This Was Only A Test

Jeff Lewis at the ArmsControlWonk talks about the Israeli air strike against the recent Syrian target. He's relaying information from Laura Rozen that the target was not nuclear technology but rather a shipment of North Korean Scud missiles.

In attacking Dair el Zor in Syria on Sept. 6, the Israeli air force wasn't targeting a nuclear site but rather one of the main arms depots in the country.

Dair el Zor houses a huge underground base where the Syrian army stores the long and medium-range missiles it mostly buys from Iran and North Korea. The attack by the Israeli air force coincided with the arrival of a stock of parts for Syria's 200 Scud B and 60 Scud C weapons.

The parts were shipped from North Korea aboard a container ship flying the Panamanian flag. The U.S. Navy wanted to board the ship in Morocco's territorial waters but Rabat vetoed the operation. The parts were loaded aboard six trucks in the Syrian port of Tartus on Sept. 3 and took three days to reach Dair el Zor. The trucks and their loads were destroyed the moment they arrived at the underground base. A unit of military police that escorted the convoy was also wiped out in the attack.

Kevin Drum is skeptical. He doesn't think that the Israelis would tip their hand on infiltrating Syrian space for the sole purpose of knocking out generic ballistic missiles.

Obviously I'm just playing amateur sleuth here, but it doesn't seem like you'd tip your hand about the capabilities of technology like this in order to destroy a bunch of rocket launchers and North Korean Scuds. The mission had to be important enough to make it worth letting the Syrians (and the Iranians and the Russians) know that their air defenses had been compromised. They might figure out how to fix it next time, after all. So maybe there was some North Korean nuclear technology there after all.

Maybe. ABC News seems to think that this was a nuke facility that the Israelis found and that the U.S. military didn't know about the facility. Or this could have been a test run for Iran, a country which uses very similar air defense systems as Syria (Russian-made), but perhaps not as well-developed. Check out this blog post for a very in-depth analysis on Iran's air defenses.

Comments

[Grandjester]

This is so cool, no posturing, no claims, demands, denials and counter claims. Just the hand of Yahweh comes down and wipes a Syrian weapons depot out. Then? Nobody says shit. Israelis keep it on the down low and the Syrians don't bitch cause they don't know where the next punch might land. Much better way of handling such "unpleasantness" than last summers very public and embarrasing adventure in S. Lebanon.

[NVH]

Holy shit, GJ, we agree.

I can't remember what I was reading, but I'm pretty positive you wouldn't have agreed with its politics, but it basically was saying how Israel just came in, DEEP, past all these 200 air defenses that the Syrians bought from the Russians, and took out whatever it was, me I'm leaning towards chem stuff, but only b/c of the Jane's Defence article a while back about the explosion ( which I still am skeptical about too ). But yes, Jesus Saves, Passes to Moses, Shoots, Scores....we should do this more often.

[christopher bitner hayes]

Of COURSE Israel had no problem waltzing in and doing whatever they felt like. They've got the best military weapons and intel my taxes can buy!

(obligatory disclaimer - if you think knocking on Israel is anti-semitic then you read the New York Times too often. It's a country and should be dealt with as such. My sometime dislike of the UK doesn't make me anti-muslim either, just for the record.)