Throughout the bloody years of their
Civil War (1975-1990), the Lebanese refused to admit that they
were responsible for all the blood being shed around them. They
were the killers, and they were the victims. They always had a
perfect scapegoat to explain the craziness around them: the
Israelis, the Syrians, the Palestinians, the Americans—anybody
was responsible, except the Lebanese! “It can’t be us” was the
term often echoed in Beirut when fighting became very brutal.
And today, the situation is very similar in Iraq. The Iraqis are
refusing to admit that they are responsible for all the blood
being shed around them. They too, have the perfect scapegoat:
the Iranians, the Israelis, the Syrians, the Americans—anybody
except the Iraqis themselves. The truth is that Iraq is in
shambles because some of the Iraqis, Saddam’s leftovers and Abu
Musaab al-Zarqawi’s terrorists, do not want Iraq to become a
pro-Western democracy. Syria has nothing to do with the trouble
making, yet it happens to be at the cross-roads, and happens to
share very long borders with Iraq (605 km). The number of
eloquent Syrians who can convincingly defend its stance and
plead innocent is very limited, and given the fact that Damascus
is still ruled by the Baath Party, its even easier to accuse
Syria of working with ex-Iraqi Baathist officials.
-Syrian cooperation
Syria’s cooperation in trying to maintain a stable Iraq can be
seen by the sand wall it created along the border to keep cars
from crossing, along with the control and observation centers
dotted on the border to monitor personnel. Similar centers have
been done by the Americans and Iraqis on their side of the
border, and they have very sophisticated monitoring devices and
technology—certainly more advanced than those of the Syrians.
Near Hirri, a small village on the Syrian-Iraqi border, the
Syrians have built an earthen ramp to prevent cars from
crossing. According to Anwar al-Bunni, a human rights activist
and opposition figure in Syria, who usually has few good things
to say about his government, confirmed that the regime has
indeed arrested those calling for jihad in Iraq. In the
conservative city of Hama, 16 preachers who ordered their
followers to fight the Americans in Iraq were arrested in
September 2004, Bunni said. If anybody were to blame for not
catching people, it would be the Iraqis and Americans.
For its part, the USA has given a
lot of contradicting signals to Damascus. In an interview with
CNN in January 2005, Secretary of State Condolezza Rice said:
“The Syrians have not been as helpful as they should be.” Her
calls were echoed by Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and his
Defense Minister Hazem al-Shaalan, who fired accusations against
Damascus in December 2004-January 2005 accusing Syria of arming
fighters to cross the border into Iraq, and revealing that an
Iraqi woman, trained by Iraqis in Syria, had entered his office
to assassinate him, but failed in her task. The Iraqis say that
Syria has up to $3 billion, stashed away from the Saddam Era in
Syrian banks. The British journalist Patrick Seale wrote an
article last week, saying that according to a source at the U.S.
National War College, an American strike against Syria nearly
took place at the end of 2004, but was delayed by the US Army.
Seale pointed out that a future attack might be carried out
either by the US Navy or Air Force, with no ground invasion.
Earlier, in December 2004, three analysts from the Foundation
for the Defense of Democracies (DFF), published an article in
The Washington Times entitled "Syria's Murderous Role." Then,
William Kristol, chairman of the Project for the New American
Century, another neo-con, wrote: "We could bomb Syrian military
facilities, we could go across the border in force to stop
infiltration, we could occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern
Syria, a few miles from the border we could covertly help, or
overtly support, the Syrian opposition.”
United Press International (UPI)
quoted a former senior US official saying: “I think there is
enough fire under this smoke to justify such action” then added,
“Syria is complicit in the (anti-US) insurgency up to its
eyeballs.” The same article claimed that according to another
unnamed official, Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi has an al-Qaeda network
in Damascus, discovered in the summer of 2004. This
hard-to-believe accusation lacks any accuracy, since Syria is a
declared enemy of al-Qaeda, due to its secularism and declared
opposition to militant Islam. It was none other than the Syrian
Intelligence that worked closely with the FBI in 2001 to track
down members of al-Qaeda in Europe, after the 9-11 attacks.
