Syria: The US military has been increasingly making the case for air strikes against Syria, writes Tom Clonan
Despite President Assad's announcement at the weekend of a partial timetable for withdrawal of the Syrian army from Lebanon, the US will continue to put pressure on Syria to withdraw all of its forces, including its intelligence apparatus. The US will also insist that Syria's proxy forces in Lebanon - including an estimated 25,000 Hizbullah armed volunteers - disarm prior to Lebanon's May elections.
This process began in earnest last September with the adoption by the UN of Security Council Resolution 1559, which demands the complete withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon. Significantly, the resolution also demands the immediate disbanding of all non-government militias in Lebanon - a pointed reference to Hizbullah.
Sources in the US defence and intelligence community indicate that Lebanon is being used to lever Ba'athist leader Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria.
Insiders say that a change of regime in Syria is seen by both the Pentagon and the White House as crucial to defeating the Sunni-led insurgency in neighbouring Iraq. Earlier this year, US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld said he believed that Syria was partially to blame for the bloody resistance in Iraq. He stated: "No one predicted the level of the insurgency as it is today. Partly it's a matter of what the Syrians and the Iranians are doing."
In his state of the union address in February, President Bush also criticised the role Damascus was playing in supporting the insurgency in Iraq and for its support of other terror groups within Syria and Lebanon.
These statements echo claims made late last year by John Shaw, US deputy under-secretary of defence, that hundreds of tonnes of high-explosive RDX and HMX plastic explosives had been smuggled from the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility in Iraq to terrorist bases and facilities in Syria and Lebanon. Mr Shaw alleged that these Iraqi-manufactured stocks of high explosives were being pre-deployed to terrorist redoubts in Syria in advance of the US invasion of Iraq for the purposes of insurgency.
In the light of these claims, it is interesting to note that in the vast majority of cases the explosives and weapons used in the current wave of suicide-bombings, rocket attacks and shootings within Iraq are of the type manufactured by the Iraqi military at facilities such as Al-Qaqaa.
Yesterday's killing near Baghdad of two US security contractors in a roadside bomb involving the use of such ordnance may further raise with the US Centcom the question of Syria's suspected involvement in the current resistance as a safe haven for Iraqi insurgents and their caches of weapons and explosives.
Such circumstantial evidence may well have informed President Bush's coded reference in his state of the union address to regime change within Syria by pro-democracy reformers. However, unlike in Iraq, a large-scale US ground operation or intervention in Syria will most likely not trigger a change of regime. Rather, a twin-track approach is being used to squeeze President Assad from power. Along with political demands to quit Lebanon, the US military is increasingly making the case for air strikes on Syria.
Centcom's deputy director of operations for Iraq, Brig-Gen Douglas Raaberg, has indicated that the Pentagon will lobby the White House for permission to initiate a policy of hot pursuit of terror suspects into Syria from Iraq along with enhanced "force protection measures". In the current scenario, this might well mean air strikes on suspected terrorist targets within Syria.
Bashar al-Assad's grip on power within Syria is tenuous at best. His authority in Damascus is predicated on his perceived status as a hard man underpinned by support from the predominantly Allawite Syrian military leadership. His rule would be directly jeopardised if he were to withdraw his troops from Lebanon overnight. Aside from the public humiliation of such a move, Syria's ailing economy is highly dependent on revenues - up to €2 billion annually - expropriated from Lebanon. In order to avoid a consequent loss of face and a catastrophic loss of revenue, Assad has dragged his feet on withdrawing his forces from Lebanon.
The recent show of solidarity with Assad orchestrated by Hizbullah in Lebanon will have had little effect on America's demands on Syria. Suspected to have been responsible for the 1983 truck-bombing which killed 241 US marines in Beirut, Hizbullah is still regarded by the US as a terrorist organisation. This view was reiterated by US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice last week. The State Department also repeated its demand that Syria withdraw all its forces and surrogates from its neighbour's territory prior to Lebanon's May elections in order not to "taint" the results.
Syria's remaining troops in Lebanon, consisting of a mechanised division headquarters, an armoured brigade, two mechanised brigades and a number of special forces units, are now concentrated in the Bekaa valley. With limited and outdated air defences, they are well within range of US air assets in the region. These include two aircraft carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf along with US air force bases at Incirlik in Turkey and Aviano in Italy. The US has also deployed more than 300 vertical-launch systems for Tomahawk cruise missiles to the region.
In the light of these circumstances, if Assad continues to procrastinate on US demands, the countdown to the May elections in Lebanon may also consist of a countdown to air or missile strikes against targets in Syria.
Dr Tom Clonan is a retired army officer. He lectures in the school of media at the DIT.