improvised explosive devices (IEDs) as everyone now likes to call them. But pitched battles with the IDF, which Hezbollah propaganda seems to thirst for, will be nasty, brutish and short.

This is not to say Hezbollah will be eliminated, but that it will be forced back into its old cowardly and treacherous pattern of routine, discrete terrorism.

Israel has made some real tactical mistakes recently, mistakes they cannot afford to make when living as they do in a constant state of war. The kidnapping of the soldiers near the Lebanon border probably should never have happened. Nor should that warship have been off its guard when the missile attack came. But there will not be many mistakes now. While press headlines have seemed to concentrate on civilians killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon, the fact is that these attacks are cutting deep into the flesh and muscle of Hezbollah.

The question now is how many missiles and how much other weaponry Hezbollah has managed to stockpile (often hidden in places with civilian population for cover) before embarking on this venture. It will not be easy to bring in more supplies from the big boys in Damascus and Tehran.

Will Syria jump in? How? With its army? Not with its air force (which Israel humiliated and destroyed in 1982). Israel has been taking pictures and gauging the Syrian armed forces for a long time now. It knows things about them that even the Syrians don't know. And what the Syrians do know must make they feel very uneasy. You would not want to be going into action in a Syrian tank, for instance, knowing what everybody now knows about precision guided munitions.

How about Iran? Not in a direct military way. It isn't ready and it cannot afford to suffer the destruction its armed forces would have to absorb. Neither its long range missile nor air forces can deliver enough bang unless they resorted to chemical weapons, which would result in... However, since in Iran we are dealing with a leader who is every bit as crazy as that Pyongyang midget with the high-heeled shoes, we have to say, "Who knows?"

The world terror war will continue. But Hezbollah's reputation is in for a big deflation, and this chance for the Islamofascists to try yet again to live up to their own military fantasies will go down in flames.

Perhaps Nasrallah's hope is to "bog down" the IDF in a war of attrition in Southern Lebanon to help is Hamas brothers in Gaza. In any case, when the dust clears, and it will, Hezbollah will be back to its squalid, pathetic tactics of the suicide bombers and assassination teams. Thus the struggle between freedom and mind-imprisoning hatred will grind on. "

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=071706E