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On the warpath to
Damascus
By Ian Williams
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
At this time last
year, it was difficult to get people to take the threat
of war on Iraq seriously. This year, the threat to Syria
is more explicit than that against Saddam Hussein, but
many people dismiss any such thought.
But
paranoia pays. We should have noted by now that the Bush
administration is motivated in mysterious ways, but does
clearly signal its intentions no matter how seemingly
irrational they appear to others. The neo-conservatives
and their friends in the administration may, as the
current unplanned Iraqi occupation experience indicates,
be out of tune with reality in the rest of the world.
But the fact that they achieved their first goal - the
invasion and occupation of Iraq - indicates that they
know all too well how Washington works. Which should
make us worry about their second goal; most of them are
on the record supporting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon's suggestion that Syria is next.
The
passage of the Syria Accountability Act in the House of
Representatives with only four votes against it on
October 15 could be dismissed as mere pandering by
legislators eager to prove how earnestly pro-Israel they
are in the run-up to a costly election campaign. But
even if Representatives only voted for it out of callow
expediency, the act threatens to mean much more.
The road to Damascus
In fact, the
honorable gentlemen and women have lent their names and
votes to a set of assertions that paves a forensic trail
for tanks on the road to Damascus. The Accountability
Act sets out, in even more detail than the
administration had done over Iraq, a host of reasons for
an invasion of Syria. And of course President George W
Bush did not forget to mention the lack of democracy in
Syria in his speech to the National Endowment for
Democracy on November 6, where he invoked
democratization as his expediently retrospective
rationale for invading Iraq.
The Accountability
Act and a host of statements from the usual suspects in
the administration invoke every spurious reason for
action against Damascus that led to the current
quicksand in Baghdad. Support for terrorism, possession
of weapons of mass destruction, and indeed harboring
Iraqi Ba'athists and the missing weapons. Congressmen
who may well oppose the idea of another war would find
it difficult to deny their votes of alleged Syrian
perfidy that matches anything concocted against Iraq.
The warnings began immediately after the Iraq
invasion - but have now resumed. In May, Under Secretary
of State for Arms Control and International Security
John Bolton alleged, "The United States also knows that
Syria has long had a chemical warfare program. It has a
stockpile of the nerve agent sarin and is engaged in
research and development of the more toxic and
persistent nerve agent VX. Syria ... is pursuing the
development of biological weapons and is able to produce
at least small amounts of biological warfare agents."
Soon after the attack on Iraq, Bolton had rushed
to reassure Arabs on American-financed Arabic radio
station Radio Sawa that Iraq was indeed just the start
of the crusades. "We are hoping that the elimination of
the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein and the
elimination of all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
would be important lessons to other countries in the
region, particularly Syria, Libya and Iran, that the
cost of their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is
potentially quite high."
The statement had
considerable implications, coming as it did from the man
who went to Israel two months before to promise Sharon
that "it will be necessary to deal with threats from
Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards".
The
Accountability Act also accuses Syria of occupying
Lebanon, but it is the other frontier that is more
worrying. As the US occupation in Iraq sinks deeper into
the mire, the act cites as gospel Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld's claim back in March to "have
information that shipments of military supplies have
been crossing the border from Syria into Iraq, including
night-vision goggles ... These deliveries pose a direct
threat to the lives of coalition forces. We consider
such trafficking as hostile acts, and will hold the
Syrian government accountable for such shipments."
A month later, he claimed that Syrian fighters
were crossing into Iraq by the "busloads" with cash and
leaflets offering rewards for dead American soldiers. As
Baghdad fell Rumsfeld accused Damascus of harboring
Iraqi leaders, "We are getting scraps of intelligence
saying that Syria has been cooperative in facilitating
the move of the people out of Iraq and into Syria," he
inelegantly told press in Washington. In other words -
if we can't find Saddam in Iraq, he may be in Syria.
The act also reiterated previous American and
Israeli claims of Syrian sponsorship of "terrorist"
organizations like Hezbollah. Although no one except
Israel and Washington defines Hezbollah as a terrorist
organization, the administration's promiscuous use of
the word "terrorist" is geared toward a domestic
audience - a strategy that worked very well for the war
in Iraq. The formula that worked so well before,
flashing pictures of "Osama bin Laden equals Saddam
Hussein" on prime time television under the rubric of
"war on terror" will work just as well with an added
Arab, President Assad. There is every bit as much
evidence connecting him to September 11 as there was for
Saddam.
Reality bites back
The accusations
against Syria dropped off during the summer as the
Pentagonistas suffered a little from the reality check
on their prognostications for Iraq, but in recent weeks
they are building up again, with the Accountability Act
just one part of a chorus singing a hymn of hate. UN
Security Resolution 1511 was about Iraq, but the US
slipped in a clause threatening countries that allowed
terrorists to pass into Iraq ... and there is only one
being mentioned at the moment. As if to prove it was a
stupid, as well as a bad regime that was being framed,
the Syrian delegate actually voted for the resolution.
Its reward was immediate. In October, when
Israel bombed targets inside Syria in complete violation
of the UN Charter, the US threatened to veto any
resolution condemning it, and made public statements in
support of the Israeli action.
At first glance,
that looks like a setup for an Israeli first strike. But
while Israel has long been used to the US paying for its
wars, since March, Sharon could be said to have
succeeded in getting the US to actually fight Israel's
wars for it. Since then, he, the neo-cons and their
allies in the US administration have been pushing hard
for Syria to be dealt with.
A new
scapegoat
There is a worrying logic to it in an
election year. Retreat from Iraq is unthinkable, but as
in Vietnam, where the logic led to Cambodia and Laos to
stop the supply lines, Syria is the perfect scapegoat
for failure in Iraq, for the missing weapons, for the
missing Ba'athist leaders, for the continuing attacks on
US troops, when we all know how glad Iraqis were to be
liberated.
Syria has not actually made things
easy for itself. The current president's predecessor and
father, Hafez al-Assad, seems to have turned down a
genuine offer to negotiate a settlement from
then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Assad turned it
down because it did not include mandatory Palestinian
territory that Syria had occupied in 1948 and was
demilitarized (officially at least) until 1967. He could
have passed on his claim to the Palestinian Authority to
put in as a bargaining chip, but he never had much time
for Palestinians he did not control.
His son
also did an amazing imitation of a rat jumping on a
sinking ship by healing the decades-long intra-Ba'athist
blood feud with Baghdad, just in time for the Bush
administration to get its teeth into Iraq. And it is
true that Syria is indeed a tyrannical and undemocratic
regime, in fact, as well as by the particular Washington
definition of one that is anti-Israeli and not easily
manipulable by Washington.
It could be objected
that Syria has helped the Central Intelligence Agency
against Islamic fundamentalists, but that seems to cut
no ice with the likes of Bolton, who does not even show
gratitude that Syria, and the others in the "axis of
evil" he reviles so, often were his only allies in
voting against the International Criminal Court.
The neo-con chorus and Vice President Cheney
made it possible - in defiance of the UN, major allies,
and much of Congress - to stampede the US into a
paroxysm of righteous patriotism against Iraq by
manipulating claims of WMDs, terrorism and similar
bogeys. They have made it plain that they would like to
do it again for Syria, and they may find allies in the
White House who are more expedient in their views about
Damascus. Syria would be a good scapegoat for continuing
failure in Iraq during an election year. Taking another
capital in the Spring is unlikely to hinder Republican
prospects in the Fall. To paraphrase Woody Allen, just
because I'm paranoid does not mean that they won't try
to follow Iraq with Syria.
Ian Williams
contributes frequently to Foreign Policy in Focus on
United Nations and international affairs.
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
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