Syria: The Next Iraq?

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http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/27284/

 

 

 

Syria: The Next Iraq?

 

By Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com. Posted October 25, 2005.

 

 

After all the exposed lies and huge costs of Iraq, is it possible that

America will let Bush get away with shattering another Middle East state?

 

Three years ago, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was widely viewed as the

first chapter of a region-wide strategy to remake the entire map of

the Middle East. Following Iraq, Syria and Iran would be the next

targets, after which the oil-rich states of the Arabian Gulf,

including Saudi Arabia, would follow.

 

It was a policy driven by neoconservatives in and outside of the Bush

administration, and they didn't exactly make an effort to keep it

secret. In April, 2003, in an article in The American Prospect titled

Just the Beginning, I wrote: " Those who think that U.S. armed forces

can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without the battle spreading beyond

Iraq's borders, are likely to be mistaken. " And the article quoted

various neocon strategists to that effect:

 

" I think we're going to be obliged to fight a regional war,

whether we want to or not, " says Michael Ledeen, a former U.S.

national security official and a key strategist among the ascendant

flock of neoconservative hawks, many of whom have taken up perches

inside the U.S. government. Asserting that the war against Iraq can't

be contained, Ledeen says that the very logic of the global war on

terrorism will drive the United States to confront an expanding

network of enemies in the region. " As soon as we land in Iraq, we're

going to face the whole terrorist network, " he says, including the

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic

Jihad and a collection of militant splinter groups backed by nations

-- Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia -- that he calls " the terror masters. "

" It may turn out to be a war to remake the world, " says Ledeen. In the

Middle East, impending " regime change " in Iraq is just the first step

in a wholesale reordering of the entire region.

 

As the war in Iraq bogged down, and as a public outcry developed in

the United States against the neoconservatives over the apparently

bungled war, another sort of conventional wisdom began to take flight.

According to this theory, the United States no longer had the stomach

-- or the capability -- to spread the war beyond Iraq, as originally

intended. Our troops are stretched too thin, our allies are reining us

in and cooler heads are prevailing in Washington--or so the theory goes.

 

But the news from Syria shows that the conventional wisdom is wrong.

The United States is indeed pursuing a hard-edged regime change

strategy for Syria. It's happening right before your eyes. With the

ever-complacent U.S. media itself bogged down in Iraq, and with the

supine U.S. Congress unwilling to challenge our foreign policy

apparatus, Syria is under the gun. As in Iraq, the United States is

aggressively pursuing a regime change there without the slightest

notion of what might come next or who might replace President Bashar

Assad. Might it be the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood, by far the most

powerful single force in largely Sunni Syria? Might the country

fragment into pieces, as Iraq is now doing? The Bush administration

doesn't know, just as they didn't know what might happen to Iraq in

2003. But they are going ahead anyway.

 

It isn't just the repercussions of the U.N.-led investigation into the

assassination of former Lebanon Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, whose

murder may or may not have been arranged by Syria's intelligence

service. Since 2003, the United States has sought political and

economic sanctions against Syria (long before Hariri was killed);

sought to isolate Syria diplomatically; singled out Syria for its

support for Sunni insurgents inside Iraq; issued a series of ominous

threats against the Syrian regime ( " our patience is running out with

Syria, " warned Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. proconsul in Iraq); and,

according to an October 15 New York Times article, begun threatening

" hot-pursuit " and other cross-border military action against Syria.

That Times piece noted, in part:

 

A series of clashes in the last year between American and Syrian

troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer that killed

several Syrians, has raised the prospect that cross-border military

operations may become a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according

to current and former military and government officials.

 

There is even a Syrian version of Iraq's charlatan Ahmad Chalabi, and

there are rumors that Kurdish rebels in Syria northeast, along the

Iraqi border, are getting support from Iraqi Kurds who are part of the

current interim government in Baghdad.

 

Various U.S. Syria analysts who have not swallowed the neoconservative

Kool-Aid argue that the United States is pursuing Regime Change II in

Syria. Among them is Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst now at the

Brookings Institution, who suggests that Assad is moving slowly in the

direction of political and economic reform -- and might want our help.

Others, including several former U.S. ambassadors, tell me that Syria

can be a key partner in quieting down the crisis in Iraq, but U.S.

belligerence is driving Syria in the other direction. And Scott Ritter

and Sy Hersh, speaking in New York last week, noted that Syria (and

its spy services) has been an important behind-the-scenes partner in

attacking Al Qaeda since 2001. But " So what? " argue the

neoconservatives. It's regime-change time, and they won't let rational

arguments get in their way.

 

The brilliant Syria weblog Syria Comment, written by Joshua Landis,

had this to say on Sunday:

 

Here is a most extraordinary letter from Syria's Ambassador in

Washington Imad Mustapha to Congresswoman Sue Kelly, which has come

into my possession. It explains how the American Administration has

been stonewalling Syrian cooperation on a host of issues. It explains

how Syria is being set up to fail so that the US can isolate it and

carry out a process of regime-change at the expense of Iraqi stability

and the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. It explains

how the U.S. administration's policy of forcing regime change in Syria

is trumping the need to save lives in Iraq. ... For over a year Syria

has been trying to cooperate with the West on the Iraq border, on the

issue of terrorism finance, on the issue of stopping Jihadists from

getting into Syria, on intelligence sharing, and on stabilizing Iraq.

Washington has consistently refused to take " Yes " as an answer. Why?

The only credible reason is because Washington wants regime change in

Syria.

 

Read the rest of Landis here, including the astonishing full text of

Ambassador Mustapha's letter.

 

So I ask: Is it possible, after everything we've learned about the

Bush administration's lies and deception over Iraq, after the

staggering cost of that misguided war to the United States, is it

possible that the American body politic is going to let Bush, Cheney

and Co. get away with shattering another Middle East state?

 

It's possible. Because it's happening.

 

 

 

 

Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who

specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a

contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother

Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a

frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.