Khalilzad Threatens Syria
By GARY LEUPP
09/19/05 "Counterpunch"
-- -- The U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad says that the
U.S. is "running
out of patience" with Syria. That's nothing new; U.S.
officials have been saying that for several years now. After
President Bush's January 2002 speech joining together Iraq, Iran
and North Korea as an "axis of evil," evil
Undersecretary of State John Bolton huffed and puffed about a
second tier of evildoing nations: Syria, Libya and Cuba. The
neocon program is obviously to create a string of client-states in
what it calls the "Greater Middle East"---an empire
dripping with oil, bedecked with U.S. military bases,
spread-eagled for U.S. corporate investment, warmly receptive to
Israeli advances.
The great prize of Iran, wedged
between "liberated" Afghanistan and Iraq, excites
particular passion in the neocon breast. Its rape, scheduled for
the summer, has been postponed for several reasons, principally
the resistance of the liberated Iraqis and the swelling U.S. death
toll. These dampen the enthusiasm of the American people for more
rapine. Overextended and bogged down in two ongoing low-intensity
wars, faced with mounting antiwar sentiment and a military
recruitment crisis, the Bush administration also faces a stone
wall of international resistance to an Iran attack. It has failed
to persuade the IAEA to find Iran in noncompliance with the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; failed to oust the honest IAEA
chief Mohamed ElBaradei (who points out that there's no evidence
for the U.S. charge); failed to arm twist ElBaradei or the
delegates of various countries to the IAEA into referring Iran to
the Security Council; and failed to convince Russia, China and
India to cooperate in its anti-Iran campaign.
These three nations are all powerful friends of Tehran.
Implicitly admitting the
setback, Condoleezza Rice told Fox News Sept. 15, "I think
the issue of a referral is something that we'll be working for a
while. I'm not so concerned about exactly when it happens, because
I don't think this matter is so urgent that it has to be on
September 19." (Sept. 19 is the next IAEA meeting.) Good!
She's realizing the humbling limits of power, and backing off for
at least a few days while she breaks in those shoes she bought in
New York during the urgent matter of the recent hurricane. But
Bolton, now UN ambassador by special presidential appointment,
must be gnashing his teeth in frustration.
Iran is a large powerful country
with powerful friends. Syria in contrast, as Richard Perle has put
it, "is
weak." If the Iran attack is on hold, and Rice prepared
to be patient, Syria might seem all the more tempting to the
salivating neocons. Among the latter, Khalilzad is well placed to
sharpen the knives. Very significantly, he states that Syria is
presently "a
bigger threat" than Iran. An Afghan-American, a presumed
Muslim in a sea of secular Jewish ideologues, this interesting
figure adds diversity to the neocon community that Seymour Hersh
has likened to a "cult."
Born in Afghanistan, he has a
doctorate from the Leo Stauss's University of Chicago, where he
studied under neocon guru Albert J. Wohlstetter, famed critic of
nuclear arms limitation treaties and of the doctrine of
"mutually assured destruction," and advocate of the use
of tactical nuclear weapons. He was a founding member of the
Project for a New American Century. He has a complex history as a
friend, then enemy, of the Taliban. As special U.S. envoy to
Afghanistan he shaped the outcome of the Loya
Jirga joke in 2002, then served as U.S. ambassador to the
Karzai court before obtaining his new assignment in Iraq. What
better choice for the administration's point man on the need for
an attack on Syria?
Others have built the case
against Syria, as though tackling an academic assignment.
