THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW
                      April 18, 2003

Israel wants strike on Syria while iron's hot
BY ROBERT NOVAK

Coinciding with the Bush administration's tough talk about
Syria, a senior Israeli official Monday exposed a smoking
gun. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the Tel Aviv news-
paper Maariv: "We have a long list of issues we are
thinking of demanding of the Syrians, and it would be best
done through the Americans."

Mofaz's Hebrew-language interview was not widely distributed
in Washington, but a few members of Congress who learned of
it were stunned by its audacity. With Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon long having urged changing Iraq's regime by force of
U.S. arms, his government now hopes to ride the emerging
American imperium to regional reconstruction along Israeli
lines.

That is the goal of prominent Pentagon civilian officials
who see virtual identity between U.S. and Israeli interests.
Sharon's hopes for his agenda are buoyed by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld's emergence. Vindicated by the spectacular
success of American arms, Rumsfeld is the strongman of the
Bush Cabinet who is directing the postwar transformation of
the Middle East.

Gen. Mofaz, a career officer before becoming defense minister
last October, is a plain-spoken paratrooper who has now
revealed his country's grand design of riding American power
to reach old goals. While Israel's military is the region's
strongest, it has been unable to achieve Mofaz's long,
unspecified wish list: removal of Syrian troops from Lebanon,
ending Syrian support of anti-Israeli terrorist groups and
effective Syrian disarmament. The biggest political-military
failure in Israel's brief history was its Lebanese
intervention.

Israel's goals conceivably can be "done through the Americans"
in the wake of the awesome U.S. military performance. Syria's
Bashar Assad is unlikely to follow Saddam Hussein's suicidal
course of confrontation with Washington. Not supplied
militarily by Moscow since the end of the Cold War, Syria's
armed forces look weaker than Iraq's.

The problem is how to justify pressuring Syria. If it was
hard to prove Iraq a clear danger to the United States,
making the case for Syria is much tougher. After the fall
of Baghdad, warnings to Damascus were based on unverified
complaints that weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi
leaders had crossed the porous Iraqi-Syrian border. "There
is no evidence," Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, said last week, that such weapons were taken out of
Iraq.

Syria for a decade or more has been building its own chemical
weapons, apparently as a puny counterweight against Israel's
nuclear arsenal. Actually, military experts do not consider
them weapons of mass destruction. Nor does their possession
violate international law since Syria has never signed the
chemical weapons ban treaty.

But President Bush is not invoking international law, as he
did when seeking United Nations sanction for military
intervention in Iraq. "Syria just needs to cooperate with
us," the president said Sunday, without citing international
authority.

Secretary of State Colin Powell muffled war drums a little
Tuesday, telling reporters: "There is no war plan right now
to attack somewhere else." However, neither Bush nor
Rumsfeld made any such assurance. Furthermore, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff two weeks ago ordered the U.S. European
Command to prepare a plan for Syria.

All this has frightened Syria and the entire Arab world.
That was the intent of Rumsfeld but not Powell, who wants
a postwar return to diplomacy by the president. Powell's
principal asset is Bush's "road map" for coexisting Jewish
and Palestinian states, a concept not popular with the
Sharon government or its friends at the Pentagon. Arabs
are skeptical, perceiving a road map that leads to fruit-
less,endless negotiations.

Nothing has so demonstrated to Arabs their political
impotence than Rumsfeld's selection of retired Lt. Gen.
Jay Garner as Iraq's interim military governor. Now a
defense contractor, he helped develop the Arrow missile-
defense system for Israel. After the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, Garner visited Israel as guest of the hard-line
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and signed
that organization's letter praising Sharon's treatment of
Palestinians.

"Out of the 270 million Americans," said Syrian Deputy
Ambassador Imad Moustapha on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday,
"you choose a military ruler to rule Iraq who is closely
related to the extremist factions in Israel." That is the
price of losing the clash of civilizations, when you appear
to be the next target.

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