(Reuters) - Syria is heading for collapse and will become a “warehouse of weapons” for Islamist militants as it descends into chaos, a senior Israeli army commander said.

“Syria is in civil war, which will lead to a failed state, and terrorism will blossom in it,” said Major-General Yair Golan, making a rare public appearance at a conference at Bar Ilan University on Wednesday. “Syria has a big arsenal.”

The Arab republic’s stock of mainly Russian-made weapons includes surface-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles and marine missiles.

It also possesses chemical weapons which Syria never used in its wars against Israel but which could be attractive weapons for militants, the general said.

“The risk to Israel is taking shape,” said Golan, who is commander of Israeli forces on the border with Lebanon and the disengagement line with Syria in the Golan Heights.

“The challenge we are facing is a huge one,” he added, according to a translation.

The Israel Defence Forces were “deeply engaged in getting ready, with plans and physical means” along the borders, the Northern Command chief said, without offering specific details.

It was very difficult to forecast how Syria would break up, Golan said. It could be effectively “cantonised” by the conflict that has raged for 14 months since President Bashar al-Assad turned his army on protesters and a rebel force fought back.

Golan said Assad’s ally Iran was trying hard to help the president stay in power, and Iran’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah was in turn a very determined enemy of Israel which has “no intention of letting us off easily”.

“HITTING THEM HARD”

Hezbollah “feel obligated to their guardian (Iran) and when needed they are going to do what Iran is interested in”, he told an academic audience at the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies.

Hezbollah is the most potent hostile military force directly on one of Israel’s borders, but it has done nothing evident in the past 14 months to exploit the Syrian crisis or start trouble with Israel to divert attention from Assad’s bloody crackdown.

The Shi’ite movement was focused on creating a “comprehensive ballistic array”, Golan said. At the moment, most of the estimated 60,000 rockets and missiles Hezbollah has in place are short-range, low-payload rockets.

“It’s not nice to live under this threat in northern Israel, but this type of threat is not a decisive factor against Israel,” he said. “Let’s not exaggerate when we talk about it.”

Hezbollah also has longer-range and more accurate missiles and hopes to obtain more to threaten all of Israel, he said.

If Hezbollah were to attack, however, it could expect massive retaliation which would not be limited to Israeli air power, Golan said. Reliance on air power alone was “an hallucination”. There would also be a war of “maneuver”, he said, signifying a land offensive.

“We need a combined effort,” Golan told the conference.

In the event of a third Lebanon war, he said, the IDF would aim to “set back the next threat for a long time by hitting them (Hezbollah) very hard so they won’t feel like engaging us again for many, many years”.

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to dislodge Palestinian militants operating in the country. It finally withdrew its forces in 2000, but went back to war in 2006, clashing with Hezbollah guerrillas. About 1,200 people, mainly civilians, died in Lebanon in the subsequent fighting, along with 158 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

Hassan Hassan 13/03/12

On Friday, senior US intelligence officials reportedly said that the embattled Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, could survive the one-year-old revolt against his dictatorial rule. Mr Al Assad, according to this anonymous account leaked to McClatchy Newspapers, “commands a formidable army that is unlikely to turn on him, an inner circle that has stayed loyal and an elite class that still supports his rule”.

These statements, made only a few days after the defection of high-ranking officials and officers, call into question US policy towards the continuing bloodshed.

It is undeniable that Mr Al Assad bears full responsibility for the continuing massacres, and that Russia is his accomplice because it supplies the regime with weapons while at the same time opposing the arming of military defectors. But the US reluctance and inconsistency have only emboldened Mr Al Assad.

The US has a responsibility, as a self-proclaimed defender of human rights and democracy, to do what it can to stop the barbaric clampdown in Syria. In the context of the Arab uprisings, people across the region have had the courage to face brutal regimes to demand change. But they have done so partly because they know the world is watching and that regimes cannot act with impunity anymore. And by the “world”, fairly or unfairly, people typically mean the United States.

In Syria, the Baathist regime will continue to wreak havoc as long as it knows it can get away with it - plain and simple. The US has a responsibility to send an unequivocal warning to Mr Al Assad. But, so far, it has failed to do so.

Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center, has rightly pointed out that diplomacy cannot work without a threat of military force: “A credible threat does not mean it must be acted upon,” Mr Hamid wrote on The Economist website, “but it does mean the international community must be ready to follow through on its threat, if necessary and if a particular set of conditions are met”.

At this stage, such a threat may be pointless as long as Mr Al Assad knows it will not be acted upon. Syrian’s foreign minister, Walid Al Moallem, has said: “I assure you from my experience that there will be no foreign military intervention.”

When the US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, visited Hama in July, protesters filled the streets. The belief was that the US would not allow another massacre like those that happened several decades ago, the best known of which was the Hama massacre in 1982, when tens of thousands of civilians were killed and neighbourhoods shelled.

When the regime escalated the violence in October, Mr Ford left Syria, apparently in another sign of support for the protest movement. But his return shortly thereafter gave breathing space to Mr Al Assad. Then last month, the US closed its embassy in Damascus. And such “one step forward, one step back” diplomacy has been mimicked by European countries.

The US has consistently followed every condemnation with a reassurance that military intervention has been ruled out. The anonymous US officials’ statements came one week after two other officials “leaked” information that the US administration was moving towards support of the Syrian opposition.

The more recent comments about Mr Al Assad’s staying power were possibly meant to pressure the opposition to make reassurances about a post-Assad Syria.

But the statements disregarded the nature of the Syrian regime, which makes it difficult for members of the inner circle to defect. The loyalty of top officials might be based on fear for themselves and their families. The regime has increasingly tightened its control over the inner circle since 2004.

Damascus seems to have learnt from the case of the former interior minister, Ghazi Kanaan, who allegedly planned to defect after the 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri. Kanaan was killed in his office on the same day that he gave an interview to a Lebanese radio station about the assassination.

Top officials are unlikely to defect - unless there is a real threat of intervention and an end in sight for the regime. Until then, Mr Al Assad’s lackeys will continue to use tanks and artillery against civilians.

Why should the US care? In 1949, the CIA engineered a coup that deposed Syria’s first elected president, Shukri Al Quwatli. According to former US agents, the coup was carried out after Syria’s parliament refused to ratify the Tapline (trans-Arabian) pipeline that would secure the right of way for Saudi oil through Syria.

The respected Al Quwatli was replaced by General Husni Az-Zaeem, who suppressed the media, the political opposition and the vibrant civil society. While it would be overly simplistic to blame the United States entirely for Syria’s subsequent decline, that military coup, the first in a series of 12 over the next 20 years, set the scene for unelected governments and their extrajudicial abuses.

Syrians believe that the US bears some responsibility for their stifled political life. Yet, as so many people across the region have done, Syrians have shown time and again that they trust the US to support their aspirations and protect them from their regime. Even if that regime is, in part, a product of US meddling.