Sound Sleep - Destroying Syria's heroin-basket

This article originally appeared in The Jerusalem Post on February 17, 1997

By Michael Oren

The search for ways to get back at Lebanon for all the terrible things Hizbullah has done to us and that we seemingly can't do back to Hizbullah has yielded an arsenal of nasty proposals for revenge. These run from bombing Lebanon's power stations to mining the backyard of its president, Elias Hrawi.

Destroying Syria's heroin-basket would be more popular than blasting the Iraqi nuclear reactor,

These ideas are all fine and good in theory. In practice, they're sure to bring the world down on our heads as fast, if not faster, than did Israel's previous attempts at creative vengeance, from the Litani Operation to Accountability and Grapes of Wrath.

What's worse, in such acts as cutting off Beirut's water supply (we tried that in 1982) or blowing up a couple of its airplanes (1968), we aren't even hurting the right people – the Syrians – and hurting them where it's most painful: their pocketbooks.

The search, I'll argue, has ended, with the solution almost literally under Israel's nose. The answer can be summed up in one word: Poppies.

Syria, which hardly ranks among the world's financial tigers, is heavily dependent on the drug trade. Even more than terror, heroin is a major Syrian export item.

Though estimates vary from the hundreds of millions to several billion, the proceeds from this trafficking are massive, more than enough to make their loss a virtual death-blow to Syria's fragile economy.

Syrian heroin is made from poppies grown in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. The process there is the same as elsewhere in the narcotics-making world.

From dried poppy seeds comes the morphine opiate from which pure heroin is then derived. From Bekaa, it's a short drive to Beirut harbor, and drug dealers and junkies around the globe.

As long as Lebanon remains outside international controls, as long as Lebanese leaders get their cut, the trade prospers and grows. That is, until the day IDF planes appear over those same Bekaa poppy fields and drop – not bombs, but... defoliants.

I'm not talking about Agent Orange, or some of the more virulent poisons, but about little more than a garden variety herbicide, the kind used to kill weeds, or, for that matter, poppies.

How many sorties would it take – three, six? – to wipe out the entire crop?

Though Damascus would undoubtedly cry foul play, perhaps produce several bodies as evidence of Israeli chemical attacks, the official record would show that nobody got killed, or even injured – except, of course, Syria's ruling drug lords.

And the true beauty of it would be that, with the exception of certain cartels, nobody could condemn us for it – not the US, certainly, which has conducted similar operations against poppy fields in South America.

Destroying Syria's heroin-basket would be more popular than blasting the Iraqi nuclear reactor, more popular than destroying Idi Amin’s air force on the ground. Israel would be giving the world a gift, and itself a potent means of reprisal.

Let’s hear Assad protest when Israel prevents his heroin from reaching the children of America and Europe. Let’s see Hizbullah try to attack us when the drug money that funds it has turned, literally, to dust.

Remember that scene in the Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the West rubs her hands and cackles, “Poppies... poppies will make them sleep…”?

There’s nothing that says we can’t occasionally draw inspiration from an anti-hero.

Let’s send those poppy fields in Lebanon to sleep.