"List reasons that might be adduced for an attack on Syria,
adducing all evidence you can find from all sources, regardless of
their reliability, and considering their potential impact on
American public opinion." Bolton drew up a case for
presentation to Congress in 2003 so full of holes that the CIA
forced the delay of his appearance for several months. But the
administration, along with congressional allies and AIPAC,
succeeded in getting an anti-Syria act passed. It followed up by
combining with a (highly opportunistic) France to get the UN
Security Council to pass resolution 1559. Demanding the immediate
withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, this was designed to
provide a pretext for an attack, but President Assad adroitly
complied even before the specified deadline. Ever upping the bar,
the U.S. now demands the removal of all Syrian intelligence agents
from Lebanon, aware that it will always be able to aver the
presence of such agents without adducing any evidence and thus
declare Damascus in violation of the UNSC resolution. Meanwhile,
Syria stands accused---by mere hints dropped by administration
officials and their allies---of the death of Lebanese former prime
minister Rafiq Hariri. Putative sponsor of Palestinian and
Lebanese "terrorist groups," equipped with chemical
weapons (to partially offset Israel's nukes), Syria's vulnerable
to the same kind of setup that preceded the U.S. attack on Iraq.
Khalilzad's role in that setup
is to pose as the American guardian of the newly free Iraqi state
besieged from Syria by "foreign" fighters. From the
outset of the occupation Washington has accused Syria of actively
abetting the Iraqi resistance, and permitting if not facilitating
such jihadis' entry into Iraq. I expect that from this point the
incessant campaign to justify an attack on Syria will focus on the
border issue. At some point Khalilzad will announce that he and
the Bush administration have finally, after so many good-faith
efforts to get Damascus to behave reasonably, and "live up to
its international obligations," etc., lost patience. But
rational people should have no patience with superpower arrogance,
indifference to human life, and Machiavellian duplicity, all of
which are written all over Mr. Khalilzad's resume.
U.S. preparations for a Syria
attack may receive little support from officials of the regime
midwifed into power by the occupation. President Jalal Talabani,
despite his long-time close ties with the U.S., has stated,
"I want to be clear on the subject of Syrian relations. All
of us in the governing council are friends of Syria."
"We have a very good relationship with Syria," he told
the Washington Post this month. While the Shiite leaders in
the new government such as Prime Minister Ibrahaim al-Jaafari have
little sympathy for the secular Baathist ideology of the Damascus
regime, they are intimate with Tehran, which has an alliance with
Syria and would be deeply disturbed by an attack on it. They also
no doubt believe that a U.S. invasion of a second Arab country
would increase rather than diminish the level of violence in Iraq.
Meanwhile the Syrians have
deftly handled U.S. pressure to date. Long on the State
Department's list of terror-sponsoring nations, Syria offered
condolences to the American people after 9-11 and has cooperated
in the international effort to crush al-Qaeda. Damascus reportedly
has accepted al-Qaeda suspects under the U.S.'s
"extraordinary rendition" program, providing the U.S.
with the exquisite service of torturing information out of them.
When Colin Powell demanded in 2003 that Syrian President Bashar
Assad shut down the Syrian public relations outfits of Hamas,
Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, in light as he put it "of the
new strategic situation" with U.S. forces occupying the
neighboring country of Iraq, Assad acquiesced. As mentioned above,
he expeditiously withdrew Syrian troops from Lebanon. But the U.S.
keeps upping the bar. Vice President Cheney has declared the U.S.
doesn't negotiate with evil, but defeats it, and plainly the
defeat of Syria weighs heavily on the neocon mind.
