Opinion Editorials, October 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
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Disentangling the US Iraq policy from its pro-Israel stand
By Michael Jansen
Jordan Times, Thursday, October 30, 2003
UNWILLING AND unable to admit that the resistance campaign in Iraq is being conducted by Iraqi patriots, the Bush administration continues to blame attacks on “dead enders” of the ousted regime, “foreign terrorists”, and “Al Qaeda”. This is true also of statements allocating responsibility for Monday's blitz on Baghdad.
The alleged involvement of a Syrian in a failed car bombing at the Jadriya police station has revived US charges that Damascus is backing the growing insurgency in Iraq. This is nothing new. Syria has been a target of the US blame-game since Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld complained last March that Damascus was providing the Iraqi army with night-vision goggles and allowing foreign fighters to cross from its territory into Iraq.
Although Damascus has rejected any connection with developments in Iraq and cooperated with Washington by taking measures to seal its long border with neighbouring Iraq and sending back fugitives the US wanted, Washington has not given Syria its due. Instead, pro-Israel neoconservatives in the administration and Zionist-influenced congressmen have kept up a stream of false accusations against Syria with the aim of forcing it to end its opposition to Israel's occupation of Arab territory and acquiesce in the US occupation of Iraq. However, the disinformation campaign about Syrian backing for the Iraqi resistance received a sharp knock yesterday through the publication, in The Washington Post, of an article by Vernon Loeb from Sinjar, in western Iraq. Loeb reported that US military commanders say that “there is no evidence from human intelligence sources or radar surveillance aircraft indicating that significant numbers of foreign fighters are crossing into Iraq [from Syria] illegally”.
Damascus is unlikely to support ousted Baathist opponents of the US occupation or Syrian Islamists involved in the resistance. The ruling Syrian and Iraqi branches of the Baath Party were such bitter rivals that Baghdad backed a violent revolt staged by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood during the late 1970s and early 1980s. After Damascus crushed the rebellion and uprooted the Brotherhood, in 1981-82, Iraq and Saudi Arabia gave sanctuary to senior and rank and file members of the movement. The radicals went to Iraq and the moderates to Saudi Arabia. Therefore, if Syrian Islamists are involved in the Iraqi resistance, it is likely that they have been based in Iraq and Saudi Arabia or are dissidents with connections to the Brotherhood and other pan-Islamist groupings.
The most serious argument against Syrian involvement with Syrian Islamists is existential. The last thing the secular Baathist government in Damascus would want to see would be the emergence of an Islamist regime in Iraq which could try to export its system of governance to Syria.
Unwilling to accept responsibility for the rising level of violence in Iraq, the Bush administration has to blame someone else. Syria is an easy candidate. Few US citizens know anything about Syria and what they know is likely to be negative due to the carefully calculated campaign of misinformation waged by the Zionists and Israel for decades. Thanks to this propaganda effort, the Bush administration felt free to blame Syria for Israel's recent bombing of a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus in response to a Palestinian suicide bombing in Israel. Several members of Congress even declared their support for Israel's action, the first Israeli assault on Syrian territory for 30 years.
Israel's attack more or less coincided with the adoption by the House of Representatives of The Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. The bill, sponsored by 76 out of 100 senators, will certainly pass in the Senate. But the law's implementation could be delayed if the White House decides to act on an attached waver which would allow the president to decide that US national security interests could be compromised if the act's provisions are carried out at present. The bill proposes that the president choose two types of sanctions out of six if Syria fails to withdraw its troops from Lebanon, dismantle alleged weapons of mass destruction and end support of “terrorist” groups.
The sanctions include downgrading diplomatic relations from the ambassadorial level, reducing US exports to Syria, cutting US investments in the country and freezing Syrian assets in the US. Since the US and Syria are not major trading partners, US investments in Syria are very small and Syrian deposits in US banks are minute, the economic impact of sanctions on either country would be minimal. The downgrading of diplomatic relations would have little political consequence because senior officials in the embassies of the two countries do not make the policies of their governments.
There is no doubt, however, that the passage of the act by the Senate could put pressure on the president to make his choice of sanctions for implementation in this election year. But his would be a bad idea. The imposition of sanctions on Syria could negatively affect the so-called US “war on terror” because Syria has been cooperative in helping to identify and apprehend Al Qaeda operatives. Punishing Syria could also prompt its ally, the Lebanese Hizbollah movement, to step up military pressure on Israel along the Lebanese-Israel border and encourage Damascus to stir up trouble for the US occupation regime in Iraq.
Syria is not without options. Meanwhile, indulging in the blame-game is harming the Bush administration's efforts to impose security in Iraq. While accusing Syria, Saddam “loyalists” and “foreign “terrorists” of waging a violent campaign against US forces in Iraq, Washington ignores the real nature of the Iraqi resistance. In an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, Dr Mustafa Alani, a scholar with the Royal United Services Institute in London, agrees that Iraq is now a fertile ground for foreign Islamist “jihadis” to pursue their campaign against the US. But he made the valid point that these fighters also require the “close support” of Iraqis to operate in their country. This means the provision of accommodation, funding, weapons, explosives and vehicles for bomb attacks. While US and British spokesmen argue that suicide bombings have been almost exclusively used by Islamist groups outside Iraq, Alani said Iraqis were quite capable of adopting and adapting this tactic to their own circumstances.
Dr Salman Al Jumali, a professor of political science at Baghdad University who has identified fighters killed in resistance operations, says foreign fighters do not even play a major role in the resistance. He told Al Jazeera that the “vast majority of [resistance fighters] are [Iraqi] Islamists — I mean Sunni and Shiite Muslims — who are fighting for the sole purpose of pushing America out of Iraq”. He says that secular nationalists, including Christians and Turkomen, are also taking part in the struggle.
This being the case, it would behove the Bush administration to disentangle its Iraq policy from its pro-Israel stand on the Arab-Israeli dispute and to define correctly and deal realistically with problems it is facing in Iraq. Blaming Syria only fans the flames of Arab anger and increases the determination of Iraqi groups to demonstrate they are part of a national resistance by mounting ever more spectacular operations against the US occupation regime.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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