Iran War: An early skirmish?

With the Trump Administration now laying the groundwork for war with Iran - to the extent that an Administration headed by an orange man-child can coherently do such a thing - it's worth paying close attention to news reports that provide justifications for such a war.

Isabel Kershner reports in Israeli Warplanes Hit Dozens of Iranian Targets in Syria New York Times 05/10/2018 that Israel responded to an Iranian rocket attack from Syria.

Kershner carefully states that her sources on the rocket attack were official Israeli ones. she describes the attack this way:

Overnight, Iranian forces fired around 20 rockets at the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, targeting forward positions of the Israeli military, according to an Israeli military spokesman. The rockets were all either intercepted or fell short of their mark in Syrian territory, the spokesman said, but were nevertheless a significant escalation in Iran’s maneuvers in the Middle East.

Though Israel has hit Iranian forces in Syria with a number of deadly airstrikes, Tehran has been restrained in hitting back, until now. The rocket attack against Israel appeared to be in response to Israeli strikes on southern Syria on Wednesday. ...

There was no immediate information about casualties in Syria. Israel reported none on its side. Colonel Conricus said the barrage of approximately 20 Grad and Fajr-5 rockets fired from Syria and aimed at Israeli positions after midnight was launched under the command of the [Iranian] Quds Force and utilized Iranian weapons. ...

The barrage came after an apparent Israeli missile strike against a village in the Syrian Golan Heights late Wednesday. [my emphasis]

She describes the Israeli response this way:

By Thursday morning, the country’s air force had destroyed “nearly all” of Iran’s military infrastructure in Syria, according to Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman. ...

In all, at least 23 people were killed in the strikes, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group. The Syrian Army, by contrast, said that three people had died.

Israel’s strikes overnight were one of the country’s largest aerial operations in decades across the Syrian frontier, and by far its broadest direct attack yet on Iranian assets.

“This was an operation we prepared for, and were not surprised by,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israeli military.

In a statement, the military said the targets included what it described as Iranian intelligence sites; a logistics headquarters belonging to the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards; military compounds; munition storage warehouses of the Quds Force at Damascus International Airport; intelligence systems associated with those forces; and military posts and munition in the buffer zone between the Syrian Golan Heights and the Israeli-occupied portion of the strategic plateau.

There was no immediate information about casualties in Syria. Israel reported none on its side. [my emphasis]

Presumably that last statement means no information from the Israeli side, because she had just quoted numbers of deaths as reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and a lower number from the Syrian Army.

Based on that report, the Israeli strike was part of a series of military actions aimed against the Syrian government and its Iranian allies. Even if the Israeli report on what apparently was a distinctly ineffective military strike is accurate in attributing it to Iran, Israel's strike was obviously far out of proportion to that one incident.

But as Kershner's report makes clear, this is a part of a much longer series of attacks against Syria.

And in the larger scheme of things now, it is another in what is likely to be a series of steps toward war against Iran, a push which Trump escalated dramatically with his announced this week that the US would breech the Iranian nuclear agreement (JCPOA).

Robert Fisk is not a reporter much liked by Iran War hawks. But he's one of the best reporters on the Middle East in Western media. He writes about the strike today, too, begin with this framing comment (In the Middle East right now, all sides in this complex battle are staring at each other with increasing concern Independent 05/10/2018):

In the West, it’s easy to concentrate on each daily drama about the Middle East and forget the world in which the real people of the region live. The latest ravings of the American president on the Iran nuclear agreement – mercifully, at last, firmly opposed by the EU – obscure the lands of mass graves and tunnels in which the Muslim Middle East now exists. Even inside the area, there has now arisen an almost macabre disinterest in the suffering that has been inflicted here over the past six years. It’s Israel’s air strikes in Syria that now takes away the attention span.

The US and Russia are both heavily involved, the Russians with more direct forces on the ground:

Yes, the Russians are going to be around for quite a while.

So are the Israelis. Their earlier attack on Iranian forces in Syria – of which there appear to be far fewer than the West imagines, although there are many pro-Iranian Hezbollah fighters still in the country – came suspiciously close to the Trump announcement reneging on the US nuclear agreement with Iran. And an Israeli statement that the Iranians had missiles in Syria was surely made in concert with the Trump administration – it came within hours, and coincidences don’t run that close in the Middle East.