Khalilzad declines to predict a
U.S. attack, merely noting (as Bush said of an Iran attack)
"all options are on the table." What could the Syrian
president do, merely to get that option off? Imagine the following
diplomatic note from Damascus to Washington:
"The government of Syria
in deference to U.S. demands has decided
(a) to refuse entry to any
person from an Arab or Muslim country arriving at Damascus
Airport with a one-way ticket, and to immediately deploy half
our entire army (100,000 soldiers) to police our 450-mile
highly porous border with Iraq, to ensure that what you call
"foreign" fighters from other kindred Arab countries
do not cross that border and assist the Iraqis who constitute
what you call the "insurgency" in Iraq, realizing
that this deployment greatly weakens our national defense
posture, but also to demonstrate our sincere desire that you
not attack us using the border issue as a pretext;
(b) to immediately expel
from Syria all persons known to us to be members of
organizations your State Department considers
"terrorist," whether or not the government of Syria
agrees with your designation, and to invite your intelligence
agencies to confirm these expulsions, again to demonstrate our
sincere desire that you not invade us using the presence of
these individuals as a pretext, and despite the fact that we
weaken our own political position by taking this highly
unpopular act;
(c) to withdraw every
remaining Syrian intelligence agent in Lebanon, although to do
so weakens our national security, and to open our books to
your intelligence agents so that you may verify this, and
further agree not to make an issue of your right to
maintain an intelligence apparatus in Lebanon, a country alien
to you and far from your shores, in order to again show our
sincere desire not to be attacked; and
(d) to destroy all chemical
weapons, and to dismantle all chemical and biological weapons
programs, in cooperation with the United States, despite the
fact that Syria, which has no nuclear weapons program, faces a
hostile Israel (occupying our Golan Heights) which possesses
200 nuclear weapons.
All that we ask in return is
that you agree not to attack or attempt regime change in our
sovereign nation. Should we conclude such an agreement, we look
forward to a period of cordial relations between our two
countries."
Would that bend-over-backwards
attitude take care of the problem? Or would the neocons who want
to rule Syria shake their heads and say, "Those tricky
bastards!"? Would they reply to the initiatives: "Too
little, too late! Assad must agree to leave the country. The Baath
Party and Syrian military must disband"? Those are the sort
of demands the Bush administration presented to Saddam Hussein
after his government in late 2002 made equally sweeping, desperate
peace proposals to the U.S.
Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle, assigned to meet with
Iraqi representatives, dismissed them as "non-starters."
But of course! What the neocons want is not mere humiliating
concessions but abject submission. If they don't find it, they
become frustrated. Their patience is tried in the process. If they
have their way on Syria they'll say some months from now, "We
made an effort! Many efforts! War was a last resort! But
Bashar Assad---a modern Hitler!---sent terrorists across his
border to help Zarqawi and al-Qaeda and kill our brave men and
women in uniform. We had no choice but to cross that border to
wipe out those terror camps"
Actually, I understand that
Assad is a mild-mannered London-trained ophthalmologist, who never
intended to acquire political leadership, who's trying to
undertake political reforms to reduce unrest (some of it
encouraged by outside forces) in Syria. The vilification of this
particular person, who presides over a secular state where
Christians and Muslims hold equal rights and where women enjoy
greater freedom than in most Arab countries, is obviously driven
by an impatient political agenda. Those pursuing that agenda want
us all to believe that Syria's "on
the wrong side of history," and that Cleo the Goddess of
History Herself demands its doom. But seems to me Syria's just
your basic, normal country, fated to fall into the crosshairs of
another country that happens to be in the clutches of a gang of
bullying thugs. For those thugs, the virtue of patience is in fact
wholly alien.
Not that I counsel patience for us,
in the antiwar movement. This thuggery has gone on too long.
Should the U.S. attack Syria, may the streets swarm with millions
demanding the ouster of the warmongering regime. Imagine the joy
of the people of the world would experience, witnessing the
spectacle of the American people themselves repudiating the war on
the world that the impatient Khalilzad and his bullying ilk are
inflicting with no end in sight.
In the meantime, a big anti-war
demo in Washington D.C. this weekend. A huge turnout might reduce
the prospect for attacks on Syria, Iran, and other countries, and
hasten the end of the occupation of Iraq. Support for the war and
for Bush has nose-dived, despite the efforts of the corporate
press to provide an upbeat "patriotic" take on events in
the world. Now is the moment for the "reality mode"
crowd to observe its obligations to the real world, in the face of
the world of myth so exploited by twentieth century fascisms. If
there's anything you ever felt urgently inclined to do,
please do this. See you in D.C.!
Gary Leupp is Professor
of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of
Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants,
Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan;
and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900.
He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of
the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial
Crusades.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
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