BY DOUG LORIMER
After several weeks of accusations from the White House and the Pentagon against the Syrian government of President Bashar al Assad — ominously similar to those used by Washington to justify its invasion of Iraq — on April 17 US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that he may soon visit Syria to press Assad to co-operate with US demands.
Washington's accusations began with US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's March 28 claim that Damascus was supplying the Iraqi regime with military equipment and allowing Arab volunteers to cross its border with Iraq to fight against the invading US army. No evidence was presented to substantiate either claim.
According to the April 9 Washington Post, Rumsfeld's charges surprised "the CIA, which had not reported any major flow of military equipment or fighters from Syria to Iraq".
Rumsfeld repeated his accusations against Syria on April 9, as US troops began their assault on Baghdad. He was soon joined by US President George Bush and his press secretary Ari Fleischer, who accused Syria of providing sanctuary to top officials of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime, of possessing weapons of mass destruction and of supporting terrorist organisations.
The accusations, which Damascus denies, have brought about speculation that Washington might be considering invading Syria, an idea that Powell has repeatedly played down. "There is no war plan on anyone's desk right now to go marching on Syria", Powell told the April 14 edition of the US Public Broadcasting System's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. "There are ways to deal with a country such as Syria ... that don't involve reaching into a toolbox and pulling out an invasion plan."
According to the April 14 British Guardian, "In the past few weeks ... Rumsfeld, ordered contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of Baghdad" and "his under-secretary for policy, Doug Feith, and William Luti, the head of the Pentagon's office of special plans, were asked to put together a briefing paper on the case for war against Syria" based on accusations that Damascus was "supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein", had "links with Middle East terrorist groups" and has an "allegedly advanced chemical weapons program".
"Feith advised the Israeli government in 1996 that it could 'shape its strategic environment... by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria'", the Guardian report noted.
According to the report, "Bush is said to have cut off discussion among his advisers about the possibility of taking the 'war on terror' to Syria. 'The talk about Syria didn't go anywhere. Basically, the White House shut down the discussion', an intelligence source in Washington told the Guardian."
While there are undoubtedly leading figures in the Bush administration who would like to achieve "regime change" in Syria in the same way this has been done by the US in Iraq, it appears that, for the moment at least, Washington wants to use the example of Iraq to put pressure on Damascus to co-operate with US demands.
In his comments to the NewsHour with Jim Lerner, Powell hinted that this was the purpose of the White House's accusations against Syria. "We wanted to point out strongly to the Syrians that this is a time for you to take another look at your policies", Powell said, adding that US-led forces in Iraq had caught people returning from Iraq to Syria carrying large sums of money and planning to join the resistance to the US occupation.
This may be Washington's real concern. There are some 40,000 Iraqi emigrants and refugees living in Syria. While Damascus has been hostile to Hussein's regime — for example, opposing his 1980-88 war against Iran, which Washington backed, and sending troops to participate in the US-led war to oust Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991 — it has also been the most vocal Arab regime opposing the US invasion of Iraq.
According to Andrew Green, the British ambassador to Syria from 1991-94, Washington's real concern with Syria may be that it might allow its territory to be used as a base for the emerging resistance movement against the US occupation of Iraq.
Writing in the April 17 British Guardian, Green argued that the "apparent ease of the [US] military victory [in Iraq] is extremely deceptive. Iraq is now on the verge of anarchy. The first requirement is to impose some measure of order, the second to re-establish a skeleton administration that can distribute humanitarian aid effectively.
"Then begins the task of assembling some kind of political structure. This will take months, if not years. Meanwhile, there is every risk that American and British troops will be seen as an occupying force, and become targets for sniping and suicide attacks. If Syria were to turn a blind eye to a flow of weapons and volunteers across her border with Iraq, the security situation could degenerate very quickly. Indeed, we could find ourselves in a quagmire."
From Green Left Weekly, April 23, 2003.
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