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2 How Syria dodged a neo-con
bullet By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Neo-conservative hawks in and
outside the administration of US President George
W Bush had hoped that Israel would attack Syria
during summer's Lebanon war, according to a newly
published interview with a prominent
neo-conservative whose spouse is a top Middle East
adviser in Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Meyrav Wurmser, who is herself the
director of the Center for
Middle East Policy at the
Hudson Institute in Washington, reportedly told
Yitzhak Benhorin of the Ynet website that a
successful attack by Israel on Damascus would have
dealt a mortal blow to the insurgency in Iraq.
"If Syria had been defeated, the rebellion
in Iraq would have ended," she asserted, adding
that it was chiefly as a result of pressure from
what she called "neo-cons" that the administration
held off demands by United Nations Security
Council members to halt Israel's attacks on
Hezbollah and other targets in Lebanon during the
war.
"The neo-cons are responsible for the
fact that Israel got a lot of time and space ...
They believed that Israel should be allowed to
win," she told Ynet. "A great part of it was the
thought that Israel should fight against the real
enemy, the one backing Hezbollah ... If Israel had
hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow
for Iran that it would have weakened it and
[changed] the strategic map in the Middle East."
Wurmser's remarks bolster reports from
Israel that hawks in the Bush administration did,
in fact, encourage in the first days of the
Israel-Hezbollah conflict the government of Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert to extend its war beyond
Lebanon's borders.
"In a meeting with a
very senior Israeli official, [US Deputy National
Security Adviser Elliot] Abrams indicated that
Washington would have no objection if Israel chose
to extend the war beyond to its other northern
neighbor, leaving the interlocutor in no doubt
that the intended target was Syria," a
well-informed source, who received an account of
the meeting from one of its participants, told
Inter Press Service (IPS) shortly after the
conflict ended in August. A similar account was
published in the Jerusalem Post at the time.
Abrams has been known to work particularly
closely with both David Wurmser, Meyrav's husband,
and Cheney's national security adviser, John
Hannah, who in turn have long favored regime
change in Damascus.
Indeed, both Wurmsers,
along with former Defense Policy Board chairman
Richard Perle and former under secretary of
defense for policy Douglas Feith, worked together
on a 1996 paper, "A Clean Break", for incoming
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which
called for overthrowing Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein as the first step toward destabilizing
Syria.
Wurmser and Hannah, according to
the New York Times, argued forcefully - and
successfully, with Abrams' help - against efforts
by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to persuade
Bush to open a channel to Syria in an effort to
stop the fighting in its early days.
Given
her husband's work for Cheney, Wurmser's remarks,
which come as the debate over policy toward Syria
both in Washington and in Israel is heating up,
offer important insights into the thinking of the
dwindling number of administration hawks,
particularly those around the vice president, who
is reportedly steadfastly opposed to any direct
engagement with Damascus or Tehran.
Since
summer's conflict, Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad has given a series of interviews with
Western media - most recently, Italy's La
Repubblica - in which he has called on Israel for
direct negotiations to end their state of war and
fully normalize relations. The repeated offers
have split Olmert's government. Some cabinet
officials, led for now by Defense Minister Amir
Peretz, have called for exploring Assad's offers,
if for no other reason than to determine what
price, besides return of the occupied Golan
Heights, Israel might be expected to pay, and what
it might gain, particularly with respect to
possibly weakening Syria's ties to Iran. But
Olmert has resisted this approach, insisting on
Sunday, for example, that he would not consider
talks with Damascus until and unless it first
renounced terrorism and halted its support of
"extremist influences", presumably the
Damascus-based wing of the Palestinian Hamas party
and Hezbollah.
But many analysts believe
that Olmert is being held back primarily by fear
of crossing hardliners in the Bush administration,
which charges Damascus with trying to regain its
influence in
