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Syria In Their Sights
The neocons plan their next “cakewalk.”
By Robert Dreyfuss
01/11/06 "American
Conservative" -- -- It’s happening again. It all
sounds depressingly familiar, and it is. The Bush administration
accuses the leader of a major Arab country of supporting terrorism
and harboring weapons of mass destruction. The stable of
neoconservative pundits begins beating the drums of war. American
forces begin massing on the country’s border, amid ominous talk of
cross-border attacks. Top U.S. officials warn that American patience
with the country’s leader is running out, and the United States
imposes economic sanctions unilaterally. There are threats about
taking the whole thing to the United Nations Security Council. And,
in Washington, an exile leader with questionable credentials begins
making the rounds of official Washington and finds doors springing
open at the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and at
Elizabeth Cheney’s shop at the State Department.
This time it is Syria. The pressure is on, and it will likely get a
lot worse very soon. On Dec. 15, the second installment of the
report by a UN team investigating the assassination of former
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri is delivered. The first report,
released in October, implicated several members of President Bashar
Assad’s family in the Hariri murder, though without hard evidence.
It would be wrong, however, to see the Bush administration’s
campaign against Syria only through the lens of the Hariri case.
Like the attack on Iraq, it is a longstanding vendetta.
Three years ago, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was widely viewed as the
first chapter of a region-wide strategy to redraw the entire map of
the Middle East. After Iraq, Syria and Iran would be the next
targets, after which the oil-rich states of the Arabian Gulf,
including Saudi Arabia, would follow. It was a policy driven by
neoconservatives in and out of the Bush administration, and they
didn’t exactly make an effort to keep it secret. In April 2003, in
an article in The American Prospect entitled “Just the Beginning,” I
wrote, “Those who think that U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy
war in Iraq, without the battle spreading beyond Iraq’s borders, are
likely to be mistaken.” The article quoted various neocon
strategists who sought precisely that. Among them was Michael Ledeen,
the arch-Machiavellian and Iran-Contra manipulator-in-chief, who
argued from his perch at the American Enterprise Institute: “I think
we’re going to be obliged to fight a regional war, whether we want
to or not. As soon as we land in Iraq, we’re going to face the whole
terrorist network. It may turn out to be a war to remake the world.”
Since then, of course, the conventional wisdom has evolved in a
rather different direction. As the war in Iraq bogged down, and as a
public outcry developed against the neoconservatives over the
bungled war, the belief took hold that the United States had bitten
off more than it could chew in Iraq—so that Syria, Iran, and the
rest of President Bush’s evildoers can rest easy. According to this
theory, the United States no longer has the stomach, or the
capability, to spread the war beyond Iraq as originally intended.
Our troops are stretched too thin, our allies are reining us in, and
cooler heads are prevailing in Washington—or so the theory goes.
But the news from Syria shows that the conventional wisdom is wrong.
The United States is indeed pursuing a hard-edged regime-change
strategy for Syria. And it isn’t necessarily going to be a Cold
War—in fact, it could well get very hot very soon. In Washington,
analysts disagree over exactly how far the Bush administration is
willing to go in pursuing its goal of overthrowing the Assad
government. In the view of Flynt Leverett, a former CIA Syria
analyst now at the Brookings Institution, the White House favors a
kind of slow-motion toppling. In a forum at Brookings, Leverett,
author of Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial by Fire, announced his
conclusion that Bush was pursuing “regime change on the cheap” in
Syria. But others disagree, and believe that Syria could indeed be
the next Iraq. For neoconservatives, ‘tis a consummation devoutly to
be wished. For the rest of us—watching the war in Iraq unfold in
horror, lurching toward breakup and civil war—the prospect ought to
be both tragic and alarming.
Having ridded itself of one of its own inside neoconservatives,
reporter Judith Miller—who once co-authored a book with the always
apoplectic Laurie Mylroie, the originator of the novel idea that
Saddam Hussein was behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing—the New
York Times now warns correctly that any chance for positive change
in Syria can only occur “if President Bush rejects the counsel of
neoconservative advisers who have learned nothing from Iraq and now
dream of overthrowing Mr. Assad with unilateral force.” So far, at
least, there is no sign that the president has rejected them at all.
