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News :: International Relations |
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Bush Vetoes Syria War Plan |
Current rating: 0 |
by The Guardian via Joe Futrelle
Email: futrelle (nospam) shout.net (verified) |
14 Apr 2003
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The White House has privately ruled out suggestions that the US should go to war against Syria following its military success in Iraq, and has blocked preliminary planning for such a campaign in the Pentagon, the Guardian learned yesterday. |
Julian Borger in Washington, Michael White, Ewen MacAskill in Kuwait City and Nicholas Watt
Tuesday April 15, 2003
The Guardian
The White House has privately ruled out suggestions that the US should go to war against Syria following its military success in Iraq, and has blocked preliminary planning for such a campaign in the Pentagon, the Guardian learned yesterday.
In the past few weeks, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ordered contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, his undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, and William Luti, the head of the Pentagon's office of special plans, were asked to put together a briefing paper on the case for war against Syria, outlining its role in supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein, its links with Middle East terrorist groups and its allegedly advanced chemical weapons programme. Mr Feith and Mr Luti were both instrumental in persuading the White House to go to war in Iraq.
Mr Feith and other conservatives now playing important roles in the Bush administration, advised the Israeli government in 1996 that it could "shape its strategic environment... by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria".
However, President George Bush, who faces re-election next year with two perilous nation-building projects, in Afghanistan and Iraq, on his hands, is said to have cut off discussion among his advisers about the possibility of taking the "war on terror" to Syria.
"The talk about Syria didn't go anywhere. Basically, the White House shut down the discussion," an intelligence source in Washington told the Guardian.
Faced with rising apprehension over the prospect of a new conflict, Tony Blair also offered categorical assurances to anxious MPs yesterday that Britain and the US had "no plans whatsoever" to invade Iraq's neighbour. |
See also:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,937105,00.html
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Comments
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Perhaps |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
14 Apr 2003
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Maybe Bush is just holding off on starting another war to save it for a little closer to next year's election. One look at the polling data at this link indicates war is the only thing keeping his approval ratings above 50%. It sure as hell isn't his handling of the economy:
http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/MyHTML3.gif
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The View From The Hard Right |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
15 Apr 2003
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You have to take this with a large grain of salt, as with everything from WorldNet Daily, but there is still quite a bit of saber-rattling going on.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32066
Is it mere rhetoric? Time will tell, but I would not be reassured by the statements in the Guardian. |
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Re: Bush Vetoes Syria War Plan |
by Joe Futrelle
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
15 Apr 2003
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Maybe so, but the Guardian article is reporting on more recent developments than the ones fueling all the press speculation over the past couple of days, of which the article you repost is an example. That's why I thought it was worth reposting ... |
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Re: Bush Vetoes Syria War Plan |
by gehrig
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
16 Apr 2003
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"President George Bush, who faces re-election next year with two perilous nation-building projects"
... one of which he's already apparently forgotten about and which is busily becoming what it had been before.
@%< |
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World Media Ask: Why Syria? |
by BBC Monitoring
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Apr 2003
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The world's press is querying US accusations that Syria harbours Iraqi fugitives and is developing weapons of mass destruction, with some seeing sinister motives behind Washington's stance.
"Now that the US is nearly through with 'regime change' in Iraq, Syria could be the next on queue for gunboat diplomacy," says Kenya's Standard.
Indonesia's Koran Tempo is convinced that Washington is not making idle threats against Syria and is intending to launch a military attack.
"Washington will isolate Syria, strangle it with embargoes and force it to disarm," it writes.
"When it is powerless, the United States can 'liberate' the Syrian people by dropping bomb after bomb on Damascus.
"Prepare for a sequel to US-style slaughter."
Germany's Die Welt is not so sure:
"Political Washington is threatening but the military is silent. That shows that there are no operational plans in progress."
Another German paper, Die Tageszeitung, thinks US domestic politics will determine whether or not the US attacks Syria.
"If Bush's re-election in 18 months should be endangered by the poor economic situation, his advisers could consider a new confrontation useful to get the voters back behind the commander-in-chief in the White House," it says.
What weapons?
Several papers give little credence to the US reports that Damascus is giving sanctuary to fleeing Iraqi officials and has weapons of mass destruction.
Pakistan's Nawa-i-waqt describes the claims as "totally unjustified".
"Syria is neither a threat for the US nor does it have any weapons of mass destruction," it says.
For the Irish Times, "it is stretching credibility to believe the Syrian government would knowingly give sanction to leading figures from the vanquished regime".
The Kenya Times suggests the US is engaged in "sabre-rattling".
"As for the weapons of mass destruction Syria supposedly harbours, why would those pushing for war against yet another Arab regime not reveal to the world the bio-chemical weapons they may have unearthed in Iraq?" the paper asks.
Dangerous trend
There is widespread belief that the US will not stop at Syria but will move to confront other Arab countries and Muslim states.
"The talk of Syria after the attack on Iraq reveals the US is targeting not destructive weapons but the Muslim world," the Pakistan daily believes.
India's Hindustan Times appears to agree: "The US warning only exposes its expansionist policy and its intention to seize the entire Arab region." Some papers believe US plans to realise peace in the Middle East are behind its threats towards Syria.
The Irish Times describes Syria's role in the region as "deeply bound up with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict".
China's Renmin Ribao warns the US of the dangers it may face if the threats against Syria continue.
"The condemnation that the US will suffer from the international community and domestic public opinion over this will be unprecedented," it says.
