Syria placed its army on war preparedness, pointed Scuds at Israel from Thursday, July 20, the day Tehran took control of Lebanon War

Our sources add Syrian fighter pilots are sitting in their cockpits.

These orders went out from Syrian president Bashar Assad July 20 when Iran's Revolutionary Guards commander Brig.-Gen Yahya Rahim Safavi (picture) assumed command of the Lebanon war from Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Tehran's direct military intervention in the conflict was accompanied by an Iranian weapons airlift which began landing Wednesday, July 19, at the Abu Ad Duhur military airfield north of Homs. The deliveries include large quantities of new missiles, including the long-range Zelzal and Fajr 3 and Fajr 5 missiles, Katyusha rockets, anti-tank and anti-air missiles sent out from RG HQ in Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf.

Assad acted on the assumption that Israel, whose air force and ground forces are already hammering the cross-border supply routes north of the Litani River to block the passage of Iranian hardware to Hizballah, will soon decide to go for Iranian military operations in Damascus and Abu Ad Duhur.

Gen. Safavi has set up two forward command posts which coordinate war operations with Hizballah chief of staff Ibrahim Akil.

One center is working out of a cellar of the Iranian embassy in Beirut to regulate Hizballah rocket fire against Israel and direct the groups of 3 or 4 RG officers taking part in every Hizballah face-to-face engagement with Israeli ground troops in the south.

The second, housed in the basement of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, is in charge of communications, intelligence and getting hardware into Lebanon.

The deliveries were made to the Abu Ad Duhur airfield because it belongs to the joint Iranian-Syrian Scud missile factory which employs a large number of Iranian engineers and technicians.

DEBKAfile's military sources report that some of the Iranian arms have Hizballah in Lebanon notwithstanding intense Israeli cutoff operations and their impact will probably be palpable in the coming days.

Israel’s audacious commando raid of a Hizballah stronghold near Baalbek more than 100 km north of the border recalled the old panache associated with Israeli military feats in the past. However the 22 days of the Lebanon war have shown an army hampered and slowed down by tactical and intelligence deficiencies which showed up in the costly Maroun er-Ras and Bin Jubeil operations in South Lebanon – and again this week in the Ayta a-Chaab battle. Those three engagements have claimed 17 lives. Between six and eight thousand troops and reservists are now deployed in South Lebanon fighting in Hizballah village-strongholds and positions along the Israeli border and plunging deeper for the mission assigned this week to push Hizballah out of the south as far as the Litani River. More such battles therefore lie ahead.

It is therefore important to heed the senior Israeli officers who tell DEBKAfile that a single successful commando raid is not going to cure the deficiencies hampering its 22-day Lebanon campaign.

The officers direct most of their criticism at the Northern Command’s handling of the war, arguing that the IDF should have kicked off the entire campaign with a series of audacious assaults like Tuesday’s Baalbek operation so as to catch Hizballah off-balance. Without these tactics, the three battles against a tough enemy which refuses to break under sustained battering were bound to end as they did.

On July 28, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 263 cited its military analysts on the IDF’s six principal failings in the Lebanon war:

1. Israeli elected leaders, Olmert and defense minister Peretz, lack military experience and the skills required for managing a war.

2. The military leadership qualities of chief of staff Lt.-General Halutz, former commander of the air force where he grew up, are questionable.

3. Olmert’s predecessor left him with a flawed legacy. During his six and-a- half years as premier, Ariel Sharon shook up the top levels of the IDF’s general command, military intelligence and the Mossad (although not the Shin Bet) and stuffed them with appointees who subscribed to his political philosophy.

Israel’s top military and security echelons have never before been picked for their political outlook. Sharon’s axe created a monolithic establishment lacking in the motivation burning in their predecessors for developing brilliantly innovative methods of warfare.

4. In six years of counter-terror warfare against the Palestinians, the IDF focused on perfecting small-time tactics for keeping local terror fires under control, but failed to produce methods applicable to a transition from fighting terrorists to waging war. Hizballah has foisted this transition on the Israeli military.

5. Israeli war planners, like the US army in Iraq, came to rely too heavily on air power, firepower and hi-tech weaponry for combating terror. They neglected to draw the lessons of the three-year Iraq war.

6. Hizballah’s tacticians and their Iranian Revolutionary Guards mentors studied every Israeli move in its 2002 Defensive Wall Operation against the Palestinian terrorist stronghold of Jenin, which ended in all the towns of the West Bank falling to the Israeli military. Taking this battle as their master plan, they invented a new war doctrine to fit a Hizballah offensive against an Israeli army which had not revised its doctrines of war in the intervening four years.

The battle fought in Jenin’s refugee camp on April 14, 2002, was the only engagement in the entire Israel-Palestinian conflict in which Hizballah and al Qaeda terrorists fought Israeli forces face to face.

The Palestinians fielded a small number of fighters. The Israeli army won the day but paid dearly in casualties. Drawing on the Jenin lesson, Iranian and Hizballah war planners are hammering at the Jewish state’s most vulnerable point - military losses and loss of life in general. By maximizing Israeli casualties, they believe that Hizballah does not have to win the war; it will turn the tables sufficiently to achieve parity with the Israeli army. For a small militia dependent on two outside governments, Iran and Syria, for heavy weapons and permission to use them, this would be no mean feat – better in fact that any Arab army has ever achieved in the past.

Nasrallah is fond of boasting that he has surprised Israel and will again. But it must be said that, going back to the Yom Kippur shock, the Israeli army did in fact recover from its early setbacks and turned the tide. It is still early days, and Israel may have surprises of its own up its sleeve. The pressure of war on the country’s borders and their homes under attack has always goaded Israel’s army into flights of improvisation and stimulated its generals into using the war arena as a testing ground for ingenious new ideas. But much depends on Olmert, Peretz and General Halutz, giving them enough rein to succeed while restraining their own pointless and often damaging statements.

"Israeli Defense officials told the Jerusalem Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria." And Haaretz quotes Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah as saying on Saturday that the "Israelis are ready to halt the aggression because they are afraid of the unknown. The one pushing for the continuation of the aggression is the US administration." And then there are a pair of Mephistopholean characters named Cheney and Netanyahu.

It's often presumed that Israel leads American policy in the Middle East, and that's frequently been true, which is why this war is strikingly and disturbingly different. The United States is actually egging on Israel to press the attack regardless of the cost Israelis may be expected to bear for the fresh blood its armed forces shed. George Bush spoke arguably his most frightening and truthful words last Friday, when he admitted that it's not the White House intention to create "a sense of stability." It's by instability - by creating "failed states" in the Balkans, Central Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere - that End-Time criminals stand to gain the most. That may be little surprise to those of us who know the playbook, but our humanity still can't help but be shocked by their unbridled delight in the "opportunities" now presented by the "new Middle East."