ASSAD WAS PLANNING TO USE NUKES AGAINST ISRAEL (PLUS: THE TOTALLY AWESOME IAF COMMANDO OPERATION THAT SLOWED HIM DOWN)

So that's why he's been so confident lately:

Meir Dagan, chief of the Mossad intelligence agency, presented Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in late spring with evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea. Dagan apparently feared such a device could eventually be installed on North-Korean-made Scud-C missiles, the paper reported. "This was supposed to be a devastating Syrian surprise for Israel,"... The report suggested intelligence including satellite images revealed a facility in Syria which may be used to build nuclear warheads.

The absolute impunity with which the IAF violated Syrian airspace obviously represents a humiliating failure for Assad. But how bad was the breakdown in Syrian counter-intelligence? This bad:

According to the report, the force included F-15s and F-16s equipped with Maverick missiles and 500 pound bombs. Flying among the warplanes at great height, The Observer reported, was an electronic intelligence gathering aircraft. According to the Times report, an IAF commando team that had arrived on the ground days earlier directed laser beams at the target for the jets.

They were hanging out for days waiting for the jets to come in, then presumably they got the hell out of Dodge without Syrian forces being able to stop them from coming in or out of the country. No wonder the Syrians are trying to buy nuclear weapons off the shelf - they're too incompetent to build them, and something tells us that their army is not really ready to go against the IDF.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]