Sunday, January 18, 2004

Syrian War: Threats or Preliminaries?

George Paine of Warblogging has called attention to a Knight-Ridder article that suggests the Bush Administration is planning some immediate escalation of pressure against Syria.  Paine comments that "neoconservatives like Richard Perle and [the State Department's] John Bolton ... want to invade Syria immediately as part of their larger effort to remake the Middle East," and reminds us that Bolton was ready to hype Syria's alleged "weapons of mass destruction" to Congress before the CIA blew the whistle on his presenting bogus claims.

Given these reports, it's worth noting what David Frum and Richard Perle lay down in their book An End to Evil (2003) as the goals of the "stern and uncompromising " policy they advocate against Syria, which would include embargoing oil shipments to Syria and interdicting weapons shipments from Iran to Syria (pp. 115-6):

1. Syria must cease all support for terrorists. ...

2. It must close its border to Iraqi guerrillas and surrender any and all Baathist leaders who have fled into Syria. [Not that Frum or Perle care, but border control on the Iraqi side is now the legal responsibility of the occupation authority.]

3. Syria [must] cease its campaign of incitement against Israel. ...

4. Syria must withdraw its forces from Lebanon and recognize that country's independence and sovereignty. ...

5. Finally: Syria must open its controlled economy and its authoritarian political system. ... It may offend every instinct of the accommodationists in our foreign policy bureaucracy, but it is past time to see whether the talented nation of Syria cannot produce leaders who have something to offer besides tyranny and war.

We can all hope that the intelligence relied upon for such matters as Syria supposedly giving "safe havens" to Iraqi guerrillas or its "incitement" against Israel is considerably better than that on Saddam Hussein's WMDs. And are most Americans willing to go into another war, and re-institute the draft, in order to force better diplomatic relations between Syria and Lebanon?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think recent events have shown that they don't really need an excuse to go to war...