Can Rifaat make a Come Back?

Sami Moubayed has written an excellent article profiling the main Syrians who have turned to Bin Laden and his brand of extremist Islam. The article, The Syrians who cried wolf, argues that the world should not underestimate the Islamist threat in Syria and neither should the Syrian government. Sami believes that Syria should recognize Islamic political parties in order to draw them into the political process and keep the masses from radicalizing as Jordan has done.

Rifaat al-Asad is once again trying to make a come back. This time he has actually got a few American backers!

On Monday, the former director of the congressional task force on terrorism and unconventional warfare, Yossef Bodansky, virtually announced Rifaat's candidacy to head Syria. Sitting across from Rifaat at a Paris restaurant, Mr. Bodansky said on the John Batchelor program on ABC Radio that his dinner companion enjoyed support from America and Saudi Arabia as the heir apparent to the crumbling Baathist regime in Damascus.

Meanwhile, in Washington over the weekend Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick told an audience at an off-the-record retreat for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that America was indifferent to the fate of Syria's rulers. "The United States is interested in behavior change, but if regime change would occur, so be it," he said, according to three people in the room for his comment.

Rifaat al-Assad has been angling for a way to take over Syria since 1983, when his brother first exiled him after he amassed a militia in the streets of Damascus with rumors circulating that the leader was deathly ill. Over the years, the Assad family's black sheep has had intermittent meetings with Western and Arab intelligence services and claimed, according to one former CIA official, that he could foment a military coup with his contacts in the military and security services in Syria. The deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Patrick Clawson, said yesterday, "Rifaat at various times in the last decade has tried to propose himself as a more reasonable alternative to other members of his family."

One of Rifaat's possible selling points to the Americans is also one of his liabilities. In 1982, he led the military campaign that crushed the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, a massacre that claimed as many as 40,000 lives. In this respect, he can claim experience that will serve him in putting down the jihadist movement in Syria at war with Iraq's first representative government. Yet at the same time, because he is both an Assad and a Baathist with blood on his hands, support for him would severely undermine America's public case that it is supporting the transition to democracy in the Arab world.

I take this as a last ditch effort by the "regime change" crowd in Washington to produce an alternative to Bashar. If they are grabbing at Rifaat, they are grabbing at straws. Rifaat!? I agree with Robert Rabil on this one, who denounced Rifaat in clear language, unlike his superiors at the Washington Institute. He said flatly,

"Rifaat is not going to work in Syria." He said that Rifaat al-Assad has too many enemies in the country ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to loyalists to his brother. "He has a terrible past and is accused of corruption throughout Syria,"

Even Farid Ghadry said Rifaat was not a democrat.

"France opposes using UN probe to destabilize Syria." Leila Hatoum writes in the Daily Star, September 30, 2005.

BEIRUT: French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy expressed Paris' opposition yesterday to destabilizing Syria through the UN probe into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. After meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Douste-Blazy said that it would be a "mistake" to take punitive measures against Damascus before the UN team completes its investigations.

Meanwhile, Mehlis is wrapping up his investigation by interviewing more Lebanese security people and taking in three engineers who work for Lebanon's cellphone company because they erased recordings of certain phone conversations germane to the investigation.

Syria has been calling on its allies for help. The Indian Minister of State for External Affairs E. Ahamed, who is visiting Syria, announced "that Syria has an important pivotal role in establishing just and permanent peace in the Middle East.

Ahamed expressed his country’s worry about escalation of the U.S. accusations against Syria following the war on Iraq.

“Despite of all pressures, Syria was and still remains strong and steadfast on all its firm principles and it works for achieving peace and stability in the region.” Ahamed said in statement to the Syrian newspaper of al-Baath.

“We hope that the U.S. will realize that there is no peace or stability in the region without Syria ……We believe that Syria has an important role to play in Iraq's future.” he Added.

Turkey rejects American demand to interfere in Syria's affairs

Yesterday Turk's Foreign Minister Abdulla Gol announced that Ankara will not interfere in any country's affairs. "Prime Minister Rajab Tayeb Erdogan warned Washington that playing with Syria will be very dangerous because Syria will be worst than Iraq" Turkish sources said.

Concerning discussions with US National Security Advisor Steven Hadley and other American officials held recently in Ankara on a scenario to change the Syrian regime, Gol said in a press conference that "Turkey can not interfere in the affairs of other countries" adding that Ankara has good bilateral ties with many countries in the region and simultaneously supports democracy and transparency in these countries".

Turkish sources said that Hadley and Secretary of State aid for Public Diplomacy Karin Hughes, who were in Anqara two days ago, conveyed an American demand to Turkey as regards a scenario to change the regime in Syria.

Turkish sources also said that Erdogan and Gol warned Hadley not to interfere in changing of the Syrian regime affirming that "ِAnqara knows very well the characteristics of the Syrian regime .In addition Anqara always advice Syrians to realize democracy."

Regarding the mission of the International Investigation Committee on the assassination of the late president Rafik Hariri, Gol said "the concerned independent committee did not reach a conclusion yet, so no comment from Turkey".

Syria Asks Russia for More Weapons

Chief of the Syrian General Staff General de corps Ali Habib was received yesterday by Russian Chief of the General Staff Yury Baluevsky in Moscow. Although the meeting went on behind closed doors, Kommersant was able to discover certain details from it. In particular, that Habib delivered two lists, one of military equipment that needs repairs and modernization, and the other of new-model weapons that Damascus is inquiring about.

This is the first visit by Gen. Habib since two significant events in relations between Moscow and Damascus. At the beginning of this year, Israel expressed its concern over Russian deliveries of Iskander-E missile complexes to Syria. Russian President blocked the deal. Moscow at the same time announced the forgiveness of more than 70 percent of Syria's debt to Russia for previous weapons shipments (more than $10 billion). That enabled Syria to make orders for more Russian weapons, which, under the new rules, were to be paid for in hard currency immediately.

The scoop on the "American academics" who visited Bashar al-Asad was sent to me by Andrea at Columbia University.

Al-Assad discuss Syria- U.S. ties with anti-war academics
Syria-USA, Politics, 9/21/2005

"The aim of our delegation visit is to reach a suitable situation to
hold dialogue between the Syrian and U.S. sides... as well as convey
a message to the U.S. people saying that we should be fair with
Syria, and don't take quick decisions on different issues between
both countries." Jennings, president of "Conscience International,"
a humanitarian aid organization told SANA.

The organization says that Jennings, Conscience International's Founder and President, led a delegation of "US Academics Against the War" to Baghdad in January, 2003, a few weeks prior to the US-UK invasion. Thirty-seven professors from twenty-eight US universities joined with academics from several Iraqi Universities to warn against the humanitarian costs and political consequences of launching a preemptive war against Iraq.

Anwar al-Bunni and other Syrian activists have announced the need for a new social contract and constitution in Syria. They are proposing one, which is described by as-Seyassah. Here is another article about it, send by Tony Badran. Thanks Tony, and thanks Nick sending the best article on it by Sham Press (also in Arabic.)

Here is an interesting article Nibras Kazimi just sent on:

Who Killed Hariri?

Nibras Kazimi on a Lebanese murder mystery
The New York Sun; Date:2005 Sep 28; Section:Editorial & Opinion; Page 8

In February, a couple of weeks after Rafiq Hariri’s assassination in Beirut, I pegged the blame for the murder on the Syrian leadership, who I claimed had acted through their acolytes, Hezbollah. My reasoning at the time was that the Syrians had the motive and the means, and that the only terrorist team that could pull off such a delicate operation was the one headed by the Lebanese terrorist Imad Mughniyeh.

A couple of months later, while visiting Lebanon, I surveyed the site of the blast and changed my mind: the bombing that killed Hariri along the waterfront was too big and too flashy and thus did not bear Mughniyeh’s signature. Would the Syrians do such a thing on their own? Unlikely; too high a risk of being caught. No, this job was done by a Lebanese network, but which one if not Mughniyah’s “A-Team”? The likely suspects were the Syrian loyalists in charge of the Lebanese security apparatus.

Yes, blaming the heads of the Lebanese security apparatus seemed the rational thing to do, and a little too easy. At the top of the list was the much-feared director of General Security, General Jamil Al-Sayyid. I went to visit him in May at his home, but was much disappointed: instead of finding a nefarious and evil spymaster, I found a vain and very proper military officer. Al-Sayyid seemed genuinely stung by the accusation that drove him to volunteer his resignation after decades of service to the Lebanese state. He had an “I’ll show them” attitude that involved setting-up his own think-tank and publishing a liberal newspaper: he would launch a political career and avenge his sullied name and track record. He did not strike me as a man that would be smartly sinister enough, or gullibly dumb enough, to be involved in the Hariri murder.

Since resigning, Al-Sayyid had managed to regain some respectability through a long interview that was serialized over several days in a leading Arabic newspaper. He was even seen about town dining with the American ambassador at an Italian restaurant in downtown Beirut.

But Al-Sayyid, along with three other top officers, was arrested last month by the Lebanese authorities on the recommendation of the German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who is running the United Nations-mandated investigation into the assassination. Mehlis is supposed to hand in his final report by Oct. 25. A lot is riding on Mr. Mehlis, including the culpability of the Syrian regime in ex-Prime Minister Hariri’s murder. His report could amount to a casus belli against the Assad dynasty by the international community. The only problem is that I think that Mr. Mehlis has very little by way of a smoking gun, but rather can only establish motive and some circumstantial evidence.

There was talk of a defector, who in the first account leaked by Saudi intelligence was supposed to be Major Zuheir S., a Syrian intelligence officer with direct oversight of activities in Lebanon.The Saudis had helped him defect and then took him to Paris (where he was debriefed by the French and then Mr. Mehlis) and to Cairo (where the Egyptian spooks figured out that he was lying) and then to Spain (where he met Rifa’at Assad, an exiled claimant to the throne of his nephew, Bashar, and a chum of the Saudis).

The Syrians countered by leaking a brief biography of Zuheir Siddique, who turns out to be in their account a colorful con man with seven wives and a checkered career in the annals of fraud all over Syria and Lebanon. He had somehow snookered the Saudis, the French and Mr. Mehlis into believing that he was credible and could prove Syrian blameworthiness. Sources keep telling me that this guy was Mr. Mehlis’s trump card and that the Syrians had found it easy to discredit his testimony. Other information that Mr. Mehlis had acted on and that found its way into the Lebanese press is also turning out to be wrong.

