Friday, August 16, 2002

Syria and Iran after Iraq

BY PV VIVEKANAND

SYRIA and Iran should have enough reasons to be worried. It is emerging that the planned US action against Iraq for "regime change" in Baghdad could be part of a grand plan to remove all those who challenge US strategic interests in the Middle East, and Syria could be the next US target after Iraq to be followed by Iran.
There are indeed signs of a wider American campaign to consolidate the US' standing as the unchallenged sole superpower of the world, and the Middle East is a very important test case for Washington.
Reports from Washington indicate that the driving force behind the campaign is a small group of "neoconservatives" with powerful political allies and which seeks to serve Israeli interests more than those of the US.
Indeed, it is no coincidence that the three US targets in the Middle East, Iraq, Syria and Iran, are also among the most vocal against Israel. It is not simply a matter of convenience for the US that fundamental changes are made in these countries to remove the challenge to Israel if not to better suit the interests of Washington's sole "strategic ally" in the Middle East; it is indeed a policy objective just as the ouster of Saddam Hussein is.
Washington flirted with Syria in the early 90s because it suited US interests to do so but now Damascus has become more of a liability than an asset only because it insists on its rights and represents the toughest of all Arab parties on whom Israel wants to impose its version of peace.
Similarly, the US hoped it could do business with Iran when "moderate" Mohammed Khatami was elected president in 1997. However, those hopes failed to materialise in view of the "hardline" religious establishment's grip on power on a parallel track with that of the government but with overriding authority.
Now that Khatami would soon step down after serving two terms, the US has little hopes that another "moderate" might take his place, and hence the recent posture that Washington had "given up" on Khatami.
On the Syrian front, George Bush Senior broke new ground in Washington's ties with Damascus by holding a meeting with the late president Hafez Al Assad in late 1990 and secured his endorsement for the US-led military action that evicted Iraq from Kuwait in early 1991.
In the bargain, Bush promised Assad at least two things: The US would ensure that an Arab-Israeli peace process is launched soon after the war over Kuwait and Washington would not question Syria's role in Lebanon.
The peace process, Assad was assured, would aim at implementing United Nations resolutions based on international legitimacy. In the end, apart from a solution to the Palestinian problem, Syria would have its Golan Heights back from Israeli occupation.
But when Arab-Israeli negotiations got under way in earnest after launched in Madrid in late 1991, it became clear that Israel had no intention of returning the Golan Heights, and the Arab camp became weak, as the late Assad saw it, because of the Palestinian-Israeli Oslo accords of 1993 and the peace treaty that Jordan signed with Israel in 1994 -- both under American auspices.
Assad, a political realist, was ready to accept peace with Israel and normal relations with the Jewish state in exchange for the return of the Golan in its entirety.
From the Israeli perspective, there is no way it could return the Golan to Syria since the Heights represents its main source of water. Giving it up would mean surrendering Israel's control over its source of water and that is not a chance it would take no matter what cost. As such Assad's insistence on a return to the lines of June 4, 1967 offered a perfect cover for Israel to stall the process.
Despite flirting with Syria, it would seem that the US never actually "trusted" it. It did not remove Syria from the list of "countries sponsoring terrorism" and demanded a series of reforms before it would think of doing so. Assad tried to comply with some of the demands by expelling some of the groups named as "terrorist" by the US, but it was not enough for Washington.
The US also found it was difficult to keep its pledge to stay away from intervening in Lebanon as calls mounted from Lebanese right-wing groups backed by France for an end to the Syrian domination of Lebanese affairs. Furthermore, Damascus failed to heed American demands to rein in Lebanese resistance against Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon, and it soon became apparent that Washington could not do business with Syria.
Indeed, the US hoped that Bashar Al Assad, who succeeded his father in 2000, would be more amenable to its demands. But the hope was short-lived since Bashar remained firm on his father's lines in the peace process.
The US is now convinced that it would be wasting time to persuade Damascus to accept anything less than its demands in the peace process and to dilute the Syrian role in Lebanon. And so, a "regime change" in Damascus is the only way out, as far as the US sees it under the givens today.
On the Iranian front, "liberal" Khatami has been unable to weaken the hardline theologians' grip on power. In the American view, the religious establishment's constitutional authority is too deep-rooted to be pried away through conventional political means adopted by political forces within the country. Again, in the US eyes, a "regime change" aiming at destroying the religious leaders' power is the order of the day in Iran.
The hostility of the theologians towards the US stemmed from the American backing for the ousted Shah dynasty. The hostility was further strengthened and turned into a way of life for the religious establishment of Iran when the US implicitly backed Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Iran's support for Lebanon's Hizbollah and Palestinian groups is a constant source of concern for Israel, and, by extension, the US. Further compounding the concern are the advances that Iran has reportedly made in developing long-range missiles which could hit Israel, its acquisition of two Russian submarines and the ongoing construction of a nuclear power plant on the Gulf coast.
