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Syria caught in Iraqi blame
game
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Throughout the bloody years of
their civil war (1975-90), the Lebanese refused
to admit that they were responsible for all the
blood being shed around them. They were the
killers, and they were the victims. They always
had a perfect scapegoat to explain the craziness
around them: the Israelis, the Syrians, the
Palestinians, the Americans - anybody was
responsible, except the Lebanese.
"It
can't be us" was the term often echoed in Beirut
when fighting became exceptionally brutal.
And today, the situation is very similar in
Iraq. The Iraqis are refusing to admit that they
are responsible for all the blood being shed around
them. They, too, have the perfect scapegoat:
the Iranians, the Israelis, the Syrians,
the Americans - anybody except the Iraqis themselves.
The truth is that Iraq is in a shambles
because some of the Iraqis, Saddam Hussein's
leftovers and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrorists, do
not want Iraq to become a pro-Western democracy.
Syria has nothing to do with the
trouble-making, yet it happens to be at the
crossroads, and happens to share very long
borders with Iraq (605 kilometers). The number of
eloquent Syrians who can convincingly defend its
stance and plead innocent is very limited, and
given the fact that Damascus is still ruled by the
Ba'ath Party, it's even easier to accuse Syria of
working with ex-Iraqi Ba'athist officials.
Syrian cooperation
Syria's
cooperation in trying to maintain a stable Iraq
can be seen by the sand wall it created along the
border to keep cars from crossing, along with the
control and observation centers dotted on the
border to monitor personnel. Similar centers have
been established by the Americans and Iraqis on
their side of the border, and they have very
sophisticated monitoring devices and technology -
certainly more advanced than those of the Syrians.
Near Hirri, a small village on
the Syrian-Iraqi border, the Syrians have built
an earthen ramp to prevent cars from crossing.
Anwar al-Bunni, a human-rights activist and
opposition figure in Syria, who usually has few good
things to say about his government, confirmed that
the regime has indeed arrested those calling for
jihad in Iraq. In the conservative city of Hama,
16 preachers who ordered their followers to fight
the Americans in Iraq were arrested last September,
Bunni said. If anybody were to blame for not
catching people, it would be the Iraqis and
Americans.
For its part, the US has given
a lot of contradictory signals to Damascus. In an
interview with CNN in January, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said, "The Syrians have not been
as helpful as they should be." Her calls were
echoed by Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and
his Defense Minister Hazem al-Shaalan, who fired
accusations against Damascus in December
and January accusing Syria of arming
fighters to cross the border into Iraq, and
revealing that an Iraqi woman, trained by Iraqis
in Syria, had entered his office to assassinate
him, but failed in her task. The Iraqis say that
Syria has up to US$3 billion stashed away from the
Saddam era in Syrian banks.
British journalist Patrick Seale wrote an
article last week saying that according to a source at
the US National War College, a US strike
against Syria nearly took place at the end of 2004,
but was delayed by the US Army. Seale pointed out
that a future attack might be carried out either by
the US Navy or Air Force, with no ground
invasion. Earlier, in December, three analysts from the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
published an article in the Washington Times
titled "Syria's murderous role". Then, William
Kristol, chairman of the Project for the New
American Century and another neo-conservative,
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 we could covertly help, or overtly support,
the Syrian opposition."
United Press International
quoted a former senior US official as saying, "I
think there is enough fire under this smoke to
justify such action," then added, "Syria is
complicit in the [anti-US] insurgency up to its
eyeballs." The same article claimed that,
according to another unnamed official, Zarqawi has
an al-Qaeda network in Damascus,
discovered last summer. This hard-to-believe
accusation lacks any accuracy, since Syria is a
declared enemy of al-Qaeda, because of the
country's secularism and declared opposition to
militant Islam. It was none other than Syrian
intelligence that worked closely with the US
Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2001 to track
down members of al-Qaeda in Europe, after the
September 11 attacks.
Another story making
headlines among Washington's neo-conservatives is
an interview with Mu'ayyad Ahmad Yassin, a former
officer in Saddam's army who led a resistance
group in Fallujah called Mohammad's Army.
Captured in Fallujah, he was interviewed last December on
the US-funded Arabic satellite channel al-Hurra,
and said that he received permission from Saddam
(while the latter was in hiding after his ouster
in April 2003) to go to Syria, meet with an
intelligence officer, and request assistance. When
asked if the Syrians responded, Yassin said he did
not know.
