WASHINGTON - Amid a continuing crackdown
against opposition forces, United States President
Barack Obama is coming under growing pressure to
impose tougher sanctions against the government of
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Two key
lawmakers with close ties to the powerful "Israel
Lobby" on Capitol Hill called on Thursday for
Obama to fully enforce existing sanctions, which
would deny Damascus access to a range of
technologies, and step up assistance to opposition
activists both in Syria and abroad.
"Syria
is not only hosting the world's worst terrorist
groups and developing weapons of mass
destruction," said New York Democratic
Representative Eliot Engel in releasing a letter
co-signed by the Republican chairwoman of the
House Foreign
Affairs Committee, Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen. "Now it's murdering its own people."
"It's long past time to impose the full
range of sanctions on Syria and to work with our
allies to tighten the screws on the Assad regime,"
he added.
The letter followed the
suggestion earlier this week by Israeli Defense
Minister Ehud Barak that Assad's crackdown had so
alienated the Syrian population that it was
unlikely that he could fully restore his authority
over the country, even if he halted the repression
now.
"I don't think Israel should be
alarmed by the possibility of Assad being
replaced," Barak told a television interviewer in
an unprecedented comment on the crisis by a top
Israeli official.
The statement was
particularly notable because Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu had reportedly told his
ministers not to discuss the situation in public
due in part to strong disagreements within the
national-security establishment over whether
Assad's demise would serve or disserve Israel's
interests.
Barak's assessment regarding
the likely trajectory of the upheaval that has
wracked its northern neighbor, however, also
reflects the views of a growing number of analysts
here who believe that popular discontent - if not
outrage - with the government's repression has
become significantly more widespread over the past
10 days, particularly since security forces
besieged and occupied the southern city of Dera'a
where the protests were first launched seven weeks
ago.
The Damascus Center for Human Rights
Studies (DCHRS) reported on Thursday that several
hundred people, including women and children, had
been killed during a two-day period in Dera'a -
among them some 81 soldiers and officers who,
according to sources cited by the Center, are
believed to have been shot for refusing orders to
fire on civilians. Assad was quoted on Wednesday
as saying that military operations in the city
would end "very soon".
International
human-rights groups have reported that well over
500 people have been killed by security forces
since protests began in March, but that figure is
regarded by many as a conservative estimate.
Hundreds - and possibly thousands - more
have reportedly been arrested in round-ups that
have continued this week in Syria's two largest
cities - Damascus and Aleppo - which have until
now remained relatively quiet, as well as in other
key towns, notably Homs, Latakia, Saqba, Qamishly
and Dera'a.
Amnesty International reported
on Tuesday that it had received first-hand
accounts of torture and other ill-treatment from
detainees who have been released. There have also
been reports that those who have been released
have been told to tell others of the harsh
treatment they received to discourage further
protests.
"These disturbing new accounts
of detainees being tortured further underscore the
need for Assad to put an end to his security
forces' violent onslaught against his own people,"
said Philip Luther, Amnesty International's deputy
director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Neo-conservatives, who, as in neighboring
Iraq, have long favored actions designed to oust
the ruling Ba'ath Party, and their allies in the
US Congress have urged Obama to take stronger
action against the regime since the outset of the
protests.
Elliott Abrams, who served as a
top Middle East aide to former president George W
Bush and reportedly urged Israel to include Syria
on its target list at the outset of its 2006 war
on Hezbollah, has repeatedly urged the
administration to pursue a diplomatic and economic
strategy designed to isolate and ultimately bring
down the regime.
"The demise of this
murderous clan [the Assads] is in America's
interest," he wrote on his blog the day after the
first protests in Dera'a were met with a violent
response by Damascus' security forces in late
March.
In late April, three influential
senators, Republicans John McCain and Lindsay
Graham and Independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman,
called on Obama to impose tough sanctions and
publicly demand that Assad resign, as he did with
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Libyan leader
Muammar Gaddafi.
Several days later, on
April 29, Obama announced a freeze on the assets
of three senior government officials, including
Assad's brother, implicated in human-rights
abuses. At the same time, the administration
helped gain passage of a resolution before the
United Nations Human Rights Council condemning the
violence.
But the administration has so
far rejected appeals to impose sanctions directly
on Assad or call for his resignation, urging him
instead to stop the repression and implement
far-reaching political reforms as he has
repeatedly promised he would.
It has also
sought to coordinate its position with the
European Union, which is itself deeply divided on
the best course and is currently considering
targeted sanctions against 15 officials, including
Assad himself.
Washington's hesitation
reflects the widespread belief that Assad's ouster
could usher in a period of chaos and possible
sectarian civil war that could easily spill over
into neighboring Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon and
threaten the de facto peace that has prevailed
along the armistice lines between Israel and Syria
in the disputed Golan Heights since 1973.
On other hand, a growing number of
analysts here believe that the repression is
steadily reducing Assad's base of support,
diminishing the possibility - if it still exists -
that he can ever regain the confidence of key
sectors of the population, particularly the youth.
That calculation appears to be leading
some to take a more hawkish position, although
military intervention, as in Libya, enjoys
virtually no support at all.
In one
notable shift, Steven Cook, a well-respected
Middle East analyst at the Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR), wrote on his CFR blog this week
that while there was a risk that a "new, nastier
dictatorship or generalized instability" would
follow Assad's demise, the risk was worth taking
in light of the "strategic opportunity" of
breaking the Syrian-Iranian alliance that the
Assad dynasty has fostered.
Urging Obama
to publicly back the opposition and call for
Assad's departure, as well as increase sanctions,
Cook wrote that the "potential for isolating Iran
- a primary policy goal of the United States since
the 1980s - is worth the risk".
Jim
Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read
at http://www.lobelog.com.
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