6.1.13

Russia is planning to deliver more than 10 MiG fighter planes to the Syrian government of Bashar Assad, the head of the state-owned MIG corporation said Friday, in a move likely to draw harsh criticism from Western governments seeking Assad’s removal amid a bloody civil war in Syria.
MIG head Sergei Korotkov told journalists that a Syrian delegation was in Moscow on Friday determining the details of the contract to deliver the MiG-29M2 jets.

The middle east, always a powder keg, is on the precipice of a conflagration of epic proportions. The Syrian civil war has become a proxy fight between the Sunni and Shiite world, whose polestars originate in Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Russia is pouring gasoline on the flames, delivering new MIG fighter jets and advanced missiles with the capability of taking out perhaps any Israeli target. Israel has warned Moscow that it will not permit the missiles on their flank. Russia has said that it has already delivered two Bastion anti-ship missile systems equipped with seventy two Yakhont supersonic missiles to Syria.

Yesterday Syrian rebels lobbed eighteen of their own missiles into the Baalbek Valley of Lebanon, sending a blunt message to Iranian muscle Hezbollah. The whole landscape has the very real possibility of being torched in an instant, quickly and instantly turned into a denuded parking lot. And now Turkey has its own internal problems that may have unforeseeable consequences.

Assad says he already has the promised S -300 missiles but experts believe that he is bluffing and that it will be perhaps a month or more before they are delivered. It is of course the height of irresponsibility for the Russians to deliver these weapon systems to a regime already teetering so close to the edge.                                      

Russia has been a total enabler since the beginning of the crisis and are only now talking out of the other side of their mouth about new peace talks. Syrian rebels refuse to be drawn in, recognizing the eleventh hour entreaty as a sham. The United States is protesting the Russian armament vociferously while the Russians maintain that they are only fulfilling old contracts. Whatever. Perhaps they are merely wanting to see the efficacy of their systems in a real war. Show that the old bear still has some teeth.

There don't appear to be a lot of sympathetic players on the scene right now. Are we really this close to arming Al Qaeda as the lesser of two evils? I read a commenter the other day who intoned that the Syrians should fight each other to the last man. A Kissingerian real politic type doctrine, something similar occurred in the Iran Iraq War, a horrid eight year affair that killed perhaps a half a million from both sides and left many more maimed. If there is one thing that the muslims hate more than the Israelis and the west, it is of course, each other.

I think that Israelis and their tribe are always ready for the possibility of another Masada. I could envision a tete a tete with the former soviets that might deliver just that. In this case they need to stay on the sidelines if at all possible, with the exception of repelling serious threats to their survival. This could be a nuclear vortex that immolates all players. Let us hope that clearer heads prevail.