One theory talks about a cover-up at the scene of the crime, but making that work would require the Lebanese bureaucracy to be more efficient than it is. The supposed coverup could be explained away as fumbling rather than malice. Moreover, the four top suspects — who headed four rival security and military branches — loathe each other, and it is very hard to envision them working together to kill Hariri.

Even the handling of the investigation by Mehlis seems sloppy and is “operating on ad hoc law” that is in contravention of what the U.N. set down in its related resolution and would not hold up in court, according to Al-Sayyid’s lawyer, Akram Azzouri, speaking in a telephone interview on Monday.

Accepting Mr. Mehlis’s thesis would make one hesitant to entertain yet another suspect entity: a Sunni fundamentalist group with the “previously unknown” tag. Sunni fanatics in carefree Beirut? The mental image just does not seem to fit, but I am slowly getting used to it. Omar Bakri, the militant fundamentalist who was recently kicked out of Britain after spending 20 years there and heralding the day when the Islamic flag shall flutter triumphantly over 10 Downing Street, is now beseeching his followers to join him in Beirut. An appendage of Zarqawi’s organization in Iraq is branching out under the name of Jund al-Sham into both Syria and the northern Lebanese town of Trablous. Shia-Sunni tensions across Lebanon are also surfacing and creating a political atmosphere that harks back to the civil war days.

The Syrian regime is nasty and horrible: they are a relic of a defunct Ba’athist totalitarian ideology that rules through vicious sectarian domination. There are plenty of reasons for undermining and overthrowing them, but on the current evidence, Hariri’s murder should not be one of these reasons. Given what I know after following this story for a while, I am less certain today that they or their acolytes — whether Hizbullah or Al-Sayyid — are indeed guilty of this particular foul deed.

The Mehlis investigation could be barking up the wrong tree, and this would have immense repercussions. There seems to be a frenzy of wishful thinking in Washington and Beirut that Herr Sherlock Holmes would nobly and irrefutably expose just how evil the Syrians really are, but everyone may be in for a major disappointment. The Egyptians have already figured out that the whole affair is going in the wrong direction and seem to be jumping ship.The Syrians are having a field day by poking holes in the supposed “evidence” against them and their Lebanese lackeys, and they have dispatched their smug No. 2 intelligence man to Paris with a big dossier to bolster the argument of their “innocence.”

But the question remains: who killed Hariri? Whoever did it has wedded terrorism to long-term strategic planning. In the old days, regimes like Assad’s or Saddam’s or the Iranian mullahs, had mastered this dark art. But what if al-Qaeda is planning to use Lebanon as a launch pad to bring down the regime in Syria? There is more to this bigger picture, and scapegoating the Syrians may be easy but dangerous if it serves other interested parties skulking in the shadows.

Mr. Kazimi is an Iraqi writer based in Washington D.C., and currently traveling around the Middle East. He can be reached at nibraska@yahoo.com

Robert Rabil Responds to my Op-Ed: Carrots or only Sticks?

Robert Rabil, director of graduate studies at Florida Atlantic University, who has written much of the most intelligent and interesting analysis on Lebanon and Syria for the influential think tank, the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, has commented on my op-ed with his own article in the "Daily Star." I will write a comment below. Here is his article.

The real message of U.S. pressure on Syria - Robert G. Rabil
Since the adoption by the UN Security Council of Resolution 1559, which authorized an independent commission to investigate the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, ironically a debate has raged more over the role played by Washington in issuing the resolution than over the possible implication of Damascus in the assassination. In fact, the Resolution was issued upon the recommendation of a UN fact-finding mission, which concluded that "the government of Syria bears primary responsibility for the political tension that preceded the assassination."

Some scholars and analysts perceive Washington's interest in pursuing the investigation as part of an overall effort to overthrow the Syrian regime. They argue that Washington is pursuing a policy of regime change on the cheap in Damascus, Syria's liberal opposition groups are not prepared to govern, Syria's deep religious animosities and ethnic hatred could easily tear the country apart if the government falls and would thus result in bringing to power militant Sunnis who would actively aid the jihadists in Iraq, and that Damascus and Washington have a mutual interest in subduing jihadism and stabilizing Iraq.

They criticize Washington's erratic policy and assert that the U.S. must choose between destabilizing Syria and stabilizing Iraq. Recently, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad welcomed a group of American academics who, according to the Arab media, opposed the Iraq war. Their meeting with Assad could be interpreted as a message critical of Washington.

This line of thinking is confused and misguided on both strategic and tactical levels. From a strategic standpoint Washington and Damascus have different objectives in the region. Washington's invasion of Iraq and promotion of democracy in the Middle East have not only shattered the regional status quo, around which Syria built its reputation as the vanguard of Arab nationalism, but have also threatened the very survival of the Syrian Baath regime. Consequently, Damascus has a strategic interest in undermining U.S. policies in the Middle East in general and in Iraq in particular.

This is borne out by Syria's policy until very recently of turning a blind eye to jihadi infiltration into Iraq. Even, Iraq's Defense Minister Saadoun al-Doulaimi recently lambasted Syria for allowing insurgents to sneak into Iraq. But Syria has set itself into a dangerous trap. The very jihadists it allowed into Iraq are coming back into Syria and fomenting trouble. Admittedly, Damascus may consider helping bring stability to Iraq only if it would have a say in formulating Iraq's political future, something Washington has been adamantly against.

On the other hand, the Hariri assassination cannot be looked at in isolation of the regional developments. It is no less associated with Syria's attempts at undermining U.S. regional efforts than with preventing the mobilization of Lebanon's political and confessional groups against Syria's occupation of the country. Not only did Hariri project domestic and universal influence but also reflected a central aspect of Washington's policies by insisting on economic and political reform. Liquidating Hariri could thus be perceived as removing a domestic obstacle in Lebanon and undercutting a "leg" of Washington's diplomacy.

Similarly, it is not apt to consider pressure on Syria as an attempt to remove the Syrian regime on the cheap. On the one hand, international pressure on Syria, led by the U.S. and France, has accomplished significant results, freeing Lebanon after almost three decades of Syrian occupation and leading to the collapse of Beirut's security regime. Four senior security officials are now under arrest facing charges of complicity in murder. Something of this magnitude has rarely occurred in the Arab world. Lebanon could become a catalyst of political change in the region.
On the other hand, one could argue that pressure on the regime has reinforced the hands of Bashar vis-a-vis the "old guard." Bashar has used the regime change pretext to try to consolidate his rule. Close members and supporters of the Assad Alawite clan have taken control of almost all military and security apparatus while at the same time nearly all the old-timers of the regime were led to retirement.

Significantly, by affirming the inviolability of the Baath Party during the recent tenth Baath Regional Congress, being the vanguard party in society, Bashar sent a message to the opposition as well as to Washington that his Baath regime was "here to stay."

Historically, the regime survived the aftershocks of the defeat in the 1967 war at a time when it was extremely weak. Nor has the regime had any qualms using whatever means at its disposal to suppress internal opposition. Thousands of Muslim brothers and supporters were killed and jailed in 1982 when they rebelled against the regime. What partly saved the day was the support of the regime by the Damascene merchant class. Although this influential class has called for reforms, it is more concerned with stability than unchecked change.

Washington's policy toward Syria, by error or trial, has the effect of neutralizing Syria by forcing it to stop hedging its diplomacy ranging from promoting terror to seeking regional power. The international investigation is more a signal to Syria and other rogue states that the language of violence is nearing its end. In this respect, it is foolish to consider that Washington's choice is between destabilizing Syria and stabilizing Iraq.

Robert G. Rabil is director of graduate studies at Florida Atlantic University and author of Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel, and Lebanon (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003). He wrote this article for The Daily Star.[End]

Comment: Robert does not dispute my primary thesis - that regime change on the cheap will lead to chaos or worse in Syria and backfire against American interests. (By the way, I believe that faced with a sudden government collapse, Syria would likely slip into chaos and possible civil war, rather than produce a stable government run by Islamists. I don't think Extremists have the ability, organization, or popularity among Syrians to take power. Maybe at the end of a brutal civil war they would emerge victorious once everyone has been radicalized, but not before.) Anyway, Robert doesn't dispute that something worse for American interests would likely happen in Syria should the government collapse.

What he does say is that US foreign policy, which he admits has been "erratic" and thus inscrutable, is not directed at regime change. To suggest that people in Washington have been hoping for regime change, Rabil insists - "is not apt."

OK, let's agree with Rabil for the sake of discussion. Washington agrees on a Syria policy and does not want regime change. Most likely, Washington has sobered up on the regime-change issue now that it must decide what to do with the Hariri investigation. The possibility of pushing Syria until it "pops" is a real concern, which Washington probably does not welcome at this point.

Robert argues that pressure works and is a good tool for forcing Syria to conform to American and Lebanese interests. Here again, we agree. I believe pressure has worked and will continue to work. The greatest evidence of this is Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, as Robert says.

Where we disagree, is over the issue of whether the US should also offer Syria carrots to shape its policy. I think, "Yes," the US should do this. The main reason Rabil doesn't think carrots are a good idea, he writes, is because:

Damascus may consider helping bring stability to Iraq only if it would have a say in formulating Iraq's political future, something Washington has been adamantly against.

What Rabil is saying, if I read him correctly, is that Washington cannot draw Asad into a deal on Iraq because it will not accept Asad having "a say in formulating Iraq's political future."

Why not? Syria's main connection to Iraq is with the tribal confederations that populate Syria’s eastern provinces and Iraq’s western provinces. Syria has allowed the tribal leaders to meet openly in the Sham hotel. Most of the Iraqi leaders I have spoken to in Damascus - the Dulaimi types - are against the Shiite Imams taking over, they don't want Iran to have too much influence in Iraq, and they support former PM Allawi, and want a "secular" coalition of Sunnis and Shiites to rule in Baghdad. Everyone of them I talked to told me, “We don’t want the United States to leave Iraq now. We want them to pursue a smarter policy and listen to the Sunnis.”

This is not so far from what the US says its goals are. The United States supported Prime Minister Allawi in the last elections and were disappointed when he lost at the polls. America says it wants a balance of Sunni and other groups in Iraq, rather than the lop-sided Shiite control that is now emerging. Why not use Syria to counter-balance Iran? This would be wise policy. It needs to bring in the Sunni tribes, which Bashar has been cultivating. There are grounds for dialogue on this.

