How the U.N. abets Syria's role in terrorism

[Coleus]

How the U.N. abets Syria's role in terrorism

Thursday, January 6, 2005

By DORE GOLD

THE UNITED NATIONS' oil-for-food scandal was placed center stage this past year, but with the Iraqi elections fast-approaching, there is another scandalous development at the United Nations that is beginning to receive national attention: how Syria, which served as a member of the U.N. Security Council from early 2002 through the end of 2003, has been continuing to back international terrorism and even turning itself into the main line of supply for the current insurgency in Western Iraq.

The ongoing developments in the oil-for-food scandal plus new revelations into Syria continuing to act as a staging ground for the Iraqi insurgency will no doubt raise serious questions about what kind of a role the United Nations can possibly play in sensitive areas of international security in the future.

Historically, the United Nations had a special role for the Syrians. Just after the 1991 Gulf War, then Secretary of State James Baker visited Damascus to try to organize what would become the Madrid Peace Conference, but kept hearing from the Syrians that United Nations auspices for the proposed Arab-Israeli peace summit was absolutely vital. "The United Nations," it was repeatedly explained, was "the source of international legitimacy."

This was known at U.N. headquarters in New York 10 years later. For that reason, high-level U.N. officials were hopeful that Syria would change its behavior on terrorism, when it was elected for a two-year term to the U.N. Security Council in October 2001 (a month after 9/11), by more than a two-thirds majority by the U.N. General Assembly. Since U.N. Security Council members were entrusted to safeguard international peace and security, it was then argued, Syria would have to curtail its support for Hezbollah and a dozen other terrorist groups to which it had given sanctuary for nearly two decades.

This U.N. scenario for Syria, however didn't pan out. The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad continued to defy United Nations resolutions and harbor terrorist groups. Despite explicit warnings from the Bush administration in early 2001, throughout 2002 it helped the regime of Saddam Hussein circumvent U.N. sanctions and allowed illegal Iraqi oil to be pumped through the Syrian oil pipeline to the Mediterranean. It no longer held Hezbollah on a tight leash but permitted its Iranian backers to reinforce the organization's military infrastructure, in Syrian-occupied Lebanon, with thousands of Fajr artillery rockets aimed at central Israel, thereby creating a new Middle Eastern powder-keg.

At the same time in 2002, Syria hosted terrorist operatives belonging to the al-Qaida affiliate network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who plotted against the Kingdom of Jordan.

In short, Syria was increasingly playing with fire precisely during the very same years it sat on the U.N. Security Council. While the exact whereabouts of Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction remains a mystery, Western intelligence agencies monitored the movement of large convoys of high-volume trucks from a presidential palace in Iraq to a presidential palace in Syria, on the eve of the 2003 Iraq War.

According to former Iraq Survey Group head David Kay, from U.S. interrogations of former officials in Saddam Hussein's regime, "components of Saddam's WMD" went to Syria before the war. From its backing of Saddam's Iraq to its ongoing occupation of Lebanon and finally to its continued support for international terrorist organizations, Syria hardly safeguarded international peace and security but rather systematically undermined it.

This is not just a story about Syria behaving as a rogue state; it is also a glaring example of the U.N. system failing. For U.N. Security Council membership from early 2002 through 2003 did not lead to more moderate Syrian behavior but rather to the exact opposite: a more defiant posture than was even witnessed during the years in which Hafiz al-Assad ruled Syria.

And now in December 2004, General George W. Casey, Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq, has disclosed that the Iraqi insurgency was being run by former Iraqi Baath Party officials from Syria. The current Iraqi leadership in Baghdad has suggested the involvement of the Syrian security services in the insurgency, as well. Indeed, Fallujah and Mosul are a stone's throw away from the Syrian border.

This latest deterioration in Syrian international behavior should not come as a complete surprise. For during those critical years in 2002 and 2003, Syria was promoted to sit on the U.N. Security Council without any pre-conditions. True Syria had been on the U.S. Department of State's terrorism list since its inception in the late 1970s. But from the standpoint of the United Nations, Syria could sit on its most august body without having to modify its behavior in the least.

What message did the Syrians internalize from this promotion in their international status? If the United Nations, from the Syrian standpoint, was the "source of international legitimacy," then Syrian behavior was viewed in the morally skewed universe of the United Nations as legitimate.

Amidst all the talk about U.N. reform, including the expansion of the U.N. Security Council from 15 to 24 members, the story of Syria and terrorism is a sharp reminder that for the United Nations to have any positive influence in the future, its changes cannot be structural alone.

The United Nations must demand minimal standards of behavior of its member states; if not, it risks becoming an entirely bankrupt idea.

The original United Nations of President Roosevelt was born in 1945 in a moment of moral clarity, at which time new members had to declare war on one of the Axis powers.

Unless that clarity is restored, the United Nations will not promote world order, but will inevitably turn into an instrument for global chaos instead.

Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, is the author of "Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos" (Crown Forum, 2004). Send comments about this article to oped@northjersey.com.

[Coleus]

Nor do we need a UN to promote world order, the world has been worse since it was formed. The UN was started by Alger Hiss and other communists which promotes terrorism, environmentalism, paganism, abortion, population control, sustainable development, etc.

[sheik yerbouty]

Send the UN to Botswana..

[Anti-Bubba182]

"..According to former Iraq Survey Group head David Kay, from U.S. interrogations of former officials in Saddam Hussein's regime, "components of Saddam's WMD" went to Syria before the war.."

I wish we knew what and where.

[Coleus]

Fight Terrorism - Get US out! of the United Nations

Fight Terrorism - Get US out! of the United Nations
"Syria won a seat on the U.N. Security Council ... with overwhelming global support and no opposition from the United States, despite its prominent position on the U.S. list of nations sponsoring terrorism."

- Associated Press
October 8, 2001

[CBart95]

Hush Coleus! All these self-appointed experts would have us believe it's all the US's fault and this whole business is merely a re-enactment of some other diplomatic disaster of history like the French in Algeria or Vietnam or God knows what.