Posted on 01/16/2004 6:17:22 PM PST by quidnunc
The Syrian president, Bashir Assad, may soon have a bigger problem with Hezbollah than Israel has. This is because, after a generation of hosting the most psychopathic arm of Iran's psychopathic theocracy, Mr. Assad no longer wants to know them. His minority Alawite, Baathist dictatorship, which Hezbollah has helped to sustain over the years, suddenly finds itself in a position where it must make new friends. Specifically, it is in urgent need of better relations with Turkey, the United States, and Israel; and Hezbollah is not popular with any of them.
It isn't in the forefront of the news, but the Syrian dictatorship is under huge and growing pressure from an increasingly impatient Bush administration to stop the terrorist insurgency into Iraq through Syria. The U.S. also wants Syria to open to Western inspection, as Libya has just done, the Assad regime's illicit weapons programmes, and for them to surrender Saddamite agents and weapons that they are almost certainly hiding.
This at a time when Syria has never been so isolated within the Arab world. It is now surrounded by American allies on all sides, except for a small patch of oceanfront, and the former state of Lebanon, which it continues to occupy in defiance of all international law. And Damascus is the headquarters for about a dozen Jihadist organizations whose senior members are on almost everyone's most-wanted list.
Imad Fayez Mughniyeh is among them — Hezbollah's ingenious operations chief, mastermind of innumerable very bloody incidents, including the bombings of the U.S. embassy and marine barracks in Beirut back in 1983. The Americans want him very, very badly.
President Assad continued to offer lip service to the "Islamic revolution" months after that ceased to be fashionable, with the fall of Baghdad. He briefly imagined himself filling the fallen Saddam Hussein's shoes as the rhetorical champion of the "oppressed Arabs". He did this, I believe, more out of stupidity than from any other motive. With the passage of months, it became obvious to him and to his advisers that they were isolated, abroad. Worse, they became increasingly isolated at home, where the televised sight of Iraqis celebrating the overthrow of Baathism in the streets of Baghdad was putting ideas into the streets of Damascus.
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(Excerpt) Read more at davidwarrenonline.com ...
Which would save us the trouble. Thence, we would need to concern ourselves only with annihilating Hezbollah.
And what a bliss for the still Syria-occupied Lebanon!
If you want to bookmark his articles discussed at FR: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/k-davidwarren/browse
His own website: http://www.davidwarrenonline.com
His page at the Ottawa Citizen: http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/columnists/davidwarren.html
This is why the war on terror had to go through Iraq. It provided the necessary "humiliation factor" alluded to by Victor Davis Hanson, after which we would see a realignment of power stage, in which a penchant for terror becomes a liability to the newly formed power structure.
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