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On to Syria? - Empire? - Global Policy Forum On to Syria?
By Matthew Rothschild
Progressive
April 16, 2003
Amazing, isn't it, how quickly Bush can get the propaganda machine going against any country he wishes? The fires in Baghdad were still burning when Bush and Rumsfeld turned their sights on Damascus.
All of a sudden, Syria was the evildoer du jour. Syria was allowing fighters to cross its border and join Saddam's troops in the war; Syria was harboring remnants of Saddam's regime; Syria was hiding Saddam's weapons of mass destruction; Syria has chemical weapons of its own (which Washington has known all along but only now chooses to advertise).
One Administration official even granted Syria status on the Axis of Evil J.V. team, along with Cuba and Libya. It's as if Bush cannot allow, even for a minute, for there not to be some foreign demon to occupy the slot in the brain of the American public reserved for enemy.
Behind this harsh rhetoric lie several motivations. One is to extend the U.S. empire throughout the Middle East. If the United States conquers Syria and then Iran, it will be occupying territory from the Mediterranean Sea to the western edge of China--something not done since the days of Genghis Khan!
Second, any campaign against Syria would be another exercise of Bush's messianic militarism. He believes that God put him in the Oval Office to rid the world of evil, and he sees himself as the liberator of Afghanistan and the liberator of Iraq. Feeling called upon, Bush wants to keep going with his own personal liberation theology. (He believes God is the architect of all that happens, so when he attacks a country, he is God's general contractor, and U.S. troops are God's construction workers.)
And third, by going after Syria, the United States will have made life a lot easier for the Sharon government of Israel. Under Secretary of State John Bolton warned in Israel in February that the United States might attack Syria after Iraq, and for Israel it would be a dream come true: its U.S. patron dispatching one enemy after another.
The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which Jay Garner, viceroy of Iraq, has associated with, has been urging Bush to get tough with Damascus. "True, there is no immediate threat to the U.S. from Syria, and other more dangerous regimes (Iraq) must be dealt with," acknowledged JINSA Executive Director Tom Neumann in an op-ed dated June 28, 2002. "Ignoring Syria, though, would be a mistake. . . . The United States must put real pressure on Syria [. . . by] making it clear to Damascus just what the economic, political, and military fallout will be for continued Syrian sponsorship of terror."
The Project for the New American Century, a powerful influence on Bush's foreign and military policies, warned in its September 2000 report that Syria, a nation "deeply hostile" to the United States, is developing ballistic missiles that "could threaten U.S. allies and forces abroad."
William Kristol founded that project and is the editor of The Weekly Standard. He co-authored The War Over Iraq with Lawrence F. Kaplan, and in that book they say the U.S. alliance with Israel is a "bulwark of American power" and the United States should become "a Middle Eastern power." Kristol and Kaplan write: "American preeminence cannot be maintained from a distance," and Washington should "act as if threats to the interests of our allies are threats to us, which indeed they are."
Right now, the Bush Administration is hyping the Syrian threat. It is talking about a so-called demonstration effect from the defeat of Saddam Hussein: intimidating other countries in the region to hop to Washington's tune. And it wasted no time in demonstrating something else: Its willingness to use Iraq's oil for Washington's purposes. Donald Rumsfeld announced on April 15 that he was cutting off a pipeline between Iraq and Syria that Damascus relied on. The pipeline has the capacity to deliver 200,000 barrels a day to Syria.
In the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Bush Administration pooh-poohed the idea that the conflict was about oil. But once it grabbed the oil fields and started controlling the spigots, it's clear that oil was always a big factor.
With Rumsfeld and Bush doing the strut and flex, they may be tempted--hey, while we're in the neighborhood--to go after Syria right away. But I suspect any campaign against Damascus will wait until after Bush's reelection, assuming he wins. I could be wrong, though. Victory has swelled his head, and there's no telling what he might do in this condition.
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