Nevertheless, and despite the seemingly unequivocal aggressiveness of the Israeli attack, considering it more or less a declaration of war, the entire episode is swarmed by indecision. Is Israel pushing to widen the frontiers of its war? Is this Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's way of avoiding the accountability of his failed war on the Palestinians? Is the bombing an Israeli message or an American one? What does Israel hope to achieve by unleashing another quagmire at a time that the US is yet to deal with her own? 

However, the rationale behind Israel's rash decision to end the three-decade long ceasefire at the Syrian-Israeli front, despite the continued hostility ensuing from the Israeli occupation of parts of Lebanon, Syria's Golan Heights and the Palestinian territories, is not the only mystery. The attack on Ain al-Sahib, near Damascus, laid bare another epochal policy, that of the United States. 

Bush, who ordered his lonely ranger in the United Nations, John Negroponte to avert the UN members from condemning the Israeli act, reacted in a manner that left little doubt that Sharon's bold move must've passed through the Washington route first. Bush's words held no hesitance, but in fact full-fledged backing of a seemingly earth-shattering provocation of war: Israel "must not feel constrained" in defending itself, Bush said. On October 06, the US President telephoned Sharon, reported the Associated Press, and "made it very clear to the Prime Minister, like I consistently have done, that Israel's got a right to defend itself and that Israel must not feel constrained in defending the homeland." 

For Bush, like many of the so-called hawks in his administration, Arabs and Muslims are all the same, geographically, culturally, religiously and politically. Bombing Syria, therefore, might not seem a far-off pitch in retaliation to a suicide bombing that was carried out by a young Palestinian female lawyer inside Israel on the preceding day. But in a world where many countries, including Syria and excluding Israel and the United States, do in fact still allude to international law while confronting such blatant violations of sovereignty, the "bring it on" mind-set of Bush, Sharon and their followers is by all means repugnant. 

No other country at the United Nations, aside from the US, considered the attack on Syria a legitimate Israeli right to "defend its citizens" as Bush later advised, nor did anyone accept the Israeli argument that the bombing of Syria was a "deterrent" move. Even the Haifa bombing, "cannot lead us to overlook or minimize the extreme gravity of the attack perpetrated against Syria," said Spanish Ambassador to the UN, Inocencio Arias, a statement that was followed by that of the British Ambassador Emyr Parry. The Israeli attack, Parry said, represented an escalation of the conflict and undermines the peace process. 

The US full backing of Israel and the passing of the anti-Syria legislation in the House, thereafter, were a formal marriage between two sinister arguments; now, Israel's war to suppress the Palestinian resistance is correlated, if not identical, to the US war to suppress just about everyone else. "The decisions he (Sharon) makes to defend his people are valid. We would be doing the same thing," said President Bush. Suddenly, Ain al-Sahib in Syria and Tora Bora in Afghanistan, as far as Bush is concerned, are two legitimate targets in an ever-stretching battlefield against what many neo-conservatives see as a hostile, undemocratic, inherently evil, uncivilized Muslim world. 

In a testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, on July 31, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told an attentive, affable audience: The war on terrorism "is a global campaign against a global adversary." This "global campaign will not end, "until terrorist networks have been rooted out, wherever they exist." Another war and a momentous propaganda campaign later, with the help of the pro-Israeli, anti-Arab and Muslim cohort in the administration, Israel has finally managed to use the same logic. "Israel will not be deterred from protecting its citizens and will strike its enemies in every place and in every way," exclaimed Sharon on October 07, just over a year after Rumsfeld articulated his 'total war' logic yet once again. Bush described the Israeli decision, practically aimed at regionalizing the conflict, as an "essential campaign." 

If this should answer at least one of the many questions being asked these days, it should leave no doubt that Israel struck Syria, not only with the routine American "green light", but with a mutual, timely and well-calculated decision, all with the aim of - aside from diverting attention from the preposterous policies that both lead in Iraq and the Occupied Territories - subduing another Arab nation that refuses to be part of the Israeli-American hegemonic project in the region.