The fall of the Assad regime could open Syria, and the region, to
widespread instability. “No one knows what is going to come out of
it,” says Wayne White, the former deputy director of the State
Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research on Middle East
issues. “It’s making me nervous. What, exactly, is ‘Syria’? There
are cleavages there. The place could just break up.” White says that
no one knows the extent to which Sunni Islamic radicals have
organized themselves in Syria, especially through the Muslim
Brotherhood. “There could be a lot more Islamic militancy there than
we’re aware of.”
For Assad, none of this is exactly a surprise. On March 1, 2003, as
U.S. forces massed for the attack on Iraq, Assad addressed an
emergency summit meeting of the Arab League. “We are all targeted,”
he said. “We are all in danger.”
On Oct. 6, in his saber-rattling declaration of war against “Islamofascism,”
President Bush not-so-subtly warned Syria that it might be next.
“State sponsors [of terrorism] like Syria and Iran have a long
history of collaboration with terrorists, and they deserve no
patience from the victims of terror,” said Bush, speaking to the
National Endowment for Democracy. “The United States makes no
distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who
support and harbor them, because they’re equally as guilty of
murder. Any government that chooses to be an ally of terror has also
chosen to be an enemy of civilization. And the civilized world must
hold those regimes to account.” Echoing Bush, U.S. Ambassador to
Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad warned bluntly that “our patience is running
out with Syria,” and like other U.S. officials Khalilzad blamed the
Assad government for America’s troubles in Iraq.
Just before the president spoke, according to Knight Ridder, senior
Bush administration officials met in a high-level powwow to discuss
U.S. options for dealing with Syria. Among the alternatives
reportedly discussed at the meeting was “limited military action,”
and despite the fact that intelligence on Syria’s actual role in
supporting the resistance in Iraq is hazy at best, the story, by
reporter Warren Strobel, revealed that “one option under
consideration was bombing several villages 30 to 40 miles inside
Syria that some officials believe have been harboring Iraqi
insurgents.” On Oct. 15, the New York Times reported that the Bush
administration was threatening “hot pursuit” and other attacks into
Syrian territory. It added, “A series of clashes in the last year
between American and Syrian troops, including a prolonged firefight
this summer that killed several Syrians, has raised the prospect
that cross-border military operations may become a dangerous new
front in the Iraq war, according to current and former military and
government officials.”
Over the past several weeks, U.S. forces in Iraq have conducted
massive air and ground attacks in cities along the Iraq-Syria
border, in a sweeping offensive in advance of the Dec. 15 election
in Iraq. In Syria—whose military is already in turmoil over its
hurried evacuation from Lebanon and whose government is rattled to
the core because of charges that top Syrian officials may have been
involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister
Hariri—the prospect of a second front along its eastern border is
raising alarm. Although intelligence analysts assert that Syria
could weather a series of limited strikes along its border without
undue consequences for the regime, in fact such attacks could have
unforeseen results, even if they don’t presage a wider war by the
United States. Still, in his Washington Post online column “Early
Warning,” William M. Arkin wrote on Nov. 8 that the U.S. Central
Command has been “directed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
to prepare a ‘strategic concept’ for Syria, the first step in the
creation of a full-fledged war plan.”
The wider war that the Bush administration seems to be pursuing was
telegraphed long ago by the various neocon pundits and
prognosticators. Charles Krauthammer used his Washington Post column
in March to suggest that the way to advance the “glorious, delicate,
revolutionary moment in the Middle East” is to go after Syria. “This
is no time to listen to the voices of tremulousness, indecision,
compromise, and fear,” he wrote. Instead, the Bush administration’s
commitment to spreading democracy should take it “through Beirut to
Damascus.” William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and
co-author of The War in Iraq (“The mission begins in Baghdad, but it
does not end there”), helpfully suggested some options that the Bush
administration is clearly thinking about now. In The Weekly Standard
last year, Kristol wrote, “We could bomb Syrian military facilities;
we could go across the border in force to stop infiltration; we
could occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, a few miles
from the border, which seems to be the planning and organizing
center for Syrian activities in Iraq; we could covertly help or
overtly support the Syrian opposition. ... It’s time to get serious
about dealing with Syria as part of winning in Iraq, and in the
broader Middle East.”
