WASHINGTON - Just when it appeared that Syria
was complying in earnest with US demands to secure its
border with Iraq, and even making unprecedented peace
overtures to Israel, key neo-conservative opinion
shapers are calling on President George W Bush to take
stronger measures against Damascus, possibly including
military action.
The media campaign was launched
last week when three analysts associated with the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a
neo-conservative group that generally backs positions of
Israel's right-wing Likud Party, published an article in
the Washington Times titled "Syria's murderous role:
Assad aides [sic] Iraq's terrorist insurgency".
Then William Kristol,
the influential chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
and editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard,
devoted his lead editorial, "Getting serious about
Syria", to the same subject, concluding that, despite
the stresses on the US military in Iraq, "real options
exist" for dealing with Damascu".
"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 ... "
On Wednesday the Wall Street
Journal followed up in its lead editorial - always a
reliable indicator of neo-con opinion on the Middle East
- charging, "Syria is providing material support to
terrorist groups killing American soldiers in Iraq while
openly calling on Iraqis to join the 'resistance'."
The editorial, "Serious About Syria?" accused
the Bush administration of responding to these
provocations with "mixed political signals and weak
gestures", and urged it to at least threaten military
action, much as Turkey "mobilized for war against Syria"
in 1998 over Damascus' support for Kurdish rebels.
Within hours, President George W Bush himself
was talking tough on Damascus. Asked during a White
House photo-op with visiting Italian Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi about accusations by Iraq's defense
minister of alleged Syrian and Iranian support for the
Sunni insurgency, the president warned the two countries
that "meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq is not in
their interest".
In some ways, the new campaign
against Syria recalls a similar effort that began
building in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion
of Iraq in March 2003. Then, Washington was seen as an
irresistible force in the region, and neo-conservatives
and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld appeared to be
spoiling for a fight with Syria, which, they charged,
was harboring senior members of the formerly ruling
Ba'ath Party and Iraq's alleged weapons of mass
destruction.
But, as the insurgency grew more
potent in the fall of 2003, Bush's chief political aide,
Karl Rove, ordered the hawks to stand down, lest a new
military adventure cost the president his re-election.
Now that Bush has won a second term, they need not worry
about the possible political consequences.
But
that fails to explain precisely why the hawks are making
such a fuss over Syria at this moment, particularly
given the prevailing Washington consensus - including
among the hawks themselves - that Iran's nuclear program
represents a much more important strategic challenge to
the administration.
In contrast to the charges
that were made against Damascus 16 months ago, the new
campaign appears to be based primarily on alleged
statements by unidentified US military and intelligence
officials cited in the Washington Times op-ed and a
subsequent Washington Post news article, to the effect
that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq is being organized,
funded and even managed by, as the Post put it, "a
handful of Iraqi Ba'athists operating in Syria".
One supposedly critical piece of evidence much
cited by the hawks was the reported discovery of a
global positioning signal receiver in a bomb factory in
the Iraqi insurgents' stronghold of Fallujah, which
"contained waypoints originating in western Syria".
These mostly anonymous accounts were recently
echoed by visiting King Abdullah of Jordan and Iraqi
President Ghazi Yawar, who also charged, as has
Washington, that Syria has trained and helped infiltrate
its own and other "foreign fighters" into Iraq.
The Post quoted one former Defense Intelligence
Agency analyst, who said, "There is an increasing view
[in the intelligence community] that Syria is at the
center of the problem."
While Kristol and others
have seized on these reports as proof of Syria's
sinister role in Iraq, they have ignored other evidence
of increased cooperation by Damascus, particularly in
sealing its border.
Indeed, on the same day that
Kristol issued his call to arms against Damascus, the
Journal's news reporters published an article that
began: "Senior military officers and other US officials
say Syria has made a serious effort in recent weeks to
stanch the flow of fighters moving across its border
into and out of Iraq, and has arrested at least one
former Iraqi Ba'athist accused by the US of helping to
finance and coordinate the insurgency."
At the
same time, a number of published accounts about the
aftermath of the capture of Fallujah established that
the number of Syrian and other "foreign fighters"
involved in the insurgency there was far less than had
been expected, putting paid to the theory that
foreigners from Syria or elsewhere were a major factor
in the uprising, as had long been claimed by the
Pentagon and its neo-con backers.
As Josh
Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma,
suggested in his Internet log, or "blog", the hawks want
a foreign scapegoat for an insurgency about which they
still know remarkably little.
"Post-Fallujah,"
according to Landis, "the analysts decided that if the
resistance was not powered by Syrians, then it was led
by Iraqis living in Syria; hence the spate of articles
suggesting the defense department had adopted this view.
It will be interesting to see if it has more staying
power than the last theory."
Moreover, added
Landis, the US administration has little to lose.
"Washington isn't having much luck with other strategies
for defeating the resistance and Syria has been quite
cooperative in the past and will probably be so in the
future. So why not mount yet another Syria-bashing
campaign?"
Bassam Haddad, who teaches Arab
politics at St Joseph's University in Philadelphia, told
IPS he sees the current campaign as an effort to
intimidate Damascus, with two aims in sight.
First, the hawks want to gain more cooperation
from Damascus on tightening its borders with Iraq and
arresting or expelling Ba'athist exiles in Syria who may
indeed - according to both Landis and Haddad - be
supporting the insurgency in various ways. Second,
pressing Syria could further tilt the regional balance
of power in Israel's favor, at a moment when prospects
for renewed peace negotiations are brighter than they
have been in a very long time.
"There's very
little happening in Iraq today that Syria is responsible
for ... so, if there is some kind of strategy behind all
of this, it is probably to apply pressure for
concessions leading to eventual negotiations with the
Israelis," particularly with respect to Syrian support
for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian groups
operating in Damascus, said Haddad.
The current
campaign may also reflect a growing sense of urgency
among the neo-cons, in particular, that "a window of
opportunity" for pressuring Syria is closing as the
situation in Iraq deteriorates. "I think these factions
would like to see something done about Syria before it
becomes hugely unpopular to take military action," he
added.
But both experts suggest a risk in
applying too much pressure on the regime of President
Bashar al-Assad which, according to Landis, will be
extremely reluctant to enter into a major fight on
Bush's behalf with many of the 500,000 Iraqis who have
come to Syria in the past year, "not to mention with
local Islamists and mosque leaders".
"I fear, as
do many in the State Department who know Syria," said
Haddad, "that the current Syrian regime is far more
preferable to both Syrians and Americans than possible
alternatives ... the best organized of which are
fundamentalist Sunni Muslims."
