Update News in English
English News Selected by Kimura Aiji
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=397347
Robert Fisk: Would President Assad invite a cruise missile
to his palace?
15 April 2003
So now Syria is in America's gunsights. First it's Iraq, Israel's
most powerful enemy, possessor of weapons of mass destruction
- none of which has been found. Now it's Syria, Israel's second
most powerful enemy, possessor of weapons of mass destruction,
or so President George Bush Junior tells us. No word of that
possessor of real weapons of mass destruction, Israel - the number
of its nuclear warheads in the Negev are now accurately listed
- whose Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, has long been complaining
that Damascus is the "centre of world terror".
But Syria is a target all right. First came the US claim that
Damascus was sending gas masks to the Iraqi army. The Syrians
denied it - but what if it's true? Why shouldn't an Arab neighbour
offer Iraqi soldiers protective clothing during an American invasion
which has no international legitimacy? Then Syria was accused
of sending, or allowing, Arab "volunteers" to cross
into Iraq to fight the Americans. This is much harder for the
Syrians to deny. I've met a few of them here in Baghdad, most
anxious to return to their homes in Homs and Damascus, others
- from Algeria and Morocco - telling me that they will be safe
if they can reach the Syrian border because "there will
be no trouble from there". But here, too, there's a whiff
of hypocrisy.
Whenever Israel goes to war, there are hundreds of "volunteers"
from the United States rushing to Tel Aviv to join the Israel
Defence Force, and America never complains.
But then comes the nastiest accusation: that members of the Iraqi
regime have fled to Syria for safety. Given Syria's increasingly
warmer relations with Saddam Hussein's Iraq in recent years,
and the joint nature of their Baathist past - the Syrian Christian
Michel Aflaq was a founder of the Baath in the days when it was
a creature of both nations - it's difficult to believe that the
Tariq Azizes and Taha Yassin Ramadans couldn't seek refuge in
Syria.
Needless to say, the capture of Saddam's half-brother near the
Syrian border has provoked the usual rash of stories. Tariq Aziz
is living in Lebanon with the ladies of President Saddam's family.
Untrue. The Arabic television satellite channel interviewed the
ex-Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf in Damascus.
Totally untrue. And also embarrassing for the Americans. For
just as they failed to capture the most brutal of the Bosnian
Serb murderers, Messrs Karadjic and Mladic, so they failed to
find Osama bin Laden - or even Mullah Omar - and, given the failure
of American intelligence in Baghdad, it wouldn't be that surprising
if the whole of the Iraqi Cabinet managed to pass safely through
an American checkpoint in an orange pantechnicon. But it's Syria
that is being lined up for attack next, not the Saddam Cabinet.
And the signs were clear long ago. Take the article in The New
York Times by Larry Collins - joint author with Dominique Lapierre
of O Jerusalem! - which last month announced that the Syrian-supported
Hizbollah resistance in Lebanon had 10,000 missiles that could
fly to Tel Aviv and "leave in their wake devastation more
terrible than anything Israel has ever known". The missiles
are a myth - I travel the roads of southern Lebanon every two
weeks and there are no such missiles, as the UN force there will
confirm - but this doesn't matter. And then it will be Libya
who has the most sophisticated C-B weapons. Or Saudi Arabia.
Or anyone else Israel wants attacked.
But this still leaves the question: could Saddam and his sons
and Tariq Aziz and Ramadan and the rest have passed through Syria?
Not impossible. But the idea that they would be allowed to stay
seems incredible. If President Bashar Assad allowed Saddam to
be a guest, it would be akin to inviting a cruise missile to
his palace.
But Syria just might have provided a transit station for the
Baath officials from Iraq. To where? My own favourite is Belarus
- because its capital, Minsk, is awash in whisky, corruption
and damp apartments (the first two of which would appeal to most
Iraqi Baathists). Vladimir Putin, of course, would be asked to
help to retrieve them and hand them over to Washington. And he
would have a price, no doubt, a price involving oil concessions
and Russia's already signed oil contracts in Baghdad .