Beijing's official China Daily reiterates this point:
"The US intention to use the leverage it has gained from its military victory in Iraq to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on other nations to change their behaviour is dangerous."
BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.
http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk |
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Ellsberg Weighs In |
by Joe Futrelle
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Apr 2003
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Published on Thursday, April 17, 2003 by the Marin Independent Journal (California)
Anti-War Activists Speak in Marin
by Beth Ashley
DANIEL ELLSBERG, outspoken anti-war activist who will lecture here April 28, is convinced that America's next military target is Syria, though he says the reasons for such an attack would obviously be spurious.
"Saddam has moved his biological weapons to Syria?" Ellsberg snorts in a phone interview from Brattleboro, Vermont. "Why would he do that?" - supporting a country ruled by a rival Baathist party which has opposed Iraqi policies in the past.
And why would Syria want them, when the recent U.S. attack made it clear that "this is a good time to get rid of biological weapons?"
After Syria, Ellsberg predicts, the U.S. will move into Iran. When the Bush administration says there are no plans for further aggresssion, "that's an obvious lie," he says.
Ellsberg - an ex-Marine best known for making public the government's super-secret Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War - will join David Harris of Mill Valley, a high profile Vietnam War protester, onstage at Olney Hall, College of Marin, at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 28, for a forum titled "Voices of Conscience: Reclaiming American Democracy Through Awareness and Action." Belva Davis of KQED-TV's "This Week in California" will moderate.
Sponsored by the college, the Vanguard Foundation and the ad hoc citizens' Ruth Group, the forum is intended to help participants sort out the mixed messages of today's political debate and to find a focus for their concerns.
"I want to grapple with how we can break the current war juggernaut," says Harris. "How can we harness the power of the millions of (people), locally and globally, who want to find peaceful solutions to the world's political problems?"
Ellsberg says rallying the opposition will be an uphill battle, thanks to the Bush administration's success in controlling media reports on the war and its rationale. Hitler's Joseph Goebbels would have envied the administration's propaganda machine, Ellsberg says.
For instance, he points out, the administration convinced 70 percent of the American public that there was a linkage between Saddam Hussein and events of 9/11, despite open testimony by the CIA's George Tenet that his agency had found no such linkage.
Bush and his supporters persuaded the American public that war was necessary to keep Saddam from using weapons of mass destruction, which Secretary of State Colin Powell, for instance, said we had proof he possessed.
Yet none have been found, and none were used, even when the administration insisted he would use them in a last-ditch effort to defend Baghdad.
"A lot of people who opposed the war think Bush will now transport (such weapons) to Iraq and then 'find' them," says Ellsberg. "But I don't think he's going to bother. So he doesn't find any, so what - 'I guess they went to Syria.' What's the evidence they went to Syria? 'You didn't ask for evidence before.'
"He's going to count on the public losing interest."
Ellsberg says most Americans believe the war was a great success, "even if you didn't find Saddam, even if you didn't find weapons of mass destruction. The war wasn't about weapons of mass destruction anyway - it was so blatantly about two things - oil and Israel."
Many anti-war protesters today feel a sense of failure, Ellsberg says, but he insists they shouldn't. Although they were a minority in the United States, they were linked with "16 million who marched throughout the world." They had allies in the United Nations Security Council, France, Russia, Germany and in the British Labor Party "who couldn't put a leash on their prime minister."
United Nations opposition succeeded in depriving the administration of the cloak of legitimacy in launching a pre-emptive war, he says. United Nations opposition preserved the concept that pre-emptive war "is a crime against peace." For that crime, in Ellsberg's eyes, Bush is "clearly indictable."
By directing the attention of the world to Iraq, the opposition "did keep the military on its toes" about willy-nilly targeting of population centers and did, to an extent, hold down mass destruction.
Ellsberg says he is "unreservedly happy" that the fighting is over and that the casualties were no greater than they were. "I did not want egg on the face of Rumsfeld in the form of more blood."
But he says the war has dug a hole for the United States that will take a long time to dig out of. He questions why the American public feels safer now than before the war, which further enraged one billion Muslims who already hate us. "The world has become dangerous in a way it never was before," he says, and becomes more so "with every arrogant piece of imperialism, every arrogant thing our leaders say, which is almost every word that comes out of their mouths."
Ellsberg's advice to concerned citizens - including those who favored the war - is to seek out other opinions than those in the mainstream media, particularly in such websites as buzzflash.com, antiwar.com and commondreams.org, or in newspapers like the Boston Globe, the St. Louis Post Dispatch or the Los Angeles Times.
"We all speak the same language," he says. "We should engage in dialogue on as calm and rational a level as possible. Rhetoric is not very helpful."
At the April 28 forum, Harris will also urge calm. "We need to take a step outside the frenzy of the last six months to assess where we are in regard to the larger policies that have driven this war. What are the implications for democracy and for us as individual citizens? What can we do to make sure we can continue to be a democracy and to reclaim the democracy we have lost?" he says.
Ellsberg says concerned Americans 'should listen to the people of Europe and the rest of the world - maybe they have some ideas about how we can get out of this hole."
"We should be linking arms with our counterparts all over the world - joining consciously with a worldwide movement for peace that is stronger and wider than ever.
"We are not the engine of the worldwide movement, but we can be part of it," he says.
Ellsberg, who lived in Mill Valley in the mid-1970s, now lives in Kensington, but has been traveling widely recently while promoting his new book, "Secrets."
Harris is the author of eight books and is at work on a ninth, an account of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-80. |
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