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US limits contact with Syrian leader
Frustration grows over border control
By Farah Stockman and Thanassis Cambanis
Globe Staff
11/08/05 "Boston
Globe" -- -- WASHINGTON -- The United States has
cut off nearly all contact with the Syrian government as the Bush
administration steps up a campaign to weaken and isolate President Bashar al-Assad's regime, according to US and Syrian officials.
The United States has halted high-level diplomatic meetings, limited
military coordination on Syria's border with Iraq, and ended
dialogue with Syria's Finance Ministry on amending its banking laws
to block terrorist financing. In recent months, as distrust between
the two countries widened, the United States also declined a
proposal from Syria to revive intelligence cooperation with Syria,
according to Syria's ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha,
and a US official.
The new era of hostility flows from American frustration at what it
considers Syria's failure to effectively control its border with
Iraq and continued support for radical Palestinian groups that
threaten the chances of peace in Israel.
The US-Syrian confrontation has sharpened just as Syria is also
facing pressure from many Arab and European governments -- as well
as the United States -- over Syria's suspected role in the
assassination of the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Oct. 31 that ''the Syrian
government needs to make a strategic decision to fundamentally
change its behavior" or risk becoming an international pariah.
Some US officials say privately that there is now an active debate
about whether regime change should be a US goal. Publicly,
administration officials say that they want to see a change in
behavior.
But Syrian officials say they have made progress on many US demands,
including stepping up patrols along the Iraqi border, and that it is
the United States that has broken promises to cooperate. Syrians say
that powerful neoconservative policy makers in Washington have long
hoped to topple their regime in a bid to transform the Middle East.
''What we see in general is an administration that is categorically
refusing to engage with Syria on any level," Moustapha said. ''We
see an administration that would really love to see another crisis
in the Middle East, this time targeting Syria."
Despite their disputes, the two countries worked together on
counterterrorism efforts following the Sept. 11 attacks.
The danger posed by Al Qaeda was one thing that both governments
could agree on: Syria's secular leaders, who are from a minority
Alawite sect, consider Al Qaeda and other Sunni fundamentalists
dangerous political rivals for the Syrian populace, a majority of
whom are Sunni.
Weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Syria turned over many of its
files on Al Qaeda and allowed the CIA to collect intelligence inside
the country, Flynt Leverett, who was a National Security Council
official at the time, writes in his recent book ''Inheriting Syria:
Bashar's Trial by Fire."
Cooperation was so close that, in 2002, the United States secretly
flew a terrorism suspect with dual Canadian and Syrian citizenship
to Damascus. He was allegedly tortured during interrogation.
Syria, also credited with foiling a terrorism plot in Bahrain,
halted intelligence cooperation after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But
by the summer of 2004, State Department officials had revived
dialogue, Moustapha said.
Powell's chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, said that Powell was
often frustrated by Syria's failure to keep promises to shut down
Palestinian groups inside Syria and to arrest Iraqis hiding there.
But he said that Powell never gave up on diplomacy with Syria, which
put him at odds with another camp of advisers in Washington who
sought to bring a hard-line against the Syrian regime.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld advocated pressuring Syria as part
of a larger plan to confront Iraq, Syria, and Iran, said Wilkerson,
now retired and a critic of the Bush administration's Middle East
policy. Rumsfeld advocated ''tightening the screw on them as much as
possible, including precision strikes into Syria to take out 'known
terrorist' sites," he added.
Other top Bush advisers have also taken a similar stance. In a 1996
policy paper, Douglas J. Feith, who later became Bush's
undersecretary of defense for policy, Richard Perle, who became
chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, and David Wurmser, now
an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, urged the Israeli government
to strike Syria.
Despite these sentiments, direct contacts with the Syrian government
were frequent just a year ago. Last September, a US Treasury
Department team accepted Syria's invitation to travel to Damascus to
study Syrian banks, which had been designated as key
money-laundering concerns. Treasury officials say the dialogue
produced some limited results -- counterterrorism-oriented changes
to banking laws and the eventual return of $262 million in Iraqi
funds to Baghdad -- but fell short of US demands.
The same month, Syria met with US-led coalition forces in Iraq and
agreed to a joint plan for securing the border, Major General Amin
Suleiman Charabeh, head of Syrian state security for the Iraq-Syria
border.
Charabeh said that a British technical team promised night vision
goggles and communications equipment to better police the border,
but the equipment never came. The British also took the names of
Syrian personnel who could receive training, but never followed up.
A British Embassy spokesman said that ''there were previous talks
about a gift of night vision goggles," but said that Syria must do
more to tackle ''support for the insurgency in areas other than the
border" before Britian will consider sharing the equipment.
The last high-level meeting between US and Syrian officials happened
in January 2005, when Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, met with
Assad. According to Moustapha, Armitage had a number of requests:
work harder to seal the border, allow Iraqis inside Syria to vote in
the upcoming election, and arrest a list of Iraqis in Syria,
including including Saddam Hussein's half-brother, Sabawi Ibrahim
al-Hassan al-Tikriti.
''Armitage said, 'Nothing today is as important to Bush as the
upcoming election in Iraq, and if you support these elections, it
will make such a difference in US-Syria relations,' " Moustapha
said.
Armitage did not return phone calls seeking comment about the
meeting.
Syria did allow Iraqis to vote, and arranged for Sabawi to return to
Iraq, where he was arrested.
But better relations with the United States did not follow. In
February, just after Powell and Armitage retired and Rice took over,
President Bush singled out Syria for supporting terrorism in his
State of the Union address, highlighting Syria before Iran.
Two weeks later, Hariri was assassinated in a plot in which top
Syrian officials would be implicated. His slaying prompted the US
ambassador to leave Damascus for what was billed as a temporary
absence, but she never returned.
And in the last three months, the United States declined the
intelligence overture.
Moustapha said that a US ally in Europe asked Syrian officials to
resume cooperation on intelligence matters. Syria agreed, he said,
but only if a third country could be present to witness that Syria
was indeed cooperating.
''They came back to us and said," 'Sorry, forget it. The Americans
refused,' " Moustapha said.
The US official said he had heard that the proposal was Syria's
initiative, and that the Americans did not consider it sincere.
''When the time was best for [cooperation], they played games, and
now it looks like they are trying to make up some ground," he said.
Other contacts with Syria have also faded away.
In September, the Defense Defense blocked Syria from attending a
conference in Jordan designed for Iraqi border officials to meet
their counterparts from neighboring countries, according to David
Thomas, a spokesman for the National Defense University, whose
affiliate school organized the conference.
''My understanding is that it is a standing policy that they are not
invited [to such meetings]," he said.
James Denselow, a British researcher who spoke at the conference on
Syria's behalf, said: ''There's no way the Syrians can control the
border to the degree that the Americans want, without American
engagement . . . but Rumsfeld's whole ideology does not allow
engagement."
Syrians say the United States wants regime change in Syria, not
cooperation.
But US officials say Syria must make a strategic decision to
completely change its ways -- like Libya did -- or risk being cut
off from the entire world.
''There have been repeated and numerous high-level attempts to
engage the Syrian government," said State Department spokesman Sean
McCormack. ''Yet they have failed to act."
Stockman reported from Washington; Cambanis from Damascus, Syria.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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