LATE at night on Sept 6, eight of the latest Israeli fighter aircraft — obtained, needless to say, from the United States of America — took off into the unknown. Literally. Even the pilots had been kept in the dark.

At least some of them are likely to have assumed that they were headed for Iran. Once they were airborne, they were informed that their target was in Syria.

What the F-15s did next is open to conjecture. There is evidence that they dumped their supplementary fuel tanks — which, in fact, only would have been required had they been bound for Iran. They didn’t, as far as anyone knows, go anywhere near Iran.

In contrast to its boastfulness in the aftermath of a successful attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, Israel has been unusually coy about the aims of Operation Orchard, as the mission was dubbed. In the nearly two months since then, no Israeli in a position of authority has offered an official comment. Besides, the government of what is supposedly the only authentic democracy in the Middle East clamped a media blackout: newspapers and the electronic media were told not to say a word, and without exception they all obeyed.

Israeli officials were allowed, however, to anonymously brief the foreign media. The US government, which was informed in advance about Israeli plans, has followed the same pattern: no representative of the Bush administration has put his or her name to an official comment, although a number of them have broached the subject with reporters on the condition that their names not be revealed.

John Bolton, the far-right former US ambassador to the United Nations, has been an exception. But then, he’s no longer an official. Not surprisingly, he is happy to enthusiastically endorse anything that Israel does, especially if it makes further conflict in the Middle East more likely. His Israeli counterpart in this respect is the warmongering former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud party, who said he had deemed it appropriate to lend his full support to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

But support for what? Aye, there’s the rub.

Most of the leaks suggest that Israel targeted a nuclear site of some sort, although there was initially speculation that its air force may have attacked a Palestinian or Hezbollah training camp. Even the motivated leaks, however, don’t hint at anything resembling an advanced nuclear programme. They insinuate a vague connection to uranium enrichment, which could in time — several years at the very least — have led to a weapon. A potential arsenal, presumably? Well, approximately one bomb a year, the experts say.

Furthermore, it is said that Damascus wasn’t a lone crusader. So, who was its partner in crime? Iran, obviously? Well, no. It so happens that a North Korean vessel docked at the Syrian port of Tartus a few days before the air raid. What was it carrying? Ostensibly, cement. But the anonymous Israeli and US sources have offered dark hints of a deadlier cargo: uranium enrichment machinery, perhaps, or something related to missile technology.

Trading relations between the countries are hardly a revelation and it is common knowledge that Damascus has in the past procured weaponry from Pyongyang. But would North Korea, on the eve of an economically beneficial agreement that involves repudiating its nuclear ambitions, be reckless enough to undertake an act that could be construed as proliferation?

What, it would be natural to ask, is Syria’s take on the whole affair? As the ostensible victim of aggression, there’s little advantage in being as secretive as Israel, unless there really is something to hide. The latter suspicion was enhanced last week after satellite imagery showed that a site where a structure of some sort stood in August had been ‘scraped clean’ by the Syrians. No explanation has been forthcoming from Damascus, which did in fact lodge a complaint about Israel at the United Nations last month. President Bashar Al Assad says that the Israeli planes attacked an empty military building. They were, according to Damascus, chased away by Syrian defences, and they dumped their excess fuel tanks on the Turkish side of the border.

The latter claim has been corroborated by sources in Turkey, which appears to have collaborated with Israel. That, again, is not entirely surprising: links between Ankara and Jerusalem go back a long way. What’s more, Turkey itself has lately been threatening war — not against Syria or Iran, but against Iraq, whose northern periphery plays host to guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), who have been engaging Turkish border troops and, on several occasions, getting the better of them.

It is worth noting that Syria, which has a small Kurdish population of its own, at one time played host to the PKK leadership, but changed its mind about this arrangement about 10 years ago after warnings from Turkey. At the same time, it’s also interesting that Assad, while visiting Turkey earlier this month, appeared to endorse the threats of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan against the Iraq-based Kurdish fighters.

Although a number of US-based experts on Syria discount the likelihood of a nuclear programme on account of the nation’s limited resources and its awareness that Israel keeps a close eye on its actions, it is not altogether inconceivable that Assad has been harbouring non-conventional ambitions. After all, it wasn’t widely known that Muammar Gaddafi was inclined that way until Libya announced it was dismantling its nuclear laboratories. However, if nuclear-armed Israel has any conclusive evidence against Syria on this account, why not make it public instead of obliquely alluding to the possibility of a nuclear device finding its way into Hezbollah’s hands?

Let’s not forget, meanwhile, that it was widely accepted even among those who did not see it as an adequate casus belli that Saddam Hussein was sitting on weapons of mass destruction (WMD). That assumption turned out to be mistaken.

At the moment, the threats of military action are directed not at Syria but against Iran, which clearly has a nuclear programme, albeit one that Tehran insists is geared towards peaceful purposes. If, as widely suspected, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has nuclear weapons in mind, he is more likely to be encouraged than deterred by the unilateral sanctions imposed last week by the US.

Given Israel’s attitude towards Iran, especially in the light of Ahmadinejad’s thoroughly misguided comments about the Holocaust and about Israel’s right to exist, it’s certainly possible that Operation Orchard was a dry run for planned attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Most Israeli analysts insist that their nation cannot coexist with a nuclear-armed Iran; they tend to ignore the consideration that if Tehran is indeed bent upon nuclearising its arsenal, this may have something to do with Israel’s WMD.

There can be little question that an attack on Iran, regardless of whether it’s carried out by the Pentagon or the Israeli air force, would provoke cataclysmic consequences. The complex mess in the Middle East grows more dire by the day. The Bush-Cheney administration isn’t scheduled to bite the dust for another 15 months. Unfortunately, that means it has time enough to further aggravate the situation, with a little help from Israel, Turkey, Syria and Iran.

The writer is a journalist based in Sydney.

mahir.worldview@gmail.com