As I explained the other day, the last paragraph of my original op-ed (which was cut) suggested that the US ask Bashar to use its influence with the Sunni tribes to protect the oil pipeline that runs from Kirkuk in northern Iraq to Banyas on the Syria coast. It is the most efficient means of getting Iraq's northern oil out of the country, but was closed by the US when it invaded Iraq in order to punish Syria. Washington has not permitted it to be reopened. Iraq's northern oil has not been exploitable for the last year because the Iraqi resistance has been blowing up the pipelines to Turkey. Let Asad try to work with the Iraqi tribes to get the oil flowing. What does America have to lose? Syria was making 1.5 billion dollars a year out of this oil before the American invasion of Iraq. It has a large incentive to help stabilize Iraq if it can get this revenue back. So long as America refuses to let Iraq run its oil out through Syria, Damascus has an incentive to try to push America out of Iraq as quickly as possible in order to get the pipeline turned back on. America should exploit Syria’s interest in opening the pipeline to get Syria on the side of stabilizing Iraq. It would be to everyone’s benefit.
Using such a carrot does not mean America must forgo the Hariri investigation or its other sticks. It can do both. Asad will be more likely to cooperate, and Syrians will see a real interest in siding with the American program in Iraq - and perhaps elsewhere. If Asad behaves, he gets more carrots and less sticks. It would also convince Damascus that the United States does not want regime-change. What Asad fears now is that even if he cooperates with America, he will be driven to the wall. Under these conditions, he will not cooperate. It is a matter of regime survival.

Take away the regime-survival question and show Syria that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and Asad will head for the light. It is natural human behavior. It is not rocket science. Hence, I continue to believe that the question is between destabilizing Syria and stabilizing Iraq. Show Asad that America does not want regime change and that there is a possibility of cooperation, and he will respond.

One more point, Rabil struck a low blow, when he wrote:

[US academics who]criticize Washington's erratic policy and assert that the U.S. must choose between destabilizing Syria and stabilizing Iraq. Recently, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad welcomed a group of American academics who, according to the Arab media, opposed the Iraq war. Their meeting with Assad could be interpreted as a message critical of Washington.

I take it that Robert is trying to imply that I joined some "group of American academics" who oppose the Iraq war and wanted to express their opposition by meeting with Bashar al-Asad. I did no such thing and would not do it. If I opposed the Iraq war, I certainly wouldn't meet with Asad in order to announce it.

I do not know of any America scholars who are in Damascus who met with Asad because of their opposition to the Iraq war. I did read this report in the local press, though, and it confused me as it has Rabil. What I think happened is this: A conference on Syrian history is being held this week in Damascus. A few American scholars, who work on 19th century Syrian history, are participating. I am not. Probably the local press used their presence in Damascus to write that they opposed the war. Maybe Bashar al-Asad turned up at the opening session of the conference to welcome them - but I do not know if this is true. I will find out.

Anyway, for Robert to suggest that my article, which argued that America must choose between stabilizing Iraq and destabilizing Syria, has anything to do with American academics who oppose the war and give allegiance to Bashar over George is just mendacity. There is no connection between the two. This is not a question about which president is better or whose side one is on. To reduce this discussion to such a level of national allegiance should be left to Campus Watch. Rabil should not stoop so low.

There is a real debate going on about what America should do in Syria to stabilize Iraq. I think Washington can be smarter. Robert thinks Washington is on the right track and doing the best it can. He doesn't think carrots will work. I do. We agree that pressure is effective. We agree that sudden regime change is dangerous. It is not a question of whose side one is on but what policy will help stabilize Iraq.

News Round Up: Sept. 28, 05

It was a bad day in Syria yesterday. May Chidiac was nearly killed the previous day in her car. She is one of Lebanon’s most respected regional broadcasters – a Diane Sawyer - who was much loved in Syria even though she was a courageous advocate of Lebanese independence. Everyone admired her. She is alive, but has lost an arm and leg. The Lebanese organized demonstrations to protest the string of killings. Everyone has accused Syria of ordering the assassination attempt. This cowardly job has reignited worries that Syria is playing for keeps and will seriously up the ante in Lebanon, if the Mehlis report corners the Asad family. Syria continues to deny that it is involved.

Today, Elias Murr, Lebanon's Defense Minister explained on LBC that Syrian intelligence officials in Lebanon threatened him months before an attempt on his life in a similar July car bombing. The FBI are now investigating the Chidiac bombing.

There are also reports that members of Ahmad Jabril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which maintains border bases in Deir Al Ashaer and Sultan Yacoub in the Bekaa as well as the Naameh hills south of Beirut, have been caught trying to smuggle weapons from Syria into Lebanon. Haaretz claims that "Assad gave Hamas and Islamic Jihad the green light for terrorism in order to divert attention and pressure from Syria. All of this suggests that Syria is to attempting to develop its regional “cards,” rather than giving them up, as the West insists it do.

Ali Habib, the Syrian Chief of Staff, has gone to Moscow for several days and everyone here is speculating about his visit - whether he has gone to purchase Strella and Alexander missile systems or to look for help against an American push to get Syrian taken to the UN Security Council.

Inside Syria security forces raided a house where pro-democracy activists were meeting on Monday, destroying documents and ordering the gathering's participants to disperse.

The broken-up meeting had been organised by the Commission for the Defence of Democratic Freedoms and Human Rights and was being held in Khan al-Shaykh, some 20 kilometres south of Damascus.

Human rights organisations in the country condemned the authorities' action. The president of the Syrian Centre for Judicial Research, Anwar al-Bunni joined the criticism, denouncing what he said was "the excessive means with which the Syrian government imposes its iron fist on Syrian society and uses force against human rights and civil society activists.

""Syria is showing the world it has two faces, one: Islamic extremism, the other: the regime of the government," Bunni told Adnkronos International (AKI).

A bit of welcome news comes from Cairo, from where Asad has just returned from a short visit. Mubarak’s spokesman said:

"The Egyptian proposal rejects isolating Syria and calls for achieving stability in the region and not opening a new focus of tension that adds to an already complicated situation. (Mubarak) is calling upon Syria to go on cooperating with Mr. Mehlis. He is against any finger pointing at Syria before Mr. Mehlis's report is made available to the United Nations," Egyptian presidential spokesman Suleiman Awad said.

A number of other Arab leaders and opinion makers have come out against isolating Syria. If both Egypt and Saudi reject the notion of isolating Syria, at least until the results of the Hariri investigation are revealed in October, they will play an important role in mitigating the full force of American wrath and hindering its ability to build a seamless coalition against it.

Even in the US administration, there seems to be division over how the US should apply the screws to Damascus.

Christopher Dickey of Newsweek, who also keeps an excellent blog, "The Shadowland Journal," wrote to me yesterday:

There seems to be genuine concern among some members of the US administration that the Syrian regime will, one day soon, crumble into chaos. But, as in Iraq, there is no known or credible scenario for the day after. In its newly cautious post-Iraq, post-Katrina, post-plunging-polls mood, Washington may actually be thinking as much about how to save Bashar as about how to bring him down. And the Saudi role in all this? Hmmmm. - Chris

It looks like Mehlis will not visit Syria again, which has led many in Damascus to speculate that the report will not be a clear indictment. One independent Syrian journalist told me today that the "buzz" around town is that it will be "inconclusive." That is where politics begin.

The reticence to topple Asad is shared by Iraqi president Jalal Al Talabani who said he could not see any alternative to the Asad regime in Syria and had not lost hope in it. As al-Sharq al-Awsat reports, he said,

"Yes, there are disputes but I shall not utter a word against Syria as it is the Country that Harbored us During the Opposition Days.” He pointed out that he has witnessed an American worry towards Iran and so much strictness against Syria. "I said to them: what is the alternative in Syria? Their response was that they do not desire to change the regime in Syria but to change the approach, "he said. He pointed out that he received promises from Syrian officials and said, "I have not lost hope until now. We need to improve relations with Syria, Turkey and Iran. We are in favor of calm and friendly discussions." The Iraqi president said, "We would not become under the influence of anyone. Nevertheless, there are worries in the Arab world of the increase of the Iranian influence. Even Collin Powell said that we have not ended the regime of Saddam Hussein in the past for fear of the Iranian influence.”

All of this can only be cold comfort to Syria, which is fighting a growing tide of world anger.

George Bush on 26 September 2005 said:

"Coalition and Iraqi troops are now focusing their efforts in western Iraq where we're trying to stop foreign terrorists from entering through Syria and prevent al Qaida from establishing a safe haven in the Anbar province."

Mr. Bush says the infiltration of foreign terrorists from Syria remains a problem:

"It takes a while to secure the border with Syria because it is a long border that has had smuggling routes in existence for decades. In order to secure a border, it requires cooperation on both sides of the border, and we're getting limited cooperation from Syria. We've made it clear to Syria we expect them to help us secure their border and to stop the transit of suiciders coming from other countries through Syria into Iraq. Their response hasn't been very satisfactory to date. I continue to remind them of their obligation."

Oxford Business Group explains how Syria has been shoring up the Syrian pound in its efforts to combated public fears that have caused a run on the local currency. (This is one way to get currency reform enacted.)

Syria: Tackling the Jitters
26 September 2005
Debate has been intensifying on Damascus's latest moves to shore up its currency and introduce reforms in the financial sector. Yet while many have welcomed the recent easing of foreign exchange controls and hike in interest rates, others see the package as too little, too late.

On September 21, Syrian central bank Governor Adib Mayyaleh announced to reporters that the bank's base rate had been raised from 6.5 to 7%. At the same time, Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Abdullah Dardari also announced that certificates of deposit were finally to be allowed, at a rate of 9%, with the specific aim of encouraging people to save in Syrian pounds.

Dardari added that banks would now sell currency at a rate of $1 to S£54, slightly under the black market rate of S£55 but above the S£50-52 prevalent a few months ago.

This came after foreign exchange controls that had been in place since the 1960s were eased, with Syrians enabled to open bank accounts in foreign currencies and to trade in foreign denominations. Banks are also now allowed to set their exchange rates within a band around the central bank figure.

The deputy prime minister also announced that Syrian nationals traveling abroad would be able to purchase $3000 per trip, compared with a previous ceiling of $2000. This ruling would not apply to those making the trip over the border to Jordan or Lebanon, however, where the maximum amount that can be purchased would be $1000.

At the same time, local banks will now also be allowed to issue letters of credit for the export and import of some 950 different items - a list accounting for about a quarter of Syria's total trade.

