Neo-cons have Syria in their
sights By Khody Akhavi
WASHINGTON - Nearly two weeks have passed
since Israeli warplanes reportedly conducted a
mysterious raid against an as yet unidentified
target in northeastern Syria. There are no
official details of the incident, as both
countries have remained tight-lipped.
In
the absence of a clear picture of what happened in
the early hours of September 6, speculation in the
US mainstream media has grown as to what exactly
the Israelis targeted, and why Syria
-
assuming it was the target of an unprovoked attack
- has been so muted in its response.
Was
Israel's attack aimed at testing Syria's radar
defenses? Did the air strike seek to disrupt arms
shipments to Lebanon's Hezbollah? Was it a dress
rehearsal for a possible future strike on Iranian
nuclear facilities?
Feeding the
speculation, a familiar clutch of hawks in the
administration of US President George W Bush
appear to be suggesting that Israel's apparent air
strike targeted a joint North Korea-Syria nuclear
venture.
Writing in the opinion pages of
the Wall Street Journal more than a week before
the incident, former US ambassador to the United
Nations John Bolton asserted, "We know that both
Iran and Syria have long cooperated with North
Korea on ballistic-missile programs, and the
prospect of cooperation on nuclear matters is not
far-fetched.
"Whether and to what extent
Iran, Syria or others might be 'safe havens' for
North Korea's nuclear-weapons development, or may
have already benefited from it, must be made
clear," he wrote. Bolton resigned his position at
the UN last year and currently serves as a senior
fellow at the neo-conservative American Enterprise
Institute.
Comments made by a US State
Department official last Friday fanned the flames
and bolstered the neo-conservative argument.
Andrew Semmel, acting deputy assistant secretary
of state for nuclear non-proliferation policy,
told the Associated Press that the US believes
Syria has a number of "secret suppliers" to obtain
nuclear equipment as part of a covert program.
The Bush administration has maintained a
hardline policy stance on Syria. It has not had
high-level diplomatic relations with the country
since the assassination of former Lebanese prime
minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. The US has alleged
that Syria played a role in the assassination.
Neo-conservatives appear to be re-igniting
a political narrative that fits neatly with the
infamous cast of the "axis of evil". While not
explicitly mentioned, Syria has often been
designated as a junior partner of Iran, Iraq and
North Korea's "reign of terror" because of its
support for Islamist opposition groups such as
Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza.
"They
[neo-cons] want to torpedo the North Korea deal,
they have clung doggedly to making sure that there
is no cooperation in Syria, and they're the same
people who got us into this mess in the Middle
East in the first place," said Daniel Levy, a
former Israeli peace negotiator and senior fellow
at the Washington-based New America Foundation.
The focus on North Korea comes as the US
prepares to implement the six-nation agreement to
end Pyongyang's nuclear-weapons program, a
diplomatic approach that has drawn the ire of
policy hawks such as Bolton.
"Bolton
represents the crowd that is very distressed that
the US has declared defeat in North Korea by
trusting the North Koreans. They would like to
scuttle that agreement," wrote Syria expert Josh
Landis on his widely read weblog Syriacomment.org.
"While doing it, anything they can drag in
to boost the notion of weapons transfers between
Korea and Syria and Iran will be icing on the
cake. Israeli planes were trying to get the
goods," he wrote.
Some US analysts have
been very dubious of an actual Syrian nuclear
threat, describing the speculation surrounding the
incident as a manufactured stunt aimed at
advancing the neo-conservative agenda.
Joseph Cirincione, director for nuclear
policy at the Washington-based Center for American
Progress, according to an interview with Foreign
Policy, said, "This story is nonsense. The
Washington Post story should have been headlined
'White House officials try to push North
Korea-Syria connection'. This is a political
story, not a threat story.
"Once again,
this appears to be the work of a small group of
officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted
'intelligence' to key reporters in order to
promote a pre-existing political agenda. If this
sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it
should. This time it appears aimed at derailing
the US-North Korean agreement that administration
hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis
want to thwart any dialogue between the US and
Syria," said Cirincione, who previously served as
director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.
The
Israeli media - bound by an army censor that
restricts coverage of the incident - have relied
largely on foreign press reports to reconstruct
the incident.
"The Israeli press have gone
out of their way to say to the Israeli public, 'We
know [the story], we're going to selectively quote
from the overseas rumors and you can fill in the
gaps,'" the New America Foundation's Levy said,
adding that the press "was dismissive about the
reports about arming Hezbollah, and gave greater
weight to those connecting Syria and North Korea".
Syria lodged a formal complaint with the
UN on Tuesday over the "flagrant violation" of its
airspace last week by the Israeli warplanes, which
Damascus claims dropped munitions on its
territory. Israel and Syria have technically been
at war since 1967, when Israel occupied the Golan
Heights during the Six Day War.
The air
incursion follows a summer that saw heightened
tension between the two countries. "Something will
come to light and will make it clear to everyone -
the Israelis were sitting on intelligence," said
Levy.
Experts are still unsure of what
that intelligence entails, and whether is it
"nuclear", "non-conventional", "chemical" or
nothing of the sort. Regardless, in most of the
narratives, the North Korea connection remains a
salient point.
But whatever happened in
the early hours of September 6 does not appear to
have soured Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's
efforts to restart negotiations with his
adversary. Olmert announced on Monday that Israel
was prepared to hold negotiations with Syria,
without preconditions and without ultimatums,
according to the Jerusalem Post.
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