Momentum is building for making Syria the next
target in the effort to roll back terrorist dictatorships in the Middle East.
At a briefing on Iraq yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute,
the influential foreign policy hawk Richard Perle, a member of the Pentagon’s
Defense Policy Board, said America should actively support the political
opposition to the dictator at Damascus, Bashar Al-Assad.
Mr. Perle was asked if legislation like the Iraq
Liberation Act, the landmark 1998 law that made regime change at Baghdad
official policy and provided assistance to the Iraqi opposition, should be
considered for Syria.
He replied, "I see no reason why we shouldn’t."
"I would hope Congress would take a look at giving support to those who want
to free Syria from the Ba’ath Party," Mr. Perle said.
A May 2000 report prepared for the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphiabased
think tank, titled "Ending Syria’s Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role," was
signed by a number of people who were then out of office but are
now
prominent officials in the Bush administration. That report says that the "use
of force needs to be considered" against Syria if it will not end its more
than quarter-century old occupation of Lebanon.
Signatories to the Middle East Forum report include Mr. Perle; the
undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith; the undersecretary of
state for global affairs, Paula Dobriansky; the senior director for Middle
East at the National Security Council, Elliott Abrams; Rep. Eliot Engel, a
Democrat of New York; an advisor on Iraq and Iran at the Pentagon, Michael
Rubin, and an aide at the State Department, David Wurmser.
Another signatory, the president of the United States Committee for a Free
Lebanon, Ziad Abdelnour, says helping the Syrian opposition would be smart
public policy.
"There’s a huge opposition but it’s silent, because they don’t have the
support of the U.S. There is as much opposition and hatred toward the Syrian
Ba’athists as there was in Iraq," Mr. Abdelnour told The New York Sun.
American officials have put Syria on notice in the last few days in what
appears to be a remarkably strong shift in American policy toward the Middle
Eastern country.
Syria stands accused of harboring former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime;
supplying Iraq with equipment during the war; illegally importing Iraqi oil;
harboring terrorist groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, and
possessing and developing weapons of mass destruction.
Syria is the only country on the State Department’s list of terror-supporting
nations that still has normal diplomatic and economic relations with America,
Mr. Engel said. Mr. Assad has been described in the Western press as a
modernizer who is different from his father, the late Syrian tyrant, Hafez Al-Assad.
Secretary of State Powell said America would "examine possible measures of a
diplomatic, economic or other nature" against Syria, but he tried to rule out
military force.
"Iraq was a unique case," Mr. Powell told reporters.
"There is no war plan to go and attack someone else, either for the purpose of
overthrowing their leadership, or for the purpose of imposing democratic
values," he said.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said American forces in Iraq had reported that they
had shut down a pipeline that had violated U.N. sanctions by carrying
oil from Iraq to Syria.
"Whether it’s the only one...I cannot tell you," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters.
"We do not have perfect knowledge."
