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How Significant Is the Delay in a U.S. Strike on Syria?
(Times of Israel) Mitch Ginsburg - The former head of IDF Military Intelligence and current director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, told the Times of Israel that the delay in U.S. action in Syria "enables the arrival of additional forces, like aircraft carriers or intercontinental bombers. If they had attacked last week, they would have been restricted to Tomahawks [cruise missiles] from destroyers." In addition, the delay allows for a tactical surprise and, in the interim, it "paralyzes the Syrian army, which is busy with survival and hiding in schools and universities." "What's important is not the timing of the attack but its scope and its quality" that will allow it to attain "the desired strategic goal of significant punishment and deterrence against future use of chemical weapons in particular and the murder of civilians in general." Maj. Gen. (res.) Uzi Dayan, a former head of Israel's National Security Council, said "the volume [of the attack] has to be such that Iran, too, will be deterred." Dayan said the U.S. could not destroy all of Syria's chemical weapons capabilities without putting forces on the ground, but that "his entire ground-to-ground missile capacity could be destroyed."