Belmont Club:
...Actually the Lebanaon attack gives the SU an opportunity to significantly weaken Syria and Iran. By mobilizing world opinion against Syria and pushing them out of Lebanon, Syria loses significant business income and illegal drug distribution income as well as a base for Iran's proxy warriors, Hezballah. A weakened Syria will also have less resources to devote to its support of terrorist in Iraq. The bombers have made a gift to US diplomacy that is worth more than a military attack.
If as the New Sisyphus argues, Assad has been "gambling for months that he can bleed the U.S. in Iraq at little cost" and that it has been waging "war more-or-less openly on the U.S. in Iraq", the question is what has changed? It is hard to imagine how the assasination of a Lebanese politician could provoke a more drastic response than months of Syrian-supported attacks on US troops in Iraq and harder still to imagine how Washington could have taken the ultimate diplomatic step without implicitly being prepared to go further. Yet it has. Unless Washington is playing a hollow hand, where the conclusion has changed the premises must be re-examined -- the principal one being that America was too hamstrung by Iraq to take anything else on -- not Syria, Iran or North Korea.
The aggressive posture taken by America against North Korea, Iran and now Syria suggests the bonds that held it down in Iraq, if ever they did, may be loosening. Dan Darling's survey of the Iraqi election results at Winds of Change may provide a clue to what is happening. It discusses whether the recently concluded election has delivered Iraq into the hands of Teheran. He concludes that it has not, at least, not obviously.
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