In wake of a United Nations investigation
implicating a number of Syrian and Lebanese
officials in the assassination of former Lebanese
prime minister Rafik Hariri, the Bush
administration is calling for international
sanctions and leaking dark hints of war.
But the United States is already
unofficially at war with Syria. For the past six
months, US Army Rangers and the Special Operations
Delta Force have been crossing the border into
Syria, supposedly to "interdict" terrorists coming
into Iraq. Several Syrian soldiers have been
killed.
The analogy the administration is
using for this invasion?
Cambodia, which the Richard
Nixon administration accused of harboring North
Vietnamese troops during the war in Southeast
Asia. On April 30, 1970, American and South
Vietnamese army units stormed across the border,
igniting one of the great disasters of all time.
The invasion was not only a military debacle; it
led to the rise of Pol Pot, who systematically
butchered some 2 million Cambodians.
As in
Vietnam, the American and British line in Iraq is
that the war is fueled by foreign fanatics
infiltrating from Syria and Iran. In an October
talk to the National Endowment for Democracy,
President George W Bush told the audience that
"Iran and Syria" have allied themselves with
Islamic terrorist groups; he warned that the
"United States makes no distinction between those
who commit acts of terror and those who support
and harbor them."
According to the
Financial Times newspaper, the Bush administration
is already discussing who should replace Syrian
President Bashar Assad, with the White House
leaning toward sponsoring an internal military
coup. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley -
the fellow who brought us the Niger-Iraq uranium
fairy tale - is in charge of the operation.
Flynt Leverett of the Brookings Institution
says the cross-border raids are aimed at
encouraging the Syrian military to "dump" Assad. A
military coup was how the US helped put Saddam
Hussein in power so he could liquidate the Iraqi
left.
The White House, in fact, knows that
foreign fighters have very little to do with the
insurgency in Iraq. The conservative London-based
International Institute for Strategic Studies
estimates that the number of foreign fighters is
"well below 10%, and may be closer to 4 or 6%".
American intelligence estimates that 95% of the
insurgents are Iraqi.
The Bush
administration has long had its sights on Iran,
which Bush calls "the world's primary state
sponsor of terrorism". These are sentiments
recently echoed in London, where Prime Minister
Tony Blair accused Tehran of smuggling weapons and
explosives into Iraq to attack British troops in
Basra. In one of history's great irony-challenged
moments, Blair said, "There is no justification
for Iran or any country interfering in Iraq."
Provocations The US has been
provocatively sending unmanned Predator aircraft
into Iran, supposedly looking for nuclear weapons,
but most likely mapping Iranian radar systems,
information the US would need before launching an
attack. According to Irish journalist Gordon
Thomas, the US has already targeted missiles at
Iranian power plants at Natanz and Arak.
Some 4,000 fighters of the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an armed organization
that seeks to overthrow the current regime in
Tehran, have a base north of Baghdad near the
Iranian border. The US has thrown a protective
umbrella over the MEK's soldiers and equipment,
although the State Department classifies the
organization as "terrorist".
Most of the
information on Iran's nuclear weapons programs
comes from the MEK, which has an uneven track
record for accuracy. In any case, there is a
disturbing parallel between the role the MEK is
playing in developing information on Iran's
weapons of mass destruction and the pre-war
intelligence on Baghdad's weapons of mass
destruction programs cooked up by Ahmad Chalabi
and the group of Iraqi expatriates gathered around
the Pentagon.
A major player in all this
is Israel, where the Likud and its US supporters
have long lobbied for a US attack on Iran and
Syria. In a speech in May to the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Richard Perle, a
Likud adviser and former Bush official, said the
US should attack Iran if it is "on the verge of
[developing] a nuclear weapon". Along with David
Frum of the Weekly Standard, Perle co-authored
An End to Evil, which calls for the
overthrow of "the terrorist mullahs of Iran".
An
Israeli proxy? Vice President
Dick Cheney has even suggested that Israel might
do the job. According to the Israeli daily
Haaretz, the US recently sold Tel Aviv 500 GBU-27
and 28 "bunker buster" guided bombs (although
Syria would be a more likely target for such
weapons).
The Israeli right has been
spoiling for a fight with Syria for some time. The
Israelis bombed near Damascus last year, and one
cabinet minister, Gideon Ezra, threatened to
assassinate Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled
Meshaal. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made
a similar threat about Hezbollah leader, Hassan
Nasallah.
The Sharon government is just as
belligerent about Iran. When he was Israeli chief
of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon said he
hoped international pressure on Iran would halt
its development of nuclear weapons, adding
ominously, "If that is not the case we would
consider our options."
One Israeli
intelligence official told the Financial Times,
"It could be a race who pushes the button first -
us or the Americans."
What that official
meant by "the button" is not clear, but the
logical candidate is a nuclear strike. In 1981,
the Israelis used conventional aircraft and
weapons to destroy the Iraqi nuclear power plant
at Osirak, but an attack on Iran's facilities
would be another matter.
Following the
1981 attack, the Iranians hardened and dispersed
their nuclear infrastructure. Israel's newly
purchased "bunker busters" might do the job, but
distance is a problem. Iran is a lot farther from
Israel than Iraq, and Israeli aircraft would have
difficulties making a round trip to Iran without
mid-air refueling. Israel has missiles, however,
plus several hundred nuclear weapons, and there
are at least some in Tel Aviv who wouldn't flinch
from using them.
Last month senior
Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin, admitted
passing classified information on Iran to Israel
through two AIPAC employees. Franklin used to work
for former under secretary of defense Douglas
Feith, and has close ties to neo-conservative
Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise
Institute, who said, "Tehran is a city just
waiting for us."
If all these names sound
familiar it is because they are the ones who
brought us the war in Iraq.
Prospects
for invasion: Cambodia redux? Would the
United States (possibly allied with Britain and
Israel) actually attack Iran and/or Syria?
Iran seems a stretch. The country has
three times the population of Iraq, almost four
times the land area, plus many mountains in which
one really does not want to fight.
Iran
also has considerable international support, and
while a number of nations are nervous about its
nuclear activities, the country is not seen as a
regional threat. Its military budget is only
one-third what it was in 1980 and, according to
Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes, Iran actually
has fewer tanks and planes than it did 20 years
ago.
Some of that support is based on the
fact that Iran has the second-largest oil and gas
reserves on the planet, reserves that Europe,
China and India simply cannot do without.
Syria is an easier target than Iran. With
the exception of its northern border, the country
is a flat plain, less than half the size of Iraq
and with a population of only 16.7 million. It is
also reeling from the UN investigation into the
death of Hariri.
This may make Syria look
like fruit ripe for the picking, and an invasion
would certainly divert attention from the chaos in
Iraq and Afghanistan. It would also be a logical
extension of the Bush administration's mythology
that all its troubles in the Middle East are
caused by foreign Islamic terrorists.
For
the outcome of such a strategy, see the war in
Southeast Asia.
Conn Hallinan is
a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In
Focus and a lecturer in journalism at the
University of California, Santa Cruz.
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