Israel wants strike on
Syria while iron's hot By Robert Novak,
Chicago Sun-Times columnist
Published in the Chicago Sun-Times
Internet edition, April 17th, 2003
Coinciding with the Bush
administration's tough talk about Syria, a senior Israeli official
Monday exposed a smoking gun. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the
Tel Aviv newspaper Maariv: ''We have a long list of issues we are
thinking of demanding of the Syrians, and it would be best done
through the Americans.''
Mofaz's Hebrew-language interview was
not widely distributed in Washington, but a few members of Congress
who learned of it were stunned by its audacity. With Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon long having urged changing Iraq's regime by force of
U.S. arms, his government now hopes to ride the emerging American
imperium to regional reconstruction along Israeli lines.
That is the goal of prominent
Pentagon civilian officials who see virtual identity between U.S. and
Israeli interests. Sharon's hopes for his agenda are buoyed by
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's emergence. Vindicated by the
spectacular success of American arms, Rumsfeld is the strongman of
the Bush Cabinet who is directing the postwar transformation of the
Middle East.
Gen. Mofaz, a career officer before
becoming defense minister last October, is a plain-spoken paratrooper
who has now revealed his country's grand design of riding American
power to reach old goals. While Israel's military is the region's
strongest, it has been unable to achieve Mofaz's long, unspecified
wish list: removal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, ending Syrian
support of anti-Israeli terrorist groups and effective Syrian
disarmament. The biggest political-military failure in Israel's brief
history was its Lebanese intervention.
Israel's goals conceivably can be
''done through the Americans'' in the wake of the awesome U.S.
military performance. Syria's Bashar Assad is unlikely to follow
Saddam Hussein's suicidal course of confrontation with Washington.
Not supplied militarily by Moscow since the end of the Cold War,
Syria's armed forces look weaker than Iraq's.
The problem is how to justify
pressuring Syria. If it was hard to prove Iraq a clear danger to the
United States, making the case for Syria is much tougher. After the
fall of Baghdad, warnings to Damascus were based on unverified
complaints that weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi leaders had
crossed the porous Iraqi-Syrian border. ''There is no evidence,''
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said last week,
that such weapons were taken out of Iraq.
Syria for a decade or more has been
building its own chemical weapons, apparently as a puny counterweight
against Israel's nuclear arsenal. Actually, military experts do not
consider them weapons of mass destruction. Nor does their possession
violate international law since Syria has never signed the chemical
weapons ban treaty.
But President Bush is not invoking
international law, as he did when seeking United Nations sanction for
military intervention in Iraq. ''Syria just needs to cooperate with
us,'' the president said Sunday, without citing international
authority.
Secretary of State Colin Powell
muffled war drums a little Tuesday, telling reporters: ''There is no
war plan right now to attack somewhere else.'' However, neither Bush
nor Rumsfeld made any such assurance. Furthermore, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff two weeks ago ordered the U.S. European Command to prepare a
plan for Syria.
All this has frightened Syria and the
entire Arab world. That was the intent of Rumsfeld but not Powell,
who wants a postwar return to diplomacy by the president. Powell's
principal asset is Bush's ''road map'' for coexisting Jewish and
Palestinian states, a concept not popular with the Sharon government
or its friends at the Pentagon. Arabs are skeptical, perceiving a
road map that leads to fruitless, endless negotiations.
Nothing has so demonstrated to Arabs
their political impotence than Rumsfeld's selection of retired Lt.
Gen. Jay Garner as Iraq's interim military governor. Now a defense
contractor, he helped develop the Arrow missile-defense system for
Israel. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Garner visited Israel
as guest of the hard-line Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs and signed that organization's letter praising Sharon's
treatment of Palestinians.
''Out of the 270 million Americans,''
said Syrian Deputy Ambassador Imad Moustapha on NBC's ''Meet the
Press'' Sunday, ''you choose a military ruler to rule Iraq who is
closely related to the extremist factions in Israel.'' That is the
price of losing the clash of civilizations, when you appear to be the
next target.