These steps are good, we back them and hope they continue, Rateb Shallah, head of the Syrian Chamber of Commerce, told reporters on September 26.

As a financial package, the moves announced by the government are clearly designed to bolster the pound and bring more dollars into the country and into its banks, boosting hard currency reserves. Estimates vary as to the current status of Syria's forex reserves, but on September 21, AFP claimed that these now stood at around $10bn.

At the same time, the hope is that the freeing up of the forex market and the introduction of letters of credit will also draw Syrians away from the black market - many people's traditional supplier of hard currency. Private currency exchange shops will also be able to operate, further bringing the forex market in from the backstreets.

Dardari also presented the moves as part of the country's broader economic reform programme.

The process of reform and economic liberalisation is heading in the right direction, he said on announcing the introduction of certificates of deposit, based on significant foreign currency reserves and production capacity.

Yet not all analysts were entirely convinced that the package was really going far enough and fast enough.

A lot more needs to be done, Nabil Sukkar, managing director of the Syrian Consulting Bureau for Development and Investment, told the Beirut-based Daily Star in its September 26 edition. The government is working on reforms, to give them due credit, but Syria only moved into the modern banking system a year and a half ago so there is much to be done.

With current pressures on Damascus from Washington over alleged failures to prevent militants from using Syria as a base for operations in Iraq, and from the UN inquiry into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri earlier this year, there is a genuine concern that the pound needs some heftier defences. The recent reprise of US claims over Iraqi militants saw the pound slip 2% in a matter of days as dollar demand surged.

Yet critics argue that while there is clearly a need for some measures to be enacted, what the recent package amounts to is a response mainly to the pressures of recent days, rather than a coherent strategy.

Such critics point to the fact that while certificates of deposit are now allowed, there has been no suggestion so far that the central bank itself will be issuing any. It will be up to the clutch of private banks - all joint ventures between Syrian and Lebanese lenders - to start this up.

At the same time, the move on letters of credit also recognises a reality since Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, which had historically been the place for Syrian exporters to access such instruments. With relations not what they were, it makes sense for Syrian companies to be able to gain letters of credit back home.

There are, however, rumours that the government may be about to expand its financial toolbox still further by beginning issuing treasury bonds. This would substantially expand the range of investment instruments available and, advocates argue, give the government a valuable tool in tackling inflationary pressures. However, few expect any rapid moves in this direction to take place. Yet the signs are that there is a growing recognition of the necessity not just for reform in the financial sector, but for the creation of a much more multi-faceted one.

The following opinion piece in Al-Quds Al Arabi is fairly typical of one broad current on the region. People worry that the US is trying to do in Arab nationalism by crushing Syria.

Syria’s Arab isolation
“The quick visit of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to Cairo, and his meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, reflect the state of isolation that the Syrian regime is living in Arab wise under pressures from the US.”

“It is noted that Cairo has now become almost the only Arab country where the plane of President Assad can land after all the Arab countries have closed the doors in his face.

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which was the main rib in the Egyptian-Syrian-Saudi triangle ruling the region and setting its policies for the past 30 years, is no longer welcoming the Syrian partner after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, especially after what has been leaked about the quick and final meeting between young Syrian President with the current Saudi King Prince Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz.

“President Mubarak, through his spokesperson, announced yesterday that he is against any attempts to isolate Syria, just like he opposes that accusation be made that it stands behind the assassination of Hariri, until the UN report about this topic be released.

“Maybe the Egyptian president is the only one among his Arab counterparts who expressed this supportive position with Syria in the fact of the increasing American pressures to isolate it Arab wise after its international isolation, in preparation of forcing economic sanctions over it. Everyone has maintained silence and most of the Arab leaders have left Syria face its own fate alone.

“The problems of Syria with the US did not begin with the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri. They began with the American preparations to invade Iraq and occupy it. And it may be helpful to remind that the US accused Syria more than once of housing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in addition to large numbers of the old Iraqi regime.

“What the US currently wants from Syria is clear to the eye and needs no further effort to discover. The whole matter is about Iraq and the lack of cooperation of the Syrian regime with the plans to occupy Iraq and end the national resistance on its land…

“President Bush’s administration which conceded that its military and political plans in Iraq reached a dead end wants the Syrian government to throw the last life jacket by sending its troops to Iraq to launch a war against the resistance and invest its effective and expert security apparatuses in this field.

“The Syrian government, despite our differences with it because of its internal matters like breaching human rights and crushing liberties, has rejected all American pressures and has stood against facing the resistance, and it is a respected national position which deserves the support of the Arabs, governments and people.

“Any Syrian cooperation with the American occupation project in Iraq would have led to the staying of the Syrian forces in Lebanon for decades to come. It would have also removed Syria’s name from the list of countries that support terror, and opened the doors of the White House in front of President Bashar al-Assad.

“Significant Lebanese figures have been assassinated in Lebanon starting with former President Bashir Gemayel, who signed a cooperation agreement with Israel sponsored by the US, going through Kamal Jumblatt, the most notable national figure, and ending with President Renee Mouawad. And despite all that, Washington never dared to point one finger at Syria in these assassination attempts because it cooperated in ending the civil war in Lebanon and supported liberating Kuwait. And the Syrian forces remained in Lebanon ruling the country just like it wanted and without any opposition from Washington or Paris.

“Syria gambled on the Arabism of Iraq and its unity, and this is the secret behind its isolation and the American war being waged against it. And now after two years of withstanding this war and the American pressures, we are starting to hear other Arab voices, the latest of which is of the Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, accusing the American policies of breaking down Iraq, erasing its Arabism, and handing it as a gift to Iran and its allies. This assures that the Syrian compass is usually right when it comes to Arab or national issues. What is hoped for, is that it keeps pointing in the right direction.” - Al Quds Al Arabi, United Kingdom

Iraqi Tribes in Syria - "Saddam's Revenge," by Joe Kline

Time Magazine has published a devastating article about how America has mishandled the war in Iraq. Their is a very interesting part "Mishandling the Tribes" which explains Syria's role in welcoming the Sunni tribal leaders of Iraq. I will publish an article by Abdullah Taa'i, who writes that "Because the influence the tribal sheikhs in Iraq used to enjoy has been taken from them," their counter-parts in Syria have now become much more powerful as the Iraqi tribal members look to them for succor. They are appealing to the Syrian government for help for their Iraqi confreres. "This will move the central block of tribes towards Syria," Abdullah writes.

Whereas American leaders in Iraq looked on the tribes as "a vestige of the past [with]no place in the new democratic Iraq," according to a former intelligence officer Joe Kline interviewed, and refused to draw them onto America's side by paying them subsidies, Bashar al-Asad has been cultivating them. This has been a dangerous gamble on Asad's part. America has demanded his help in crushing them, and Asad has refused. In the coming months, America will likely force him to crack down on them as a result of his mistakes in Lebanon. The US has outmaneuvered Asad on the regional chessboard. The tribes can hurt Asad and make trouble in Syria, but America can hurt him much more. The tribes are not going away, however, and are masters at revenge and survival. The Syrian government will not abandon them entirely because all of Eastern Syria is tribal.

They will remain Syrian, when the Americans have quit Iraq. Also, should Iraq split into three, Syria will inherit the Sunni tribes, who will have no where to turn for help but to Damascus.

The original draft of my op-ed, the last paragraph which was eliminated, read:

A first step toward [testing Syrian willingness to improve relations with the US and Iraq] is to reopen the oil pipeline running from Kirkuk in northern Iraq to Banyas on the Syria coast. If Syria can use its influence with the Sunni tribes that span both sides of its border to move oil from Iraq to global markets, everyone would be the richer.

It would have been a way to draw all sides into trying to cooperate.

Saddam's Revenge
The secret history of U.S. mistakes, misjudgments and intelligence failures that let the Iraqi dictator and his allies launch an insurgency now ripping Iraq apart
By JOE KLEIN
Sunday, Sep. 18, 2005

Five men met in an automobile in a baghdad park a few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in April 2003, according to U.S. intelligence sources. One of the five was Saddam. The other four were among his closest advisers. The agenda: how to fight back against the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. A representative of Saddam's former No. 2, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, was there. But the most intriguing man in the car may have been a retired general named Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, who had been a senior member of the Military Bureau, a secret Baath Party spy service. The bureau's job had been to keep an eye on the Iraqi military—and to organize Baathist resistance in the event of a coup. Now a U.S. coup had taken place, and Saddam turned to al-Ahmed and the others and told them to start "rebuilding your networks."

The 45-minute meeting was pieced together months later by U.S. military intelligence. It represents a rare moment of clarity in the dust storm of violence that swirls through central Iraq. The insurgency has grown well beyond its initial Baathist core to include religious extremist and Iraqi nationalist organizations, and plain old civilians who are angry at the American occupation. But Saddam's message of "rebuilding your networks" remains the central organizing principle.

More than two years into the war, U.S. intelligence sources concede that they still don't know enough about the nearly impenetrable web of what Iraqis call ahl al-thiqa (trust networks), which are at the heart of the insurgency. It's an inchoate movement without a single inspirational leader like Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh—a movement whose primary goal is perhaps even more improbable than the U.S. dream of creating an Iraqi democracy: restoring Sunni control in a country where Sunnis represent just 20% of the population. Intelligence experts can't credibly estimate the rebels' numbers but say most are Iraqis. Foreigners account for perhaps 2% of the suspected guerrillas who have been captured or killed, although they represent the vast majority of suicide bombers. ("They are ordnance," a U.S. intelligence official says.) The level of violence has been growing steadily. There have been roughly 80 attacks a day in recent weeks.

Suicide bombs killed more than 200 people, mostly in Baghdad, during four days of carnage last week, among the deadliest since Saddam's fall.

More than a dozen current and former intelligence officers knowledgeable about Iraq spoke with TIME in recent weeks to share details about the conflict. They voiced their growing frustration with a war that they feel was not properly anticipated by the Bush Administration, a war fought with insufficient resources, a war that almost all of them now believe is not winnable militarily. "We're good at fighting armies, but we don't know how to do this," says a recently retired four-star general with Middle East experience. "We don't have enough intelligence analysts working on this problem. The Defense Intelligence Agency [dia] puts most of its emphasis and its assets on Iran, North Korea and China. The Iraqi insurgency is simply not top priority, and that's a damn shame."

The intelligence officers stressed these points: They believe that Saddam's inner circle—especially those from the Military Bureau—initially organized the insurgency's support structure and that networks led by former Saddam associates like al-Ahmed and al-Duri still provide money and logistical help.