While the story is being used to
magnify Syrian involvement, it actually proves the
opposite. If anything, the interview proves that
the US and Iraq cannot give hard evidence against
Syria. Another "senior" unnamed Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) official said that
intelligence officers in Syria wanted to continue
supporting the insurrection in Iraq and bullied
anyone who wanted to cooperate with the US.
Although this endangered Syria, it nevertheless
provided them with millions of dollars from arms
deals, the CIA official said. He added, "We should
send a cruise missile into south-side Damascus and
blow up the mukhabarat [intelligence]
headquarters off the map. We should first make
clear to them that they are the target."
Many in Syria doubt whether these
quoted officials spreading anti-Syrian propaganda in
the mass media actually exist. If the US is
openly hostile toward Syria, why don't these
"officials" come out and reveal their identity? They are
not criticizing an ally like Great Britain, and
being shy about it, but a country they plan on
invading. Many in Syria believe that no such
officials exist, but are actually trial balloons for
the Bush administration, used only to intimidate
Syria and pressure it to cooperate better with the
Americans in Iraq.
There are disagreements
among US policymakers on how best to deal with
Syria. Former deputy secretary of state Richard
Armitage gave an interview to Egyptian TV and was
told: "The Syrians are saying that you don't have
enough evidence." He replied, "In some cases, they
are right." When visiting Damascus last month,
Armitage said, "Syria has made some real
improvements in recent months on border security."
Martha Kessler, a CIA expert on Syria,
said, "I don't think the administration can afford
to destabilize another country in the region," and
pointed out that repeatedly, Syria had extended a
friendly hand to the US, since the collapse of the
USSR in 1991, only to be shunned by Washington.
According to her, Syria had offered to station US
forces on its soil before the US invasion of Iraq
in March 2003. The Americans cannot afford war
because a war-torn Syria would mean zero control
on Hezbollah in Lebanon, igniting a war with
Israel that could bring the entire region into
chaos. Expressing a very different view from the
US mainstream, she said, "Damascus is not the
heartbeat of this Iraqi insurgent movement."
Kessler's argument is persuasive, written
by a CIA official since the war began in 2003. The
truth is that the Iraqis are living in a
combination of chaos and fear, and when this
prevails, people search for scapegoats to explain
their misery. Joshua Landis, a professor at
Oklahoma University, writes that he met an Iraqi
judge passing through Syria to Iraq who believed
Syria's role in the uprising was central. This
Iraqi man explained that suicide bombings were not
part of Iraqi culture or history, and that Iraqis
had never engaged in senseless killing in the name
of Islam. It could be concluded, according to him,
that these attacks were being imported from some
nearby country with a history of suicide bombing,
"committed and directed by foreigners who were
importing their violent and twisted ways" to
Iraq, a clear reference to Syria.
Echoing the Lebanese in 1975-90, he
said, "It can't be us." This Iraqi gentleman has
not read his history well, and seemingly forgets
that Syria does not have a history of suicide
bombings, or terror attacks. It is in Iraq where
King Faysal II was slain, along with 20 members of
his royal family (women, children and pets
included), in 1958. That same year, it was his
uncle Prince Abd al-Illah whose body was crucified
and mutilated at the Ministry of Defense, and his
prime minister Nuri al-Said whose body was dragged
on the streets of Baghdad by an automobile until
it crumbled into pieces. It was in Iraq where
General Abd al-Karim Qasim was shot in 1966, and
where his corpse was shown on Iraqi television.
The Iraqis, cultured, sophisticated and
refined as many of them are, are nevertheless very
bloody in their dealings with one another.
Thousands today are armed throughout Iraq, roaming
the streets by night, looking for trouble and
yearning to pick a fight with a traditional enemy,
be it the Shi'ites, the Kurds, the Sunnis or the
Americans. They had been forced to live in
superficial harmony for more than 40 years of
military rule, and once law and order collapsed,
so did their civilized dealings with one another.
This is identical to how the Lebanese had
to live with one another, often unwillingly, and
then erupted into violence once the state crumbled
in 1975. In looking back through history, we can
blame nobody but the Lebanese themselves for the
outbreak of war in 1975, and can blame nobody but
the Iraqis themselves for their current status
quo. The Syrians are innocent.
Dr Sami
Moubayed
is a Syrian political analyst. He is the
author of Damascus Between Democracy and
Dictatorship 1948-1958 (Maryland 2000).
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