WASHINGTON - Despite the clear opposition
of the Barack Obama administration and apparent
ambivalence on the part of the right-wing
government in Israel, neo-conservative hawks here
have set their sights on Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad who they hope will be the next domino to
fall to the so-called "Arab spring".
In a
much-noted op-ed published on Saturday by the
Washington Post, Elliot Abrams, who served as
former president George W Bush's top Middle East
adviser, called for the administration to take a
series of diplomatic and economic measures similar
to those taken against Libya before the United
States and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization's (NATO's) military intervention, to
weaken Assad's hold on power and embolden the
opposition.
He was joined the same day by
the Wall Street Journal's hardline
editorial page that urged
Washington to support the opposition "in as many
ways as possible".
"It's impossible to
know who would succeed Assad if his minority
Allawite regime fell, but it's hard to imagine
many that would be worse for US interests," the
Journal's editorial board asserted. Its
increasingly neo-conservative counterpart at the
Washington Post, which last week called Assad "an
unredeemable thug", urged the administration to
side "decisively with those in Syria seeking
genuine change".
And on Tuesday, a major
candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential
nomination, former Minnesota governor Tim
Pawlenty, chimed in with a full-throated
endorsement of Abrams' recommendations and
described Assad himself as a "killer".
The
latest campaign, which comes as the administration
finds itself ever more deeply embroiled in a civil
war in Libya and remains preoccupied by challenges
to friendly regimes in Bahrain and Yemen, was
launched as it became clear over the past week
that Assad faces what most observers here believe
is the biggest crisis of his nearly 11-year-old
reign.
More than 60 people have reportedly
been killed in clashes between protesters and
police around the country since demonstrations
erupted in the southern town of Deraa two weeks
ago.
Expectations that Assad, who
dismissed his government on Tuesday, would
announce a series of reforms, including an end to
a nearly 50-year-old emergency law, were dashed on
Wednesday when he blamed "conspiracies" for the
unrest in a speech to parliament. Although he
suggested that major reforms were indeed
impending, he failed to specify either what they
were or when they might be implemented.
"There will be more demonstrations,"
predicted Bassam Haddad, a Syria expert at George
Mason University, who added that the regime
remained divided between reformists and
conservatives. "If Bashar gets his way, I feel the
response [to further protests] will be mild. But
if the hardliners get their way, there will be a
crackdown that will have a snowball effect and
that could turn into a nightmare for the regime."
That would likely be welcomed by the
neo-conservatives, some of whom have already
suggested that a violent repression will enable
them to invoke Washington's intervention against
Libya as a precedent for taking strong action
against his regime.
The Obama
administration, which has tried to engage Damascus
as part of a broader strategy to weaken its
alliance with Iran, has regarded Assad himself as
reform-minded, but limited in his ability to move
against an entrenched opposition in the security
forces and his ruling Ba'ath party.
On
Sunday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
described Assad as a "different leader", noting
that "many of the members of congress who have
gone to Syria in recent months have said they
believe he's a reformer".
The remark
infuriated neo-conservatives who have long
considered the Assad dynasty as public enemy
number two, after Iran, in the Middle East due to
its ties with Tehran, its long-standing support
for Lebanon's Hezbollah and Palestine's Hamas,
and, since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, its
alleged backing for Sunni insurgents there.
Indeed, the notorious 1996 "Clean Break"
memo that was prepared for then-incoming Israeli
premier Benjamin Netanyahu by several prominent
neo-conservatives who, seven years later, would
take senior posts in the Bush administration,
depicted the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as one
crucial step in a larger strategy designed to
destabilize Syria.
During the 2006 war
between Israel and Hezbollah, Abrams reportedly
urged Israel's defense minister to expand Israel's
bombing campaign to include targets inside Syria,
a course that was supported publicly by other
neo-conservatives outside the administration. To
their frustration, the Israelis rejected their
advice.
Neo-conservatives and their
congressional allies have fought tooth and nail
against efforts by the Obama administration to
begin normalizing relations with Damascus that
were effectively broken off by the Bush
administration after it blamed the 2005
assassination of former Lebanese prime minister
Rafik Hariri in Beirut on Assad's regime.
Now, however, they clearly believe that
the Arab spring has presented a new opportunity
for "regime change" in Damascus, one that must be
seized without delay.
Abrams, who exerted
a major influence on Bush's policy toward Syria,
has called in particular for the administration to
strongly and continuously denounce the regime,
withdraw its ambassador, press for international
action against Assad, including seeking his
indictment by the International Criminal Court,
and using Washington's influence with the new
governments in Egypt and Tunisia to persuade the
Arab League, which expelled Libya earlier this
month, to apply the same sanction to Damascus.
But, aside from condemning specific
incidents of violence by the security forces, as
well as an expression of disappointment on
Wednesday at Assad's speech before parliament, the
administration has shown no inclination to follow
this advice.
"Washington already has its
hands full in the Middle East," noted Dov Zakheim,
who served in a senior Pentagon post under Bush.
"In an environment in which American
forces are engaged in three Muslim countries, the
last thing Washington needs is to verbally trap
itself in a situation in which pressure for yet
more military action begins to mount," he wrote in
the Shadow Government blog at foreignpolicy.com on
Monday.
"The last thing the United States
needs is to get enmeshed in Syria's troubles," he
added, noting that "[a]n unstable Syria might be
tempted, as neither Assad pere nor
fils were, to attack Israel on the Golan
front, or to push Hezbollah into a war that
Damascus would then widen."
Similarly,
Paul Pillar, a retired Central Intelligence Agency
analyst who served as National Intelligence
Officer for the Middle East between 2000 and 2005,
warned that regime change could turn out very
poorly for both the US and Israel and that Abrams'
and the Journal's confidence that any successor
regime would be preferable to Assad's was
ill-founded.
"Syria under Assad is
probably the most secular place in the Middle
East," he noted in his blog at the
nationalinterest.org website. "The influence of
Islamism, in whatever form, in Syria has nowhere
to go but up if there is regime change. That would
not be welcome to those in Israel and the United
States who worry about any political role for
Islamists."
Jim Lobe's blog on
US foreign policy can be read at
http://www.lobelog.com.
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