‘Little’ military actions like the bombing of the unspecified site in Syria by the Israelis in September of 2007 intrigue me; there’s a lot of supposition going on, but very little in the way of fact, or even claims, put out by either side.

Back then, in the most intellectual discussion forum I participate in (the door job), the following points were noted:

1. The Israelis said very little at the time, despite their track record at talking the talk.
2. Syria initially responded with quite nasty words, but then abruptly shut up.
3. The US, Russia, Germany, Iran, all of them were fairly quiet about the whole thing.
4. The international media noted that something had happened, but didn’t even begin to speculate on it.

Following careful consideration of the above points, and the little that was being reported, we arrived at the following possible scenarios:

1. The Syrians had shot down an Israeli jet carrying ‘special’ weapons, and the Israeli’s had tried, unsuccessfully, to bomb the wreckage to prevent said special weapons falling into Syrian hands. We deemed this unlikely, because Syria would have responded in a more managed style. Or so we thought.
2. The Israelis had done something similar to Operation Babylon and hit something that the Syrian’s were developing that they really shouldn’t have been. We didn’t think that this was too likely either, what with the way that Israel had crowed over the Iraq raid, compared to the semi-silence following this one.
3. The Israeli Air Force was basically just saying to Syria “Yup, in asymmetric warfare our Army needs a bit of improvement, but we can still pummel you back to the stone age if you so much as blink. K thx bye.” We didn’t think that this was too likely, what with that statement being public knowledge anyway…

In the end, we decided that it was all just a little too fucked up for our understanding, but that that was about par for the course as far as the Middle East goes.

Seems that we should have focussed more on that there second scenario. Because now the US is claiming to have photo evidence that the Syrians were developing nuclear nastiness. And that the Israelis decided that they didn’t particularly like that development, and made their objections in only the was a modern fighter-bomber can…

So, we were wrong. Well, not entirely, it still is fucked up. But we considered and dismissed the scenario that seems to be what actually happened.

Are we dumb, or what?