(Wall Street Journal) Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes - The White House is weighing its response to Syria's chemical-weapons use against a sobering fact: Damascus has developed a world-class air-defense system - built, installed and maintained, largely in secret, by Russia's military complex. Some advocates of military action have cited Israel's successful bombing in January that targeted a suspected SA-17 antiaircraft missile shipment. However, as Pentagon officials later learned, the Israeli planes never entered Syrian airspace. Instead, the Israeli warplanes were flying over Lebanon when they executed a sudden burst of speed and altitude to catapult a bomb across the border to the target about 10 miles inside Syria, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. account of the Israeli operation.
2013-04-29 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive