War (of Words) with Syria
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Wednesday, Apr 16, 2003
[Softer tone on Syria from Rumsfeld yesterday. Perhaps Rumsfeld has decided to let State run foreign policy?]
Defense Link -- April 15
Rumsfeld/Meyer Briefing
Q: -- saying, in effect, to Syria to cease and desist aiding and abetting those of the Saddam regime and also in building or harboring weapons of mass destruction.
The bottom-line question is, specifically -- underline the word "specifically" -- how does the Bush administration intend to make that happen? How can you prevent Syria from doing these things?
SEC. RUMSFELD: I don't have anything else to add on that. The President's spoken on it. Secretary Powell has spoken on it. I'll leave that to them.
[Later in briefing.]
Q: But given -- if I could follow up, but given Syria's support for terrorism, is there a concern that Iraqis could in fact -- former regime leaders could use Syria as a haven from which to plot and carry out terrorist attacks?
SEC. RUMSFELD: The -- I don't have anything else to say about Syria. The president's been discussing it. Secretary Powell's been discussing it. I've discussed it. And I don't know what one can add. Obviously, the people in Iraq who ran that government are on our list. And we'd like to have them. And we'll get a lot of them. We may even get most of them over time. And life will go on.
Reuters -- April 16
Egypt says Israel behind U.S. pressure on Syria
CAIRO - A senior adviser to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak accused Israel on Wednesday of instigating a campaign of U.S. threats against Syria to force Damascus to make political concessions to the Jewish state.
Osama el-Baz also urged Israel, in remarks carried by the official Middle East News Agency (MENA), to prepare to withdraw from occupied Arab lands.
"Concerning threats to Syria, Baz said the threats were aimed at pressuring Syria and twisting its arm to go along with certain proposals..., explaining that Israel was the instigator," MENA said.
Baz urged Israel not to waste the chance for "a true co-existence with the Arabs", adding that Israel must be ready to withdraw completely from the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.
[The al Queda/Syria story broken by Time/Europe has some legs.]
LA Times via San Francisco Chronicle -- April 16
Italian police link Syria to al Qaeda extremists
Nation served as way station for terror recruits, probe finds
by Sebastian Rotella
Milan -- Syria has functioned as a hub for an al Qaeda network that moved Islamic extremists and funds from Italy to northeastern Iraq, where the recruits fought alongside the recently defeated Ansar al-Islam terrorist group,
according to an Italian investigation.
Herald Sun (Australia) -- April 17
US renews its attack on Syria
By PHILLIP COOREY in New York
Arab diplomats convened a meeting at the United Nations and accused the US of backing Israel, which has nuclear weapons.
The diplomats said they would ask the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution declaring the Middle East a "zone free of weapons of mass destruction".
"The only party in the region with weapons of mass destruction is Israel," said Syrian envoy Fayssal Mekdad after the meeting.
Reuters -- April 16
Syria Says Willing to Work with U.S. to Help Iraqis
By Inal Ersan
DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syria said on Wednesday it was willing to cooperate with the United States in the interest of Iraqis but would not close the offices of militant Palestinian groups, one of Washington's long-standing demands.
"Syria will always cooperate in things that serve the Iraqi people's interests," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Buthaina Shaaban said.
Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara said his government was willing to sign a treaty making the entire Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.
[Discussion of arms control in general, and how that applies to Syria.]
Council of Foreign Relations, via New York Times -- April 15
Q&A: After Iraq, Pressure on Syria?
In an article you wrote for Arms Control Today, you express concern that the administration is focusing more on the countries that possess weapons of mass destruction than on the weapons themselves. Can you expound on that a bit?
The administration has correctly identified a number of key problems with the international non-proliferation regime, including the difficulty of enforcing many of these treaties. The administration is right; for far too long, we've let violators get away with these violations, or allowed the treaties to mask clandestine programs that countries were conducting.
But I fear that [administration officials] have lurched too far in the other direction, weakening the international rule of law in the process, and perhaps gone so far as to now downgrade the role of the United Nations in this process. By focusing on what they think are the key proliferation violators--Iran, Iraq, and North Korea--[U.S. officials] risk ignoring the proliferation problems that are created by other countries that have large stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, or in some case biological weapons--including Pakistan, India, and Israel--and the prominent role that nuclear weapons play in our own national security strategy.
This creates a double standard in the world, where some countries are allowed to have these weapons, while others are not. It's a strategy of picking and choosing good guys and bad guys, which in my view will ultimately fail, in part because the good guys and bad guys keep changing. In one decade we may be allowing or even encouraging a country to have these weapons and in another decade we may find that that country is now a threat to our own security. Remember, Iraq and Iran used to be good guys. We helped both of those countries develop their deadly arsenals. Pakistan is a good guy now. That country is deeply troubled, and is in a profoundly unstable area of the world. There's no guarantee of where Pakistan is going in the future.
The Age (Australia) -- April 16
Bush bomb plotter seen in Syria
A suspected high-ranking operative of the Iraqi intelligence service who is believed to have played a key role in a 1993 plot to assassinate [former] US president George [H.W.] Bush has been spotted in Syria.
Faruq Hijazi, whose last official post was Saddam Hussein's ambassador to Tunis, flew to Damascus on a commercial jet in an apparent attempt to seek refuge in the country following the toppling of the Iraqi government by US forces, said a US official, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity.
[Assessment of Syria's military strength's and weaknesses.]
Slate -- April 15
Assad's Situation
Syria's military machine may be hollow—but it isn't harmless.
By Fred Kaplan
After the Israelis stripped bare the myth of Syrian defenses in 1982, Hafez Assad abandoned his goal of achieving "strategic parity" with Israel and instead aimed for "strategic deterrence." To that end, he built up huge stockpiles of biological and especially chemical weapons—including an arsenal of missiles with sufficient range to reach Israeli cities, as well as bombs and artillery shells to kill enemy troops on the battlefield.
Australian Broadcast Corporation -- April 15
Interview with Alexander Downer, Foreign Minister of Australia
KERRY O'BRIEN: But in this new pre-emptive age, why isn't war at the end of the chain, if Syria doesn't respond to America's warnings in the way America wants it to?
ALEXANDER DOWNER: Well, never be too rapid in making foreign policy by analogy, as I often say that to people.
Look, in this particular case, there are Security Council resolutions.
There hasn't been 12 years of endeavours to get Syria to disarm from chemical and biological weapons.
The circumstances are not directly analogous with Iraq.
And that conclusion shouldn't be drawn.
But that's not to say that the Americans aren't right to have concerns about Syria.
New York Times -- April 14
Syria Harbors Iraqis and Grants Transit to Hezbollah, U.S. Asserts
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON — Syria is allowing some members of Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim militant group based in Lebanon, to travel from Syrian-controlled southern Lebanon to Iraq, current and former United States intelligence officials said today.