Is this really an escalation?
Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have fired Scud missiles at rebel fighters in recent days, Obama administration officials said on Wednesday.
The move represents a significant escalation in the fighting, which has already killed more than 40,000 civilians in a nearly two-year-old conflict that has threatened to destabilize the Middle East, and suggests increased desperation on the part of the Assad government.
I realize that I'm fitting in new information to fit my narrative that Assad's only hope for survival is to retreat to a rump realm based on the coastal region, but is this development not so much an escalation as an attempt to use assets that can't be moved within the borders of a new and smaller Alawite Syria?
After all, why waste effort destroying them or risk them being used by rebels if Assad plans to retreat from the bases where the missiles are located? Use 'em or lose 'em, right?
The story doesn't say whether these are silo-based weapons or otherwise static, rather than mobile launchers. If the latter, it wouldn't fit my sheer speculation, of course.
And it is a not-too-subtle reminder that Assad could put chemical warheads on the weapons. That too fits with my thinking on a withdrawal.
An announcement that the Syria government is relocating to a more secure location within the Alawite homeland in the west would be the signal that everything really must go.
UPDATE: They are all road-mobile, it seems. Which doesn't invalidate my speculation. If Syria had a mix of stationary and mobile weapons yet was firing the mobile missiles, that would tend to argue I'm wrong. But if all are mobile and Assad only wants some of the missiles within his smaller realm, he'd still want to get rid of the excess. Firing them is better than destroying them.