Now it is almost foregone conclusion short of divine intervention or a miracle that US President George W. Bush would not be dissuaded from his plans to launch military strikes against Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. It is also clear that the US action would lead to a reshaping of Iraq, including a disintegration of that country as we know it today.
It is not a new discovery. It was always known that toppling Saddam could not been seen as a surgical operation conducted in isolation from all other realities in Iraq, and Arab leaders have repeatedly warned the US against such action that would definitely have wide-ranging regional implications.
It was also clear these fears plus the immense difficulty in toppling Saddam had forced the then administration of George Bush Senior to stop short of ordering American forces into Baghdad after the 1991 Gulf war.
As such, and given that the ground realities today make it much more predictable that military action against Iraq would destabilise the region, it appears that Washington has accepted the inevitability of such a course of events and, if anything, it suits the post-Sept. 11 American thinking.
That would definitely mean that the "regime change" in Iraq that Bush is seeking is the first step in the grand American plan to change the shape of the region and would be followed by similar action in Syria and Iran.
However, there could be more than meets the eye in the equation.
There is a growing school of thought that believes that purely Zionist -- read Israeli or vice versa -- interests aimed controlling the world's destiny are the guiding force behind the US administration's actions that ultimately would serve Israel rather than the US itself.
A recent report indicated that the main force driving Bush into undertaking such actions is the group of "neoconservatives" in Washington.
Some might even argue that it sounds more like a Zionist-led circle which had planned in the first half of the last century that the best means to serve the goal of Zionist domination of the world was to control the superpower which dominates the world.
The report, carried by Reuters, said that the group known was "neocons" first emerged in the 1960s when a group of thinkers, many of them Jewish and all passionately anti-Communist, became disillusioned with what they saw as a dangerous radical drift within the Democratic Party to which they then belonged.
Some researchers argue that the group was actually formed in the 30s, with Prescott Bush, grandfather of the present president, taking a leading role as an American Christian supporter of Israel but manipulated by Zionist leaders.
That group is now aligned with the Republicans, and might find Bush Junior a willing tool in its hands to serve Israeli interests if only because of his relative inexperience in international affairs, critics say.
It was under this group's influence that the then president Ronald Reagan took the unprecedented step of bombing a foreign country in peace time arguing that it was involved in attacks against Americans.
Under Reagan's orders, American warplanes bombed the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi in April 1985 after intelligence reports said that Libya was behind a grenade attack at a Berlin disco frequented by American soldiers. One woman was killed in the grenade attack while the American bombing killed five people, including Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi's adopted daughter.
In concept, it fitted in with the Israeli policy of military retaliation for attacks targeting Israeli interests, and Reagan appeared to have been prompted to taking an Israeli leaf by the Zionist group.
(It is even argued by some critics that the all-too powerful "neocons" were behind "framing" Libya in the 1988 Lockerbie affair despite evidence that pointed the finger at Syria and Lebanon as well as "rogue" agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. The argument goes on to say that the group thought Libya posed an immediate challenge to US interests and Washington was not ready yet to take on Syria or Iran).
Today, according to Stephen Walt, a dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the group, which he described as "small but well-placed" and including "neoconservative officials and commentators, is primarily interested in eliminating what they regard as a threat to Israel."
"Absent their activities, the United States would be focusing on containing Iraq, which we have done successfully since the Gulf War, but we would not be trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein. We would also be pursuing a more evenhanded policy in the Middle East in general," Walt told Reuters.
Among the "allies" of the group are Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.
Another ally of the group is said to be Richard Perle, another former Reagan Defence Department hawk who serves as chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, "a formerly sleepy committee of foreign policy old timers that Perle has refashioned into an important advisory group."
Incidentally, it was Perle who organised a briefing by RAND Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec, who has no firsthand experience whatsoever with the Middle East.
In his briefing -- which was very conveniently "leaked" to the Washington Post -- Murawiec portrayed Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the US, an assertion that prompted the Pentagon to issue a denial that it is not official policy.
The "neocon" circle is backed by conservative magazines like Commentary, and the Weekly Standard, and think-tanks such as the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century, says Reuters.
James Zogby, chairman of the Arab American institute, appeared to have put, perhaps unwittingly, his finger on the Zionist pulse of the group when he commented that the circle's "attitude towards an Iraq invasion is, if you have the ability and the desire to do it, that's justification enough."
That is precisely a part the Zionist ideology, and this seen at work today in the brutal military approach adopted and practised by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon against the Palestinians and his attitude towards the Arabs at large.