All that is consistent with the neocons’ long-held view about Syria
and the region. For years they’ve been calling for regime change in
Syria, which was a major target in the now infamous paper written a
decade ago by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and
others entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the
Realm,” prepared as a study-group project for Israel’s Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In it, the authors called for “striking
Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove
insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper” as a
“prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would
threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.” Wurmser, a former AEI
Middle East specialist, played a key role in the Pentagon’s Office
of Special Plans, which helped Vice President Cheney and Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld manufacture false intelligence to justify
the war in Iraq. Wurmser is currently an aide on Vice President
Cheney’s national-security staff.
In 1997, the same circle—Perle, Feith, Ledeen, Wurmser, et
al.—created the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon. The USCFL—like
the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which involved the same
cast of characters—lobbied hard for the so-called Syria
Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act (SALSA), which was
passed by Congress and signed into law in 2003. It was SALSA that
set into motion the Bush administration’s current squeeze on Syria,
beginning with limited U.S. economic sanctions on Damascus triggered
by the act. One of the chief problems with SALSA, which was opposed
by just about all of the foreign-policy professionals in the State
Department and among Middle East experts, is that it created a
slow-motion confrontation with Syria precisely at the moment when
the United States most needed Syrian co-operation both in the war
against Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and in helping to stabilize Iraq.
“In Iraq, the two countries we most need the help of are Syria and
Iran,” says Chas W. Freeman. “We’re not trying to involve them.
We’re trying to up the ante by confronting Syria and Iran.”
Wesley Clark, a retired Army general who served as supreme allied
commander in Europe, wants to see the United States engage Syria in
a diplomatic dialogue. “The very last thing we need to do is to
engage in hot-pursuit raids into Syria,” he says.
The fact is, after 2001, Syria worked closely with the United States
in tracking down al-Qaeda cells and, according to former U.S.
intelligence officials, Syrian intelligence was very helpful.
(Perhaps even too helpful, since the United States apparently
“rendered” suspects captured in the war on terrorism to Damascus for
less-than-civil interrogation by Syrian authorities.) “In the
aftermath of 9/11, Syria provided the United States with actionable
intelligence on al Qaeda affiliates, as administration officials
publicly acknowledge,” wrote Flynt Leverett, the former CIA Syria
expert. “While I was serving on the National Security Council, this
information let U.S. and allied authorities thwart planned
operations that, had they been carried out, would have resulted in
the deaths of Americans.”
Even after the war in Iraq, while some U.S. officials threatened
Syria for its alleged, but unproven, support for Iraqi resistance
groups, other U.S. officials worked to establish better relations
between Washington and Damascus. It isn’t hard to guess which was
which: the Bush administration’s neocons wanted a showdown with
Syria, while the realists at the CIA and the State Department sought
a settlement. The prospects of a U.S.-Syria deal reached their
high-water mark in September 2004. During that period, top U.S.
officials, including William Burns of the State Department, visited
Syria to talk about getting Syria’s help in shutting down the
Syria-Iraq border, establishing joint U.S.-Syrian border patrols,
and providing Syria with high-tech surveillance gear to help stop
the infiltration of Islamist radicals into Iraq. There were rumors
everywhere, too, about Syrian-Israeli peace talks over the
Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. And Secretary of State Colin Powell,
visiting the region, went so far as to praise what he saw as
“positive” news from Syria. “I sense,” he said, “a new attitude from
the Syrians.” So obvious was the effort that Time magazine published
a story entitled “Cozying Up to Syria,” an idea that seems quaint
now.
That all came to a crashing end a few days later after an
assassination that stunned the world—no, not Hariri’s, but the
murder of Izzedine Sheik Khalil, a top official of Hamas, apparently
by Israel’s Mossad, in a huge car bomb in Damascus. It was the
latest in a string of Israeli provocations against Syria, including
the killing of a Hamas leader in Beirut, an Israeli air force strike
at a Palestinian training camp outside Damascus, and Israeli
overflights that buzzed the Assad family’s home in Latakia. Not
without reason, Syria’s Foreign Minister Farouq Sharaa charged that
the Israeli assassination was meant specifically to disrupt the
progress in U.S.-Syrian relations. And so it did.
