by VICTOR KOTSEV
The United States-based intelligence analysis organization Stratfor argues that the terror attack in Damascus on Wednesday, which claimed the lives of several top Syrian officials, may have been engineered by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in order to thwart a coup plot. It also speculates that the closely timed attack against Israeli tourists in Bourghas, Bulgaria, which cost seven lives, may have been an Iranian warning to the West not to be excluded from negotiations over the Syrian transition.
Whether or not Stratfor’s assessment is accurate, these messages of terror add to an incredibly tense confrontation in the Middle East and demonstrate how diverse and far-reaching the consequences of a larger armed conflict could be.
Fears that Israel would use the occasion to attack Iran directly seem about as exaggerated as speculation that the Syrian army would retaliate against the rebels with chemical weapons. The situation is nevertheless highly volatile. Amid dense war clouds over the Persian Gulf and the Levant, each escalation could trigger responses that lead to the violence easily spiraling out of control.
Judging from past behavior, there may be more substance to reports that the US and Israel would at some point take out Syrian weapons of mass destruction – Fox News reported that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta discussed this but it is hard to pinpoint any time frame for such an operation. Uncertainty reigns as the proverbial fog of war has fully descended over the Middle East.
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