SYRIA is U.S.'s TOO-HARD BASKET. (This BARF with knowledge of Iraqi WMD, and where hidden)

CAIRO - It's now clear that the administration of US President George W Bush just doesn't know what to do about Syria. It can't live with Syrian President Bashar Assad, the only significant Arab potentate indifferent to US interests, and it is bewildered at whether or how to bring him down.

The potential implication by United Nations investigators (and even by former Syrian vice president Abd al-Halim Khaddam) of

high Syrian officials in the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri seems the ideal pretext for the United States to pursue regime change aggressively, a la Iraq.

Yet the Bush administration has balked, restrained by the international community's unwillingness to sanction Syria, the political cost of unleashing military power, and its own fears of what might replace Assad. The US State Department's announcement on February 18 that it intends to fund the fractious Syrian opposition to the tune of US$5 million hardly justifies five years of saber-rattling and suggests a poverty of options rather than the emergence of a plausible strategy for toppling Assad.

In a bygone era, successive US administrations treated Syria with a deference that now seems unthinkable. Though a paradigmatic dictatorship, Syria was considered a key player in the "peace process" and a pillar of regional stability. That all changed when George W Bush came to power, adorning his staff with neo-conservatives for whom Syria was a roadblock to newly imagined US interests and an unreconstructed enemy of Israel.

Last month, Moshe Yaalon, who was Israel's top general at the time, said Iraq transported WMD to Syria six weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

Last March, John A. Shaw, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian Spetsnaz units moved WMD to Syria and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. "While in Iraq I received information from several sources naming the exact Russian units, what they took and where they took both WMD materials and conventional explosives," Mr. Shaw told NewsMax reporter Charles Smith.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong was deputy commander of Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In September 2004, he told WABC radio that "I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran."

In January 2004, David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group which conducted the search for Saddam's WMD, told a British newspaper there was evidence unspecified materials had been moved to Syria from Iraq shortly before the war. "We know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program," Mr. Kay told the Sunday Telegraph.

Also that month, Nizar Nayuf, a Syrian journalist who defected to an undisclosed European country, told a Dutch newspaper he knew of three sites where Iraq's WMD was being kept. They were the town of al Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria; the Syrian air force base near the village of Tal Snan, and the city of Sjinsar on the border with Lebanon.

In an addendum to his final report last April, Charles Duelfer, who succeeded David Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said he couldn't rule out a transfer of WMD from Iraq to Syria. "There was evidence of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initiated by a Syrian security officer, and ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved. In the judgment of the working group, these reports were sufficiently credible to merit further investigation," Mr. Duelfer said.

In a briefing for reporters in October 2003, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper Jr., who was head of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency when the Iraq war began, said satellite imagery showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06036/649858.stm

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