Not coincidentally, the end of the thaw in relations between
Washington and Damascus occurred as the UN Security Council passed
Resolution 1559, aimed at putting pressure on Syria to end its
presence in Lebanon. Along with SALSA, Resolution 1559—which
followed a stupid and clumsy attempt by Assad to extend the
presidency of the pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon—set
into motion the train of events that led to Hariri’s assassination
on Valentine’s Day 2005. By October 2004, a full-blown crisis
between the United States and Syria was underway. Even the
Washington Post began calling for war. “Syria’s government has been
a longtime sponsor of terrorism, a stockpiler of missiles and
chemical weapons, and an unapologetic ally of Islamic extremists; it
has allowed hundreds, if not thousands, of insurgents to stream
across its borders to fight U.S. forces in Iraq,” thundered the
Post, though utterly wrong about nearly every one of its charges.
Concluded the Post, the United States could no longer tolerate Syria
and had to consider “breaking off of relations [and] military
retaliation.”
Since then, the United States has moved closer and closer to war
with Syria. In this history-as-farce rerun of the war with Iraq,
there is even a Syrian Ahmad Chalabi, namely Farid al-Ghadry, the
founder of the exile Reform Party of Syria, which is mixing it up
with a varying cast of characters among Syrian exiles and reformers,
from those with democratic ideals all the way to Syria’s Muslim
Brotherhood. Earlier this year, Ghadry and a cohort of allies won an
audience with a gaggle of top U.S. officials from the State
Department, the National Security Council, and the Defense
Department.
Virtually no one believes that Ghadry, a U.S. businessman, has any
future in Syria. But the astonishing thing about the Bush
administration’s destabilization of the Syrian regime is that no one
in Washington has any idea who or what might emerge to replace
Assad’s government. Asked to guess, most intelligence analysts throw
up their hands. Some argue that the most likely heir to a post-Assad
Syria would be the Muslim Brotherhood, an underground secret society
that has long been at war with the regime in Syria, ever since
President Hafez Assad inaugurated a new constitution in the early
1970s that proclaimed Syria to be a secular, socialist republic. But
Syria, a nation of just 18 million people, has as many as two
million Christians, two million Kurds, and many other non-Sunni
minorities—including the ruling Alawite group, to which the family
of the president and his chief backers belong. As a result, Syria
would not be ruled easily by Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamists.
Meanwhile, the UN investigation into Hariri’s murder is a ticking
time bomb for Assad. Already beset by the conflict with Israel, the
war in Iraq, and a crisis in Lebanon, Bashar Assad will have to
summon all the wiliness of his late father to survive the next few
months. In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour—who, in
parroting the White House line, seemed to be auditioning to reprise
the role of Judy Miller in this Middle East war—Assad plaintively
pointed out that there is little that Syria can do to stop
insurgents from crossing the long desert border between Syria and
Iraq, and he added that the United States had failed to control the
Iraqi side. “There is nobody on the Iraqi side, neither Americans
nor Iraqis,” said Assad. (Amanpour was unmoved. “Why cannot your
forces go house to house? Why cannot you actively stop this, close
it down?”) “We are interested in a more stable Iraq,” insisted
Assad. “[The United States] only talks about a stable Iraq, but the
mistakes they make there every day give the opposite result.”
Imad Moustapha, Syria’s ambassador to the United States, told the
Boston Globe in November that the United States recently refused yet
another proposal from Syria to revive co-operation with Damascus on
intelligence. “What we see in general is an administration that is
categorically refusing to engage with Syria on any level,” said
Moustapha. “We see an administration that would really love to see
another crisis in the Middle East, this time targeting Syria. ...
Even before the Iraq war started, they had this grand vision for the
Middle East.”
Less grand is the vision of Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host, who
ripped a page from Pat Robertson’s assassination handbook. “It’s
Bashar’s life,” said O’Reilly on Oct. 5. “I mean, we could take his
life, and we should take his life if he doesn’t help us out.”
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States
Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers national security for
Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, The
Nation, and Mother Jones.
January 16, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative
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