The Bush Administration's fixation on finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 2003 diverted precious intelligence resources that could have helped thwart the fledgling insurgency.

From the beginning of the insurgency, U.S. military officers have tried to contact and negotiate with rebel leaders, including, as a senior Iraq expert puts it, "some of the people with blood on their hands."

The frequent replacement of U.S. military and administrative teams in Baghdad has made it difficult to develop a counterinsurgency strategy.

The accumulation of blunders has led a Pentagon guerrilla-warfare expert to conclude, "We are repeating every mistake we made in Vietnam."

The Wrong Focus
it is no secret that General Tommy Franks didn't want to hang around Iraq very long. As Franks led the U.S. assault on Baghdad in April 2003, his goal—and that of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—was to get to the capital as quickly as possible with a minimal number of troops. Franks succeeded brilliantly at that task. But military-intelligence officers contend that he did not seem interested in what would come next. "He never once asked us for a briefing about what happened once we got to Baghdad," says a former Army intelligence officer attached to the invasion force. "He said, 'It's not my job.' We figured all he wanted to do was get in, get out and write his book." (Franks, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this article.)

The rush to Baghdad, critics say, laid the groundwork for trouble to come. In one prewar briefing, for example, Lieut. General David McKiernan—who commanded the land component of the coalition forces—asked Franks what should be done if his troops found Iraqi arms caches on the way to Baghdad. "Just put a lock on 'em and go, Dave," Franks replied, according to a former U.S. Central Command (Centcom) officer. Of course, you couldn't simply put a lock on ammunition dumps that stretched for several square miles—dumps that would soon be stripped and provide a steady source of weaponry for the insurgency.

U.S. troops entered Baghdad on April 5. There was euphoria in the Pentagon. The looting in the streets of Baghdad and the continuing attacks on coalition troops were considered temporary phenomena that would soon subside. On May 1, President George W. Bush announced, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," on the deck of an aircraft carrier, near a banner that read mission accomplished.

Shortly thereafter, Franks moved his headquarters from Qatar back to Florida. He was followed there in June by McKiernan, whose Baghdad operation included several hundred intelligence officers who had been keeping track of the situation on the ground. "Allowing McKiernan to leave was the worst decision of the war," says one of his superiors.

(The decision, he says, was Franks'.) "We replaced an operational force with a tactical force, which meant generals were replaced by colonels." Major General Ricardo Sanchez, a relatively junior commander and a recent arrival in Iraq, was put in charge. "After McKiernan left, we had fewer than 30 intelligence officers trying to figure who the enemy was," says a top-ranking military official who was in Iraq at the time. "We were starting from scratch, with practically no resources."

On May 23, the U.S. made what is generally regarded as a colossal mistake. L. Paul Bremer—the newly arrived administrator of the U.S. government presence, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)—disbanded the Iraqi army and civil service on Rumsfeld's orders. "We made hundreds of thousands of people very angry at us," says a Western diplomat attached to the CPA, "and they happened to be the people in the country best acquainted with the use of arms."

Thousands moved directly into the insurgency—not just soldiers but also civil servants who took with them useful knowledge of Iraq's electrical grid and water and sewage systems. Bremer says he doesn't regret that decision, according to his spokesman Dan Senor. "The Kurds and Shi'ites didn't want Saddam's army in business," says Senor, "and the army had gone home. We had bombed their barracks. How were we supposed to bring them back and separate out the bad guys? We didn't even have enough troops to stop the looting in Baghdad."

A third decision in the spring of 2003—to make the search for WMD the highest intelligence priority—also hampered the U.S. ability to fight the insurgents. In June, former weapons inspector David Kay arrived in Baghdad to lead the Iraq Survey Group (isg), which had 1,200 intelligence officers and support staff members assigned to search for WMD. They had exclusive access to literally tons of documents collected from Saddam's office, intelligence services and ministries after the regime fell. Kay clashed repeatedly with U.S. military leaders who wanted access not only to the documents but also to some of the resources—analysts, translators, field agents—at his disposal. "I was in meetings where [General John] Abizaid was pounding on the table trying to get some help," says a senior military officer. "But Kay wouldn't budge."

Indeed, a covert-intelligence officer working for the isg told TIME correspondent Brian Bennett that he had been ordered in August 2003 to "terminate" contact with Iraqi sources not working on WMD. As a result, the officer says, he stopped meeting with a dozen Iraqis who were providing information—maps, photographs and addresses of former Baathist militants, safe houses and stockpiles of explosives—about the insurgency in the Mosul area. "The President's priority—and my mission—was to focus on WMD," Kay told TIME. "Abizaid needed help with the counterinsurgency. He said, 'You have the only organization in this country that's working.' But military guys are not used to people telling them no, and so, yes, there was friction."

Sanchez learned that autumn that there were 38 boxes of documents specifically related to the city of Fallujah, a hotbed of Sunni rebellion. Months later, when military-intelligence officers finally were able to review some of the documents, many of which had been marked no intelligence value, the officers found information that they now say could have helped the U.S. stop the insurgency's spread.

Among the papers were detailed civil-defense plans for cities like Fallujah, Samarra and Ramadi and rosters of leaders and local Baathist militia who would later prove to be the backbone of the insurgency in those cities.

U.S. military-intelligence sources say many of the documents still have not been translated or thoroughly analyzed. "You should see the warehouse in Qatar where we have this stuff," said a high-ranking former U.S. intelligence official. "We'll never be able to get through it all. Who knows?" he added, with a laugh. "We may even find the VX [nerve gas] in one of those boxes."

Misjudging The Enemy
As early as June 2003, the CIA told bush in a briefing that he faced a "classic insurgency" in Iraq. But the White House didn't fully trust the CIA, and on June 30, Rumsfeld told reporters, "I guess the reason I don't use the term guerrilla war is that it isn't ... anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance." The opposition, he claimed, was composed of "looters, criminals, remnants of the Baathist regime" and a few foreign fighters. Indeed, Rumsfeld could claim progress in finding and capturing most of the 55 top members of Saddam's regime—the famous Iraqi deck of cards. (To date, 44 of the 55 have been captured or killed.) Two weeks after Rumsfeld's comment, the Secretary of Defense was publicly contradicted by Centcom commander Abizaid, who said the U.S. indeed faced "a classical guerrilla-type campaign" in Iraq.

In a sense, both Rumsfeld and Abizaid were right. The backbone of the insurgency was thousands of Baathist remnants organizing a guerrilla war against the Americans. According to documents later seized by the U.S. military, Saddam—who had been changing locations frequently until his capture in December 2003—tried to stay in charge of the rebellion. He fired off frequent letters filled with instructions for his subordinates. Some were pathetic. In one, he explained guerrilla tradecraft to his inner circle—how to keep in touch with one another, how to establish new contacts, how to remain clandestine. Of course, the people doing the actual fighting needed no such advice, and decisions about whom to attack when and where were made by the cells. Saddam's minions, including al-Duri and al-Ahmed, were away from the front lines, providing money, arms and logistical support for the cells.

But Saddam did make one strategic decision that helped alter the course of the insurgency. In early autumn he sent a letter to associates ordering them to change the target focus from coalition forces to Iraqi "collaborators"—that is, to attack Iraqi police stations. The insurgency had already announced its seriousness and lethal intent with a summer bombing campaign. On Aug. 7, a bomb went off outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, killing 19 people. Far more ominous was the Aug. 19 blast that destroyed the U.N.'s headquarters in Baghdad, killing U.N. representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and 22 others. Although al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the attack, U.S. intelligence officials believe that remnants of Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) carried it out. "It was a pure Baathist operation," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "The Iraqis who served as U.N. security guards simply didn't show up for work that day. It wasn't a suicide bomb. The truck driver left the scene. Our [explosives] team found that the bomb had the distinctive forensics of Saddam's IIS."

On Oct. 27, 2003, the assaults on "collaborators" that Saddam had requested began with attacks on four Iraqi police stations—and on International Red Cross headquarters—in Baghdad, killing 40 people.

The assaults revealed a deadly new alliance between the Baathists and the jihadi insurgents. U.S. intelligence agents later concluded, after interviewing one of the suicide bombers, a Sudanese who failed in his attempt, that the operation had been a collaboration between former Baathists and al-Zarqawi. The Baathists had helped move the suicide bombers into the country, according to the U.S. sources, and then provided shelter, support (including automobiles) and coordination for the attacks.

Mishandling The Tribes
By almost every account, sanchez and bremer did not get along. The conflict was predictable—the soldiers tended to be realists fighting a nasty war; the civilians, idealists trying to create a new Iraq—but it was troubling nonetheless. The soldiers wanted to try diplomacy and began reaching out to the less extreme elements of the insurgency to bring them into negotiations over Iraq's political future. The diplomats took a harder line, refusing to negotiate with the enemy.

Military-intelligence officers presented the CPA with a plan to make a deal with 19 subtribes of the enormous Dulaimi clan, located in al-Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni triangle. The tribes "had agreed to disarm and keep us informed of traffic going through their territories," says a former Army intelligence officer. "All it would have required from the CPA was formal recognition that the tribes existed—and $3 million." The money would go toward establishing tribal security forces. "It was a foot in the door, but we couldn't get the CPA to move." Bremer's spokesman Senor says a significant effort was made to reach out to the tribes. But several military officials dispute that. "The standard answer we got from Bremer's people was that tribes are a vestige of the past, that they have no place in the new democratic Iraq," says the former intelligence officer. "Eventually they paid some lip service and set up a tribal office, but it was grudging."

The Baathists, on the other hand, were more active in courting the tribes. Starting in November 2003, tribal sheiks and Baathist expatriates held a series of monthly meetings at the Cham Palace hotel in Damascus. They were public events, supposedly meetings to express solidarity with the Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation.

(The January 2004 gathering was attended by Syrian President Bashar Assad.) Behind the scenes, however, the meetings provided a convenient cover for leaders of the insurgency, including Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, the former Military Bureau director, to meet, plan and distribute money. A senior military officer told TIME that U.S. intelligence had an informant—a mid-level Baathist official who belonged to the Dulaimi tribe—attending the meetings and keeping the Americans informed about the insurgents' growing cohesion. But the increased flow of information did not produce a coherent strategy for fighting the growing rebellion.

The Dealmaking Goes Nowhere
Saddam was captured on Dec. 13, 2003, in a spider hole on a farm near Tikrit. His briefcase was filled with documents identifying many of the former Baathists running support networks for the insurgency. It was the first major victory of what the U.S. called the postcombat phase of the war: in early 2004, 188 insurgents were captured, many of whom had been mentioned in the seized documents. Although Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, Saddam's former No. 2, narrowly evaded capture, much of his Mosul and Kirkuk apparatus was rolled up. Baathist financial networks were disrupted in several provinces. The CIA, in fact, believes that Saddam's capture permanently crippled the Baathist wing of the insurgency. "A guy like al-Duri is more symbol than substance at this point," a U.S. intelligence official says. "The parade has passed him by."

Military-intelligence officers who were in Iraq at the time, however, saw evidence that the Baathists regrouped in the spring of 2004, when the U.S. was preoccupied with battling a rebellion led by Shi'ite extremist Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq's south and with the fight for the rebel-held city of Fallujah in the Sunni triangle. And the U.S. intelligence officials believe that some former regime loyalists began to be absorbed by other rebel groups, including those made up of religious extremists and Iraqi nationalists.

Al-Ahmed, say U.S. intelligence officials, is still running the support network he began building after the meeting with Saddam in the car. In May 2004 al-Ahmed set off on one of his periodic tours of the combat zone, meeting with local insurgent leaders, distributing money and passing along news—a trip later pieced together by U.S. intelligence analysts wading through the mountain of data and intelligence provided by low-level local informants. Al-Ahmed started in his hometown of Mosul, where he had been supervising—from a distance—the rebuilding of the local insurgent network disrupted after Saddam's capture. He moved on to Hawija, where he met a man thought to be a senior financier of the insurgency in north-central Iraq. After a brief stay at a farmhouse near Samarra, he met with military leaders of religious and nationalist rebel groups in Baghdad and with Rashid Taan Kazim, one of the few faces from the deck of cards (al-Duri is another) still at large, who is thought to be running a support network for the insurgency in the north and west of Iraq. Al-Ahmed's final stop was Ramadi, where he distributed $500,000 to local insurgency leaders.

What is remarkable is the extent to which the U.S. is aware of al-Ahmed's activities. "We know where Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed lives in Damascus," says a U.S. intelligence official. "We know his phone number. He believes he has the protection of the Syrian government, and that certainly seems to be the case." But he hasn't been aggressively pursued by the U.S. either—in part because there has been a persistent and forlorn hope that al-Ahmed might be willing to help negotiate an end to the Baathist part of the insurgency. A senior U.S. intelligence officer says that al-Ahmed was called at least twice by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi—an old acquaintance—and that a representative of an "other government agency," a military euphemism that usually means the CIA, "knocked on his door in 2004 and asked if he was willing to talk. He wasn't."

Starting Over Again
In the middle of 2004, the U.S. again changed its team in Baghdad. Bremer and Sanchez left, replaced by Ambassador John Negroponte and General George Casey. At the same time, there was a new transitional Iraqi government, led by Iyad Allawi. Negroponte set up a joint military-diplomatic team to review the situation in the country. The consensus was that things were a mess, that little had been accomplished on either the civilian or the military side and that there was no effective plan for dealing with the insurgency. The new team quickly concluded that the insurgency could not be defeated militarily—but that it might be divided. The attempts to engage potential allies like al-Ahmed became the unstated policy as U.S. and Iraqi officials sought ways to isolate foreign terrorists like al-Zarqawi.

But progress in the effort to defuse the insurgency through dealmaking has been slow—and in some cases has led the U.S. to ease pressure on individuals tied to rebel groups. Consider the careful handling of Harith al-Dhari, chairman of the Association of Muslim Scholars and one of Iraq's most important Sunni leaders. In late 2003, several insurgent groups began to meet regularly in the Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad, over which al-Dhari presides. According to U.S. intelligence reports, al-Dhari—who has said he might encourage his organization to take part in the democratic process—did not attend the meetings. But his son Muthanna—who is thought to be an important link between the nationalist and religious strains of the insurgency—did. In August 2004, the son was arrested after his car scanned positive for explosives residue. But he was quickly released, a retired dia analyst says, under pressure from Iraq's government, to keep channels open to his father. "It would be difficult to lure Harith into the tent if Muthanna were in jail," says the former officer.

By April 2004, U.S. military-intelligence officers were also holding face-to-face talks with Abdullah al-Janabi, a rebel leader from Fallujah. The meetings ended after al-Zarqawi—who had taken up residence in Fallujah—threatened to kill al-Janabi if the talks continued, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources. But attempts to negotiate with other insurgents are continuing, including with Saddam's former religious adviser. So far, the effort has been futile. "We keep hoping they'll come up with a Gerry Adams," says a U.S. intelligence official, referring to the leader of the Irish Republican Army's political wing. "But it just hasn't happened."

Civil War?
The leadership in Baghdad changed yet again this year. Negroponte left Baghdad in March to become director of national intelligence. He was replaced by Zalmay Khalilzad. But the turnover in the Iraqi government was far more important: religious Shi'ites, led by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, took charge, a severe irritant to many Sunnis. "The insurgents see al-Jaafari as a traitor, a man who spent the Iran-Iraq war in Iran," says a senior military officer. "And many of the best officers we have trained in the new Iraqi army—Sunnis and secular Shi'ites who served in Saddam's army—feel the same way."

Al-Jaafari did not help matters by opening diplomatic ties with Iran, apologizing for Iraq's behavior in the Iran-Iraq war and cutting economic deals with the Iranians.

In fact, some Iraq experts in the U.S. intelligence community have come to the conclusion that Iraqis' courageous recent steps toward democracy—the elections in January and the writing of a constitution that empowers the religious Shi'ites and the Kurds (though it is resoundingly opposed by the Sunnis)—have left the country in a more precarious position. "The big conversation in our shop these days," says a military-intelligence officer, "is whether it would be a good thing if the new constitution is voted down [in the public referendum] next month."

Iraq experts in the intelligence community believe that the proposed constitution, which creates autonomous regions for the Kurds and Shi'ites in the oil-rich north and south, could heighten the chances of an outright civil war. "A lot of us who have followed this thing have come to the conclusion that the Sunnis are the wolves—the real warriors—and the religious Shi'ites are the sheep," says an intelligence officer. "The Sunnis have the power to maintain this violence indefinitely."

Another hot debate in the intelligence community is whether to make a major change in the counterinsurgency strategy—to stop the aggressive sweeps through insurgent-riddled areas, like the recent offensive in Tall 'Afar, and try to concentrate troops and resources with the aim of improving security and living conditions in population centers like Baghdad. "We've taken Samarra four times, and we've lost it four times," says an intelligence officer. "We need a new strategy."

But the Pentagon leadership is unlikely to support a strategy that concedes broad swaths of territory to the enemy. In fact, none of the intelligence officers who spoke with TIME or their ranking superiors could provide a plausible road map toward stability in Iraq. It is quite possible that the occupation of Iraq was an unwise proposition from the start, as many U.S. allies in the region warned before the invasion. Yet, despite their gloom, every one of the officers favors continuing—indeed, augmenting—the war effort. If the U.S. leaves, they say, the chaos in central Iraq could threaten the stability of the entire Middle East. And al-Qaeda operatives like al-Zarqawi could have a relatively safe base of operations in the Sunni triangle. "We have never taken this operation seriously enough," says a retired senior military official with experience in Iraq. "We have never provided enough troops. We have never provided enough equipment, or the right kind of equipment. We have never worked the intelligence part of the war in a serious, sustained fashion. We have failed the Iraqi people, and we have failed our troops."

"Long Walk" by Chris Ellery

Here is a poem by Chris Ellery, a wonderful poet I chanced upon in Damascus this summer. His poem, "Long Walk" is a good tonic after all the politics.

Chris Ellery
2661 Yale Ave.
San Angelo, TX 76909
Chris.Ellery@angelo.edu

Long Walk

When you walk all day with someone
and neither knows the other’s language,
you will find much to talk about.
Rafik is Arab. His letters are sun and moon.
On the maseer, the “long walk,”
where we meet, we pass
through orange groves, olive groves,
through the ancient rugged country, up
and down a twisting way.
Taking my arm, he says a hundred times,
“Hello.” His only word of English.
“Hello”—again and again until it becomes
HOL-low, hilloh, HAY-L-O-O-O-O—
just to break the silence
with a bright, round nimbus of speech.
He gives me cigarettes, food, plucks
oranges from the trees to sweeten my walk.
When we come to a village, I am
the first to drink the cold well water. When dark comes
to “Hyena Heaven,” and I am
so tired, he points his torch
before my feet
to light the treacherous path.
Without light,
without food or smokes,
how can I reciprocate?
“Shukran.” Thanks. That is my one word.
Well, that was years ago.
Rafik has learned a little English,
I a little Arabic.
Meeting half way like this, we find
more and more to say,
more and more in the wordless quiet
our footsteps leave.

Apologies to Ambassador Ford

I must apologize for misquoting the British Ambassador in Damascus, Peter Ford, the other day. I quoted Ambassador Ford telling a Syrian friend that President Assad was weak and expected to fall. Ambassador Ford wrote:

Josh

In case silence is taken as consent, please note that I definitely did not say what I am quoted as saying here and it's not what I think. I'd be glad if you'd circulate this denial.

Peter Ford

Unfortunately, our mutual friend misunderstood the Ambassador, a lesson to us all.
Apologies, Joshua

"The Case for Border Co-operation" by James Denselow

James Denselow has contributed an important article below. He recently returned from a conference held in Jordan on Iraq's borders. It was attended by high security officials from Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, the UK and US. Syria and Iran were excluded. Syria was eager to send a high level committee to the conference, but was excluded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself. This leads James to ask how many US soldiers and Iraqi citizens will be killed as a result of the West's policy of isolating Syria.

The Case for Border Co-Operation
by James Denselow, King's College, London, and Researcher at Chatham House
September 24, 2005
Written for "Syria Comment."

Flint Leverett described the mechanisms of a US policy of regime change on the cheap in Syria; its cornerstone is the twisting of indirect pressure points to further isolate and weaken the regime. Such pressure points include WMD proliferation and the support of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Lebanese Hizbullah (what the US administration describe as the ‘A’ team of terrorism). However today the greatest threats to the Syrian regime come from accusations of direct involvement in the assassination of Hariri (initial verdict out on the 25th of October) and US accusations of ‘allowing forces’ to cross the border into Iraq to fuel the continued insurgency that plagues the country.

Several commentaries have argued (includes this blogs much featured Michael Young) that Syria’s ephemeral control of its border with Iraq represents its last remaining ‘card’ before an ‘insignificance ensuing from absolute concession’. It is this argument that US policy makers are seemingly pursuing too. Its faith lies in the effectiveness of pressure; as far as the administration sees it, further isolation leads to further pressure which is the only form of politics that will succeed in forcing the Syrians to take increased action on its border and stop ‘bleeding’ the US in Iraq. At its most simple, this policy ignores the fact that the heart of the insurgency is Iraqi, the Centre for Strategic International Studies estimating that the foreign elements of the insurgency as ‘vastly overblown’, and that there are only 550 Syrian fighters in an insurgency over 30,000 strong.

Yet the heat that the Syrians are feeling over the border issue has been steadily increasing since the 2003 invasion. Syria has found itself at the epicenter of the 'Iraqi blame game'. In 2003, in line with both Syria's public opinion and geo-strategic interests at the time, President Assad was the regions biggest critic of the US invasion. This lack of support led to the country being labeled a junior member of the axis of evil and having direct links to support of the Iraqi insurgency. In December 2004 President Bush urged Syria to 'stop the flow' of jihaid's across the border. In January 2005 the then Iraqi Minister of National Security accused Iran and Syria of being 'two naughty boy's' in being directly involved in assisting fighters transit into Iraq. The 2005 February 14th assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri simply turned up the heat of these accusations.

In Condoleezza Rice's June tour of the region this year, she accused Syria of 'directly supporting groups committed to violence in Iraq'; while a state department official warned that Syria 'was in the worlds crosshairs'. Meanwhile President Assad has consistently argued that it is impossible to completely control its border. Assad has also emphasized Syria's potential role as being 'key to the solution of Iraq's problems', saying that the country has done 'everything within their capacity which could preserve the stability of Iraq'.

Despite Secretary Rice's persistent accusations of Syria being 'out of step' with where the region is going, it has been cleared of a number of accusations. In April this year the Iraqi Survey group cleared Syria of possessing Iraqi WMD and in May the spokesman for Iraqi PM al-Jaafari admitted that Iraq 'doesn't think that Syria actively supports the transit of fighters', but instead is 'not doing enough to make sure there is effective control there'. This theme is now used regularly against the Syrians, as Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said in late May: "there are responsibilities of the Syrian government to hamper and prevent the flow of terrorists from coming across".

So this is the situation we come to today. The Syrian regime has gone from allowing the border to stay open in 2003, as reports in Damascus emerged of large numbers of fighters being transferred from the Iraqi consulate, to reacting to seal the border under relentless US pressure. The timing of the actual shift can be traced to the June 10th Ba'ath Party conference, where it is believed there was a change in personnel responsible for the Iraq file and that while official rhetoric would continue to highlight the legitimacy of resistance to an occupation, all possible measures were taken to fundamentally alter the identity of the borderland, to change it from a line in the sand to a manifestation of actual sovereignty. Yet time is running out, this month US Ambassador to Iraq Khalilzad threatened that ‘US patience is running out and that ‘all options are on the table’.

One option that is not on the table is co-operation with the Syrians in securing the border. This raises the question ‘is Syria is being set up to fail?’ and is the price of this set-up Iraqi and US casualties?

The Iraqi-Syrian border is a difficult and harsh environment, 376 miles in length stretching from the Turkish to the Jordanian tripoints. Since the borders creation it has never existed as a zone of separation despite the woeful relations between the two states. As Abdullah Taa’i reported on “Syria Comment”, 97% of residents in Syria’s Eastern provinces have relatives in Iraq. Before the 2003 invasion a black market economy across the border set up a network that’s worth was estimated at $2bn annually. Although today’s illegal trade is a fraction of pre-war times it still keeps afloat a desperately poor local economy, where people earning 10$ a month are easily tempted into smuggling people across into Iraq (CSIS estimated Saudis crossing the border to be willing to pay thousands of dollars). To fundamentally alter the dynamics of such a border requires a long-term policy with a cornerstone of communication between the respective sides.

Such communication is glaring in its absence. At a recent conference in Jordan concerning Iraqi border security, Donald Rumsfeld personally vetoed the attendance of the Syrian delegation. At a tactical level there is a complete absence of communication between the Syrian and US/Iraqi border patrol. Syrians bemoan this fact, as President Assad has asked 'who to cooperate with? If you go to the border there are only Syrian guards on our side. But if you look at the Iraqi side there is nobody'. Certainly the Iraqi's it seems are another one and 1/2 to two years away from total border guard deployment following Paul Bremmers ill-fatted decision to disband the Iraqi armed forces including a 35,000 strong border guard.

A simple incident highlights the absence of communication. When US forces closed al-Qaim crossing last year after taking fire from both sides of the border, they communicated the borders closure by using a catapult to send the message to the Syrian side of the border. What is more, it seems that a decision has made banning local level communication from Syrian border guard until state-to-state relations are improved.

Such an absence of communication has inevitably led to failures of joint-intelligence. The Syrians claim that over 100 incidents have been recorded of US/Iraqi border guards targeting Syrian forces by accident. In such incidents the Syrian report 6 killed and 17 injured, it is difficult to put precise estimates on the deaths caused by foreign fighters in Iraq, but surely the number is enough to warrant a tempering of ideological animosity in favor of technical realism.

If the US hopes to fully stabilize Iraq it needs to isolate the battlefield and cooperate with the country’s neighbors. This means formulating a coherent policy that can prove to the Syrians that all the US is seeking is ‘a change in behavior and not regime’ (C,Rice). The Syrian regime has neither the means nor the know-how to unilaterally secure its border with Iraq. What is required is a systems-approach to border security between Syria and Iraq/US, this encompasses regular meetings, exchanges, technical (night-vision ?) and consultative working groups based on the bedrock of a mutuality of interest. However for such a process to begin both sides must stop catapulting rhetoric at each other and come to recognize the primacy of negotiations.

The US Wants to Get Bashar by the throat and Shake Him Hard to See What Change Falls out of his Pockets

My interview with Bernard Gwertzman for the Council on Foreign Relations has now been posted on their webpage.

Syrian Expert Landis: Damascus Rife With Rumors on Whether UN’s Lebanese Investigation Implicates Syrian Leadership
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman
Author: Joshua Landis

September 21, 2005

Joshua M. Landis, a Syrian specialist on a Fulbright fellowship in Damascus, says the ongoing UN investigation led by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis into the possible involvement of the Syrian government in the assassination last February of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Harriri, has produced “great speculation” in Damascus on whether the top leadership of the Syrian government will become embroiled.

Noting that the United States is bringing great pressure on Syria to do more to stop infiltration of insurgents into Iraq, Landis said there is no real dialogue going on now between the two countries. He says, “People here feel there is nothing they can do to satisfy Washington—that Washington, constitutionally, is anti-dialogue with Syria.” He adds that the question everyone is asking is, “Are there some terms that they could actually offer the United States” to satisfy Washington?

Landis, who is an assistant professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and who publishes a blog called Syria Comment, was interviewed by phone from Damascus by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org.

On Monday in New York, there was a meeting with Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a group of Western and Arab leaders involved with the situation in Lebanon, in which Syria has been accused of having a role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harriri. After the meeting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “We’re interested in only the following with Syria: First of all, that there be full and complete cooperation with the Mehlis [UN] investigation and that the truth be found—whatever that truth is.” And of course, the special UN investigator Detlev Mehli has apparently arrived in Syria today, so what’s apt to happen? Is he going to have a real investigation in Syria?

Yes, I think he is. He’s scheduled talks with some people that are high up in the government, including Ghazi Kanaan, the interior minister, and with the person who was the head of intelligence in Lebanon [Rustom Ghazali]. He has a slate of some very important people that he’s going to talk to, and that’s just the beginning. He’s going to ask for more. He has forty more days to do his investigation.

So the big speculation in town is where this is all going to lead, and obviously, it’s going to lead to the Syrian government. How far up the line is he going to go? One question is, Will the president [Bashar Assad] be implicated somehow? Will Mehlis implicate someone in the president’s family, like Assef Shawkat, who is the brother-in-law of the president, or even Maher Assad, the president’s brother and the head of the presidential guard? If it was somebody in the immediate family, this would be a real crisis, because obviously the president could not sacrifice somebody like that. That’s the kind of talk that goes around Damascus. If it’s not somebody in the immediate family, then maybe that person could be sacrificed. The foreign diplomats here believe there’s not going to be complete conclusiveness in the end—that [opinion is] just based on other investigations in the past—and that this is going to leave the door open for wrangling.

Under what legal obligation do Syrian officials have to speak to Mehlis? Can’t they just take the equivalent of the U.S. Fifth Amendment, which protects witnesses from having to testify to anything that will incriminate him/herself?

Yes, I suppose they can just say, “We don’t do this; this is our sovereignty.” If an international court came to the United States, I’m sure the United States would do something similar. Many governments do not like to have international courts coming into their sovereignty. On the other hand, Syria wants to go along with the process. The Syrians have maintained they are innocent from the beginning and that the assassination of Rafik Hariri was not devised by them. In a sense, they need to come clean. Also, they do not want to be completely isolated. Clearly, America is going to put pressure on them. Since Syria was the major Arab country opposed to America’s involvement in Iraq, relations have gone from bad to worse.

Bashar [Assad] is not with the Americans; he stood against them. He said it was a big mistake for Americans to invade Iraq and he compares it with the Balfour Declaration [The Balfour Declaration, issued by the British foreign secretary during World War I, offered Jews a homeland in Palestine], with the design of taking over a chunk of land in the Middle East. He believes that to have a foreign power take a big chunk of the Middle East was something Arabs could not stand by.

So now the U.S. is pressing Bashar to stop the foreign insurgents from going into Iraq. And Syria officially says they’ve done all they can, but no one believes them in the United States.

Syria has done the easy things: It has put several thousand troops on the 350-mile border with Iraq; it has built this big sand dune so that vehicles cannot cross the border, but people are smuggled in. And Syria does not have any night-vision goggles or night equipment; it has asked the United States for them. There are of course, no American guards on the other side of the border or Iraqi guards along the 350 miles. So Syrians are doing the complete job of guarding this border. And America wants them to do it and doesn’t want to pay them for it. They want them to do it for free, as part of their duty as an international player.