Another story making headlines among American neo-cons is an
interview with Mu’ayyad Ahmad Yassin, a former officer in
Saddam’s Army who leads a resistance group in Falluja called
Mohammad’s Army. Captured in Falluja, he was interviewed in
December 2004 on the US-funded Arabic satellite channel
al-Hurra, and said that he got permission from Saddam (while the
latter was in hiding after his outset in April 2003), to go to
Syria, meet with an intelligence officer, and request
assistance. When asked if the Syrians responded, Yassin said he
did not know! While the story is being used to magnify Syrian
involvement, it actually proves the opposite. If anything, the
interview proves that the USA and Iraq cannot give hard evidence
against Syria. Another “senior” unnamed CIA official said that
intelligence officers in Syria wanted to continue supporting the
insurrection in Iraq and bullied anyone who wanted to cooperate
with the Americans. Although this endangered Syria, it
nevertheless provided them with millions of dollars from arms
deals, the CIA official said. He adds: “We should send a cruise
missile into south-side Damascus and blow up the mukhabarat
(intelligence) headquarters off the map. We should first make
clear to them that they are the target.” Many in Syria doubt if
these quoted officials, spreading anti-Syrian propaganda in the
mass media, actually exist. If the USA is openly hostile towards
Syria, why don’t these “officials” come out and reveal their
identity? They are not criticizing an ally like Great Britain,
and being shy about it, but a country they plan on invading!
Many in Syria believe that no such officials exist, but are
actually trial balloons for the Bush administration, used only
to intimidate Syria and pressure her to cooperate better with
the Americans in Iraq.
There are disagreements among US
policy-makers on how to best deal with Syria. Richard Armitage
gave an interview to Egyptian TV and was asked: “The Syrians are
saying that you don’t have enough evidence?” He replied, “In
some cases, they are right!” When visiting Damascus in January
2005, Armitage said: “Syria has made some real improvements in
recent months on border security.” Martha Kessler, the CIA
expert on Syria, said: “I don’t think the administration can
afford to de-stabilize another country in the region” and
pointed out that repeatedly, Syria had extended a friendly hand
to the USA, since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, only to be
shunned by Washington. According to her, Syria had offered to
station US forces on its soil before the US invasion of Iraq in
March 2003. The Americans cannot afford war because a war-torn
Syria would mean zero control on Hizbullah in Lebanon, igniting
a war with Israel that could bring the entire region into chaos.
Expressing a very different view from the US mainstream, she
said: “Damascus is not the heartbeat of this Iraqi insurgent
movement.”
Kessler’s argument is one of the
finest that I have read to date, written by a CIA official since
the war began in 2003. The truth is that the Iraqis are living
in a combination of chaos and fear, and when this prevails,
people search for scapegoats to explain their misery. Joshua
Landis, a professor at Oklahoma University, writes that he met
an Iraqi judge passing through Syria to Iraq, who believed
Syria’s role in the uprising was central. This Iraqi man
explained that suicide bombings were not part of Iraqi culture
or history, and that Iraqis had never engaged in senseless
killing in the name of Islam. It can be concluded, according to
him, that these attacks were being imported from some nearby
country with a history of suicide bombing; “committed and
directed by foreigners who were importing their violent and
twisted ways (to Iraq),” a clear reference to Syria. Echoing the
Lebanese in 1975-1990, he said: “It can’t be us!” This Iraqi
gentleman has not read his history well, and seemingly forgets
that Syria, does not have a history of suicide bombings, or
terror attacks. It is in Iraq where King Faysal II was slain,
along with 20 members of his royal family (women, children, and
pets included) in 1958. That same year, it was his uncle Prince
Abd al-Illah whose body was crucified and mutilated at the
Ministry of Defense, and his Prime Minister Nuri al-Said whose
body was dragged on the streets of Baghdad by an automobile
until it crumbled into pieces. It was in Iraq where General Abd
al-Karim Qasim was shot in 1966, and where his corpse was shown
on Iraqi Television. The Iraqis, cultured, sophisticated, and
refined as many of them may be, are nevertheless very bloody in
their dealings with one another. Thousands today are armed
throughout Iraq, roaming the streets by night, looking for
trouble and yearning to pick a fight with a traditional enemy,
be it the Shiites, the Kurds, the Sunnis, or the Americans. They
had been forced to live in superficial harmony for more than
40-years of military rule, and once law and order collapsed, so
did their civilized dealings with one another. This is identical
to how the Lebanese had to live with one another, often
unwillingly, and then erupted into violence once the state
crumbled in 1975. In looking back through history, we can blame
nobody but the Lebanese themselves for the outbreak of war in
1975, and can blame nobody but the Iraqis themselves for their
current status quo. The Syrians are innocent.