This news out of the Middle East doesn’t appear to bode terribly well for the supposedly nascent economic recovery, now in its fourth year:
The airstrike that Israeli warplanes carried out in Syria was directed at a shipment of advanced surface-to-surface missiles from Iran that Israel believed was intended for Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese organization, American officials said Saturday.
It was the second time in four months that Israel had carried out an
attack in foreign territory intended to disrupt the pipeline of weapons
from Iran to Hezbollah, and the raid was a vivid example of how regional
adversaries are looking after their own interests as Syria becomes more
chaotic.
Apparently the Israelis share some of my skepticism about the so-called “Arab Spring”. The problem with democracies is that although they do tend to wage less war, the wars they wage tend to be of the “total” variety. Given that there are now democracies on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, any war would be more likely to continue to unconditional surrender than in the bad old days of the Middle East strongmen.