Peloni: Brig Gen.(Res.) Yossi Kuperwasser weigh in with Prof. Russel Berman & Amir Oren on the significance of the Syrian conflict with regards to Israel as Iran and Turkey battle for dominance, and what we should focus on going forwrad.
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@ all
This is a great topic for debate…Who is the greatest danger to Israel? Answer: They all are. It is not an either/or game.
@fquigley
Go easy on Peloni. He’s a good guy.
@Rafi
I agree with you that the Kurds are the only ration actors here. I have hoped for a long time to see the establishment of a free Kurdistan, but Erdogan won’t hear of it. Kurds and Armenians, he hates them to death.
Lastly, Assad does look very shaky. If he falls, there will be a mad dash to see who can grab power. None of the contenders looks like a good, or even tolerable choice. When the fall comes, maybe Israel should be a player and not a spectator.
Neither Syria run by Iran and it proxies nor a Sunni Islamist Terrorist state is good for Israel.
Hopefully Trump will help the Kurds in Syria (the only rational actors there) defeat their enemies. Not too sure this will happen but it would be a step in the right direction. Al Quida offshoots with the help of Turkey are about to capture Syria.
Assad fleeing the country in the near future is quite likely. Syria is fast turning into a second Libya where warlords rule certain sections of the dysfunctional failed state.
@Felix
This threat is already existing in Syria, and the failure to eliminate Iran and address this radical Sunni axis has thus far allowed it to dominate and control the entire opposition movment in Syria. Hence, not dealing with Iran has made the rise of these islamic fascists, as you like to describe them, the heir apparent to the fall of Iran’s dominance in the region. Indeed, it is Irain’s puruit of their own colonialist agenda in Syria which has held back the horde of fascist opposition forces, not Assad, who invited Iran to invade his nation and use it as a conduit to Lebanon as it planned, staged and conducted its annihilistic war against Israel. Hence, Iran will meet its end, and when it does, it is difficult to conceive of an alternate fate for Assad other than to see him fall as well. He is an impotent, incompetent, facilitator of his own doom fashioned alongside the Iranian war against Israel.
Furthermore, Israel must complete its move against Iran expeditiously, for many reasons, only one of which is to deal with the possible rise of the radical Sunni axis in the void left by the radical Shia axis. Both of these axes must be addressed, and failing to do so would be to continue to support an existential threat against Israel, and this would only result in revisiting the tragedy of October 7 at some point in the likely not too distant future.
Raphael
The reality is far more dangerous if Assad is defeated
Peloni have you not noticed that Syria is in grave danger of being run over by islamic Fascism
You Peloni in actuality are supporting that. Without any doubt you are.
No amount of your garbage verbiage can disguise it.
@Raphael
Syria is overrun by two super powers, one of which (Russia) has no other regional position outside of Syria, and this foreign occupation is a direct consequence of Syrian weakness, ruled by Assad. In fact, Hezbollah’s decimation is what triggered the Rebels to strike at this moment and is intimately associated with the success of the Rebels. Keeping a weak leader in place in the Middle East is sort of like trying to use water ballons in base ball. Only the strong, or at least those perceived to be strong, will survive, and Assad doesn’t qualify and hasn’t for over a decade in this regard, which is why he has foreign armies crisscrossing his nation.
The thing which makes this statement inaccurate is that Turkey is not on the cusp of becoming a member of the Nuclear States Club. Indeed, Turkey’s relative conventional status has no relevance in comparison to Iran’s nuclear program, and Iran’s nuclear program is exactly what makes it the threat which it has been for some time now looming over the entire region including Israel. Notably, Erdogan, for all his efforts to be more of a issue than he is, can not compare to this threat emanating from Iran. Hence, I would argue that Turkey is infinitely less threatening than Iran.
Both true statements, though, I would say that Erdogan makes threats, not just hostile statements, towards Israel more than periodically. So, even though Iran is the greater threat of the two regional Baddies, so to speak, they must each be opposed with vigor and resolve.
Also, Assad is far too well tied to Iran to be left in power. He is allied to Iran, kept in power by Hezbollah, and disputes Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan, as Rafi well noted. Also, he lacks the means to remove Iran from his country, even if he wanted to pursue such a choice. In fact, his fate would be quite difficult to tease apart from that of Iran. The more destabilized the Mullahs become, the more destabilized Assad will become. Hence, I would argue that as the Mullahs must go, when they do, Assad will inevitably fall, unless some other occupying force were to come to keep him in power – don’t think for a minute that Israel will fill this role. So with this in mind, the question which comes next would be why anyone would want to keep such a feckless personification of Syrian weakness, chaos and disunity in place one day more…the answer is that they wouldn’t.
Just thinking out loud…Wouldn’t a weak Syria, ruled by Assad, be better than a Syria controlled by Turkey or Iran? Of course, Assad and Iran are bad, but I think Turkey is more dangerous, being more militarily powerful than either. Erdogan periodically makes extremely hostile statements towards Israel. I also think that he has aspirations of creating a new Ottoman empire.