Syria caught in Iraqi blame game

By Sami Moubayed

DAMASCUS - Throughout the bloody years of their civil war (1975-90), 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 exceptionally 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 a shambles because some of the Iraqis, Saddam Hussein's leftovers and Abu Musab 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 crossroads, and happens to share very long borders with Iraq (605 kilometers). 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 Ba'ath Party, it's even easier to accuse Syria of working with ex-Iraqi Ba'athist 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 established 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. 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 last September, Bunni said. If anybody were to blame for not catching people, it would be the Iraqis and Americans.

For its part, the US has given a lot of contradictory signals to Damascus. In an interview with CNN in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza 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 and January 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 US$3 billion stashed away from the Saddam era in Syrian banks.

British journalist Patrick Seale wrote an article last week saying that according to a source at the US National War College, a US 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, three analysts from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies published an article in the Washington Times titled "Syria's murderous role". Then, William Kristol, chairman of the Project for the New American Century and another neo-conservative, 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 quoted a former senior US official as 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, Zarqawi has an al-Qaeda network in Damascus, discovered last summer. This hard-to-believe accusation lacks any accuracy, since Syria is a declared enemy of al-Qaeda, because of the country's secularism and declared opposition to militant Islam. It was none other than Syrian intelligence that worked closely with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2001 to track down members of al-Qaeda in Europe, after the September 11 attacks.

Another story making headlines among Washington's neo-conservatives is an interview with Mu'ayyad Ahmad Yassin, a former officer in Saddam's army who led a resistance group in Fallujah called Mohammad's Army. Captured in Fallujah, he was interviewed last December on the US-funded Arabic satellite channel al-Hurra, and said that he received permission from Saddam (while the latter was in hiding after his ouster 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 US and Iraq cannot give hard evidence against Syria. Another "senior" unnamed Central Intelligence Agency (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 US. Although this endangered Syria, it nevertheless provided them with millions of dollars from arms deals, the CIA official said. He added, "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 whether these quoted officials spreading anti-Syrian propaganda in the mass media actually exist. If the US is openly hostile toward 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 it to cooperate better with the Americans in Iraq.

There are disagreements among US policymakers on how best to deal with Syria. Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage gave an interview to Egyptian TV and was told: "The Syrians are saying that you don't have enough evidence." He replied, "In some cases, they are right." When visiting Damascus last month, Armitage said, "Syria has made some real improvements in recent months on border security."

Martha Kessler, a CIA expert on Syria, said, "I don't think the administration can afford to destabilize another country in the region," and pointed out that repeatedly, Syria had extended a friendly hand to the US, 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 Hezbollah 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 persuasive, 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 could 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 1975-90, 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 are, 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 Shi'ites, 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.

Dr Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst. He is the author of Damascus Between Democracy and Dictatorship 1948-1958 (Maryland 2000).