What I think is more important is the issue of visas. The United States wants Syria, in effect, to establish a homeland security department. Syria is now the one Arab state allows every Arab into its country without a visa. They show their passport at the border and they can come in. There are 5 million Arab tourists a year to Syria.

Of course, if the Syrians really wanted to, they could crack down inside Syria on the people running the insurgent program, right?

This is what America wants. The major way to do that is by seeing who the people are who are coming in here, because Syria says it doesn’t know. There are five million Arabs coming to this country every year. Syria doesn’t know who they are. The United States wants the Syrians to do what America does to the Arabs coming in to the United States—do backgrounds, get the mother and father, and post this information back to Saudi Arabia, because we believe about 80 percent of these mujahadeen are coming from the Gulf. If you could get the information back to Saudi Arabia and get good coordination with the Americans and Saudis and so forth, then you could find out if these mujahadeens are bad guys or businessmen or whatever they are. Theoretically, Saudi Arabia could issue some kind of exit visas, because Syria gives exit visas. And that way the Saudis would know who is leaving their country and they could do a background check and share it with the Syrians.

The question about how people are getting through Syria is one of the toughest to answer. America says that there are training camps. The Syrians deny this. We really don’t know the truth of this, but the United States has not put anybody on TV from the Iraqi side to say, “Yes, that is the truth.” We really don’t have the evidence on that. It is easy, on the other hand, to sneak into Iraq. If I wanted to get into Iraq, I could do it. I know many people from Arab tribes, who are here in Damascus, who make their living by smuggling. And the tribes here really see themselves as Iraqis in many ways. A major tribal district is in Ramadi; the big tribes in the east, like the Shammar and Agebap, are really Iraqi tribes. The center of these tribes is in Iraq, but they’ve washed over the Syrian border into Syria.

And those people really feel Iraqi—they speak the same dialect, they have the same customs, and so forth, and they feel connected to Saddam Hussein. In 1991, when Syria sided with George H.W. Bush against Iraq, there was a little intifada in Abu Kamal, which is the major city along the border. And the people went out on the streets and demonstrated saying, “Long live Saddam Hussein; long live Iraq.” The Syrian army sent out some divisions out there and arrested a whole bunch of people for doing this. This was the situation in 1991, and I’ve asked many people who I’ve met from Abu Kamal if the people are sending fighters to help [the insurgency] and they say, “Of course we are, because these are our people, these are our tribes, and they’re being killed.”

Let’s go to a question you discussed in your op-ed in the New York Times last week: How do develop a relationship that’s satisfactory to both Syria and the United States? What should the United States do that it’s not doing now?

There’s a big clash. The Syrians feel America should not be in Iraq and that they’ve been pushed out of Lebanon—the government of course feels like it lost a big asset being pushed out. And of course, you can see the result of that today. The Lebanese have turned very anti-Syrian and they’re helping with the Mehlis report. The Christians in Lebanon are talking about how Israel would be a much better partner than Syria and that they should make peace with Israel, run their commerce through Israel and into Jordan, and then sell all their all trans-Arab trade to the Gulf through Israel.

It’s hard to imagine Hezbollah and the other Muslim groups would allow that.

Hezbollah is the major roadblock. And here we have Resolution 1559 that aims to disarm Hezbollah and make the Lebanese army the only force in the land. And if that were accomplished, then what would keep Lebanon from signing a deal with Israel?

Israel and Lebanon were ready to sign a peace treaty in 1983 after the 1982 Israeli invasion, which Syria blocked Beirut from signing?

Yes, they were about to sign in 1983. The Christians that were pushing for that then are still pushing now. That’s something that could happen. The Lebanese have said that they won’t go off and sign an independent deal without Syria and a resolution of the Golan Heights issue with Israel, but they could change their tune.

Syria has nothing going on with Israel right now, right?

Nothing. Syria is totally isolated. Bashar Assad had visits lined up to go to Austria and to go to Brazil, but both of those were stopped several months ago because of U.S. pressure on those two countries to not greet him. The Turkish Prime Minister [Recep Tayyip Erdogan] was supposed to come here a few months ago and he ultimately had to apologize and not come, but all the papers were saying it was because of U.S. pressure. The Europeans are not opening their doors to the Syrians.

How does Syria get out of this?

I don’t think they can get out of this in the short term. What I think America wants to do is get Syria by the throat; they have to wait for the Mehlis report to be thoroughly investigated and for the court case to begin. I think the United States will try and get European partners to do what they did in Libya, which is direct sanctions not against the people—they won’t turn him into Saddam Hussein or Arafat. What they’ll do is they’ll turn him into [Libyan leader Muammar] el-Qaddafi. Instead of putting sanctions against the people, they’ll stop all international flights—I think this is what they’re moving towards—and pull all the European ambassadors so there really isn’t anyone for Bashar to talk to.

I think they’re going to try and get him by the throat and shake him really hard and see what kind of change falls out of his pocket. Pressure has worked so far; they’ve gotten Syria to withdraw all their forces from Lebanon. That’s a major achievement. They’ve gotten Syria to work with the United States, or at least to not make trouble in Palestine. The whole [Israeli] Gaza withdrawal went very smoothly and there weren’t any attacks by any of the extremist groups. And that’s because Bashar met with all the Palestinian [Authority] leaders and he backed them. He said, “You have my blessings.”

Bashar asked them not to cause trouble in Gaza?

Yes. He met with [Palestinian Authority President] Abu Mazen and [Prime Minister Ahmed] Qurei and brought the heads of the local, more extreme groups, like Islamic Jihad and so forth that have representatives in Damascus, all together in a room and he made an understanding between them in order to show that he was willing to work with them. Of course, he has not kicked those people out of Damascus, which is something that America wants him to do. For Americans, that’s provocation. But he could use his power there further down the line if there are withdrawals in the West Bank; all that could be reactivated.

From the outside, you wonder why Bashar doesn’t make a bigger effort to really improve relations with the United States instead of antagonizing Washington.

I think he thinks he is. He’s maintained that he wants dialogue; he’s maintained that he wants peace with Israel; he’s pulled out of Lebanon; he’s said that he will go along with policing. I think he feels he is making these concessions. Now of course, the dialogue has not always been warm. But the people here feel there is nothing they can do to satisfy Washington—that Washington, constitutionally, is anti-dialogue with Syria. And this is the question that everybody is debating: Are there some terms that they could actually offer the United States that would be the equivalent to Qaddafi’s?

On the other hand, the Americans have left the door open for bargaining. Because if we look what Rice is saying—she said about two months ago, “We want to change the regime’s behavior, not change the regime”—those were very important words that we hadn’t heard clearly from the American administration. Rice has taken a very cautious line. She’s given every indication that they don’t necessarily want to change the regime here. And it would be very frightening, I think, for them to contemplate that because they have absolutely zero alternatives. The Americans know almost nothing about Syria and they don’t have any clue what would happen here should the regime collapse.

Has the American ambassador returned to Damascus?

Nobody is expecting the ambassador anytime soon. We’re looking forward to another half year—it could be more than that—of isolation. There is no dialogue.

No Deal for Syria: The US Feels this is a Chance to Get Rid of the Regime

Robin Wright of the Washington Post explains that Syria is looking for a deal with Washington to protect it from the worst aspects of the Mehlis investigation. The Americans and French are not willing to make such a deal, she explains.

Michael Young, quoted in the Guardian, explains that there will be no deal because, "I think the Americans and French basically feel this is a chance to get rid of the Syrian regime."

Here are the articles:

Syria Seeking Deal In U.N. Hariri Probe
Investigation Into Killing Deepens

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 23, 2005; Page A15

Syria is trying to negotiate a deal to prevent punitive action by the United Nations if, as is widely expected, the Damascus government is linked to the Feb. 14 assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister, according to U.S. and European officials.

Over the past month, the government of President Bashar Assad has been inquiring about the potential for a deal, roughly equivalent to what Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi did to end tough international sanctions imposed for his country's role in the 1988 midair bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the officials said. Gaddafi eventually agreed to hand over two intelligence officials linked to the bombing for an international trial, a move that began Libya's political rehabilitation.

But the United States, France and U.N. officials have all recently signaled to Syria that they will not compromise on the completion of a full investigation into the slaying of Lebanese reformer Rafiq Hariri -- or subsequent legal steps, wherever the probe leads, the officials said.

The U.N. investigation moved this week to Syria, where Detlev Mehlis, the chief investigator, interviewed the two most recent Syrian intelligence chiefs in Lebanon and their aides in the probe into the bombing that killed Hariri and 19 others as they drove through Beirut, the capital.

Since the arrest last month of four top Lebanese security officials with close ties to Damascus, Syria has been concerned, said a U.S. official familiar with the overtures. Mehlis, who has taken the investigation far deeper, far faster than initially expected, "is coming up with stuff that is making people in Damascus nervous," the official said. Like others, the official would discuss the matter only on the condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity involved.

Overtures from Damascus have included vague suggestions of a willingness to hand over certain unidentified security individuals in exchange for guarantees that any subsequent trial would not try to point fingers any higher in Syria, according to several Western officials familiar with Syria's moves.

On Monday, a senior State Department official said there was "universal support" for a fully independent investigation "unfettered by any attempt to influence the result. The outcome must follow the facts where they lead." He spoke after the first meeting at the United Nations of a core group of nations working to help Lebanon end years of political domination by Syria.

The investigation has been facilitated by an unexpected flow of information from Lebanese security sources as well as at least two well-placed Syrian officials, according to Western sources familiar with the probe. Some have been moved to Europe, the sources said.

For Assad, a former ophthalmologist who inherited power after the death of his father in 2000, the stakes of the U.N. investigation are high -- and extend well beyond the probe of the Hariri killing.

"Bashar is moving toward the moment of truth, the defining moment of his presidency," said a senior European diplomat familiar with the U.N. probe. "The Mehlis report is due on October 25, and if he reports that this goes all the way to the top of Damascus, there will be a political earthquake."

If the U.N. investigation does name Syrian officials, Assad will be under pressure to arrest and try the alleged perpetrators -- or face international condemnation and punitive actions such as economic or diplomatic sanctions, say U.S. and European officials.

U.S. and European officials are already discussing a new U.N. resolution to ensure that anyone cited or indicted as a result of the U.N. investigation is formally held to account. "If the investigations lead to evidence of the involvement of a high-ranking official, [he] should pay for it, no matter how high-ranking," the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said in an interview published yesterday in the Arabic daily al-Hayat.

Solana, who participated in the core group talks with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday, also said i