Saturday, March 29, 2003

Hiking the stakes

y pv vivekanand

THE US has dramatically increased the stakes in the
ongoing war against Iraq by issuing an implied threat
of military action against Syria if it helped its Arab
neighbour to resist the American-British invading
force.
The writing was indeed on the wall that Syria could be
targeted when the US said last week that Russian
companies were supplying night goggles and
communication jamming gear to Iraq. The implication
was then clear that Russian firms could have supplied
such equipment to Syria while the Moscow government
kept a blind eye and Damascus could have sent the gear
to Iraq.
Given the rising unilateralism in American actions and
words as represented by President George W. Bush and
his aides like Defence Secretary Donald Rumseld - who
made the charge against Syria on Friday - it would
appear that Washington might be willing to take on
Syria -- and probably Iran at a later stage -- in what
many Arab commentators see as a grandoise plan to
reshape the entire Middle East to suit American and
Israeli interests, and not necessarily in that order
either.
While it does not appear that the US has any
intentions to widen the war, the natural course of the
bellicose approach would inevitably trigger
unexpected developments. There are even doomsday
political prophets who predict a "third world war" --
a prospect that is ruled out by all but a handful of
observers of the Middle East.
However, it is widely expected that the US would
switch its gunsights to Syria and Syrian-backed
Lebanese hardline groups like Hizbollah as well as
Palestinian factions based in Damascus after it takes
care of the Saddam Husein regime in Baghdad.
Syria has rejected Rumsfeld's charges and described
them as prompted by America's "failures" in the ground
offensive in Iraq and the "blunders" it made in view
of the high civilian casualties in the war.
However, Damascus has very good reasons to remain on
guard.
The Damascus-backed Palestinian groups -- Hamas,
Islamic Jihad, the Democratic Front for the Liberation
of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, Fateh Uprising -- a breakaway group from
Yasser Arafat's mainstream Fateh - the Arab Liberation
Front, and the Palestine Liberation Front among others
-- are a constant source of problems for Israel.
Israel has accused Syria of extending logistic and
tactical support for these groups to stage armed
attacks against Israeli targets. It is also accusing
Syria of encouraging Hizbollah and other groups in
Lebanon to keep the tempo high across the
Lebanese-Israeli border even after Israel left
southern Lebanese territory after a disasterous
17-year occupation in 1999.
The Israeli argument is that Syria wants to keep a
front alive with the Jewish state so that the
outstanding dispute over Israel's occupation of
Syria's Golan Heights does not get pushed back in
regional priorities.
It has for long pressured the US to act against
Damascus, but Washington did not seem to be ready to
oblige Israel until now.
With the tempo of war high in the region, the US
might be goaded into taking action against Syria in
order to serve Israeli interests.
IN practical terms, the US, with the additional
120,000 soldiers ordered into the Middle East to store
up the war against Iraq in view of unexpected Iraqi
resistance, could be tempted to take on Syria.
The natural candidate to do the job on behalf of the
US is of course Israel, which is itching for action to
remove Syria as a military power in the equation and
thus do away with Syria's insistence that it return
the Golan Heights in its entirety.
Despite half-hearted overtures in the past that came
to nought, it is a foregone conclusion that Israel has
no intention whatsover of returning the Golan Heights
to Syria. While the conventional argument is that the
Heights would give Syria a strategic military
advantage, the prime reason for Israel's refusal to
retun it is the very fact that it represents the main
source for water for the Jewish state. It has to be
taken note here that Israel's has an almost fanatic
obsession with not only securing its water sources but
also seeking to increase the quanity of water
available to it.
In a wider context, it is not ruled out that the US
would and could call on Israel for help if the going
gets tough in the region.
There is an argument that the US might not favour
invovling Israel in a widened version of the war since
would lead to further strain in US-Arab relations (in
view of the Arab rejection of Israel's occupation of
Arab lands and its refusal to accept Palestinian
rights as the basis for peace).
However, such a consideration might not be key to any
decisions taken by the US, which has pulled all the
plugs in striving towards war against Iraq, including
dumping the UN Security Council and alienating many
European countries,
Waging a war on two fronts -- Iraq and Syria might
not appear feasible for the US at this point, it need
not be so. Israel has one of the best-equipped
military might in the world -- in fact it is counted
as the fifth or sixth strongest military power armed
with hi-tech conventional and unconventional weapons.
As such, it is conceivable that the US might simply
assign Israel to "take care of Syria" while it
concentrates on Iraq. The ground for such Israeli
action could be easily "manufactured" -- staged
anti-Israeli attacks blamed on Syrian-backed elements
are the means to pave the way for an Israeli-Syrian
confrontation.
Another option is for the US to fire a few rockets at
Syria if the situation gets worse and thus send a
strong "physical" warning to Damascus to stay out. If
that happens, then Damascus would have to deal with an
unprecedented wave of Arab nationalism which would
only turn the situation worse and restrict its
diplomatic options.
The wild card in the game will be Iran, which would
step in if Syria is targeted. The two countries are
bound by close relations, and Syria has always
described non-Arab Iran as its "sole strategic ally"
in the region. Syria was the only Arab country which
supported Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Iran is
generous with aid for Syria.
The Syrians export their finer quality crude and
refine Iran-supplied free oil for its own purposes.
Rusmfeld on Friday accused Iran of allowing Iraqi
exiles opposed to the Saddam regime were crossing the
border into Iraq and this was complicating the US war
to topple Saddam Hussein. What he stopped short of
mentioning is the American fear that the Iran-backed
Iraqis might put up stiff resistance to the US plans
for post-war Iraq.
Both Syria and Iran appear in the American list of
countries that support "international terrorism" and
this would justify any action that Rumsfeld might
order against them.
Iran has so far remained mostly vocal in its barrage
against Israel, but its backing for the Palestinian
struggle, training of Islamic Jihad members, funding
Hamas fighters, arming Hizbollah with rockets is
undeniable.
Israel fears Iranian military advances would sooner
or later be used against the Israelis and would gladly
welcome a chance to have a go at Iran
However, from Rumsfeld has taken softer tone towards
Iran than Syria.


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Following is a piece that I wrote in August
2002, predicting that the US will be targeting Syria
and Iran.

August 16, 2002

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.