John Rapley - Foreign Focus ISRAEL'S AIR attack on an alleged terrorist training camp within Syria has raised tensions in a region where they were already running high. Syria quickly declared that the camp had long been dormant, and called for the United Nations Security Council to condemn Israel. The United States then stepped in and said it would use its veto to prevent any such resolution.
Israel was responding to a recent suicide-bombing carried out by Palestinian militants which, it says, are backed by Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been using the cover of the war on terror to target Israel's Palestinian enemies wherever it can find them. The Israeli government had already provoked enough international outrage by its actions within Palestine.
Widening the struggle to other Arab countries represents a dangerous escalation. For the time being, though, we are unlikely to see much in the way of a response. By describing its attacks on Palestinians as a front in the war on terror, the Israeli government mollifies the Bush administration. Having taken its own war on terror into other countries, the White House will not now criticise its loyal ally for doing the same thing. Not surprisingly, President Bush stated that Israel had a right to defend itself, and so could not be sanctioned for an action that was, on the face of it, a clear breach of international law.
As for Syria, there is no chance that it will respond in kind to this violation of its sovereignty. At its strongest, the Syrian military could at best hold its own for a short time against Israeli forces. That was decades ago.
Since then, its military hardware has been rundown and the country is ill-equipped to go to war. Add to that the fact that Syria presently feels itself especially vulnerable, given that it has to contend not only with Israeli forces on its western flank, but American forces to its east, in Iraq.
Instead, if Syria does retaliate, it will do so through the very proxies that Israel is anxious to eliminate. If war, in von Clausewitz's famous dictum, is the continuation of politics with an admixture of other means, then this sort of terrorism is war with an admixture of other means.
REBEL MILITIAS
Syria may well prompt rebel militias it supports in southern Lebanon and the Palestinian territories to step up their attacks on Israel. It may also continue to quietly encourage the use of its territory as a transit-point for Islamist guerrillas on their way to fight Americans in Iraq.
Therein lies the real danger. Some have argued that the Israeli attack on Syria reflects its growing frustration and impotence in neutralising its foes.
If it is going after terrorists in Syria, it would seem to suggest it has exhausted its targets within the Palestinian territories, despite many brutal assaults. Yet the bombers keep coming, and Israeli intelligence - compromised by a lack of cooperation by the Palestinians ever since the Sharon government severed high-level contacts with the Palestinian administration - is coming up empty-handed. The hard method promised by Ariel Sharon has not given Israelis peace and security. Still, he must be seen to do something, even if that is blowing up a possibly-abandoned terrorist camp.
However, if Arab governments feel impotent in the face of such humiliations, their inaction does not extend to the street. Young Arabs, enraged by the twin-humiliation of such Israeli aggression and the American occupation of Iraq, are turning to radical Islamism in growing numbers. Not only can they go kill Israelis now, but they can make their way to Iraq and kill Americans as well. And they are doing just that. Despite the denunciations of state-sponsored terrorism, in reality, the government in Damascus enjoys more influence than control over the organisations it sponsors.
To some extent, it is trying to maintain a presence in organisations that have their own independent existence, and which can even prove troublesome for their putative master (Indeed, Syria, as did Iraq under Saddam Hussein, has had its own problems with the Islamist opposition in its midst).
The US and Israel may judge that the solution to their woes is to stamp out state-sponsored terrorism. But they may well find that the sort of unorganised, non-state terrorism now emerging proves to be an even more intractable foe.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
