Is There More Behind Bush’s Empty Bluster Against Syria and Iran?

by Steve

Well, it is summertime at the ranch in Crawford Texas for W. That means it is time to ignore another real problem while on vacation, like he did in 2001 by ignoring the warning signs about Al Qaeda attacks on America.

Now Bush is downplaying the North Korean threat publicly while privately considering caving in and meeting some of the conditions that he said he never would. Unfortunately, he will be doing it after Pyongyang had pushed him into a corner with its admission that they had finished reprocessing 8000 fuel rods. Of course, if Bush had followed the course laid out by folks at the Brookings Institution months ago for a comprehensive settlement, he could have had this resolved by now without looking like he got rolled to a degree.

But we will wait to see if the PNAC neanderthals sabotage this possible deal.

While Bush dithers on North Korea, he did manage to make an empty threat from the ranch today. With the African uranium and Iraqi WMD lies exploding all around him, and with a nutcase member of the “Coalition of the Duped” by his side at the ranch in Crawford, it was high time for W to launch another misdirection play today by dredging up the threats against Syria and Iran.

You may remember that the last time the Administration tried to add Syria to the PNAC dance card by claiming that they were involved in terrorism and assisting Hussein or Al Qaeda, it came as a surprise to the CIA and to Colin Powell, as we reported here back on April 8.

Plus, as we reported back on April 14th, Britain vetoed any invasion of Syria, and given Tony Blair’s problems of late, it is even less likely now that the Brits will be backing us up in any action anywhere. And as the Guardian reported, Bush himself had vetoed an invasion of Syria at the time. Add to that the opposition from Russia, China, and India to any move against Iran, and you are left with another Bush misdirection play.

This comes a week after George Tenet stopped Undersecretary of State John (“Cuba Has WMDs”) Bolton from making an ass of himself again by issuing new unsubstantiated warnings about Syria’s alleged accelerated development of WMDs. So with that route cut off to stir things up, Bush returns to the tried and true while on vacation at the ranch by making a now-empty threat that Iran and Syria will be held accountable. Just what the hell does that mean George, when you have almost all of our overseas forces tied up in Afghanistan, Iraq, or soon-to-be Liberia? Why the empty bluster now, aside from an attempt to steer the agenda away from damaging SOTU stories and back towards terrorism?

Well, another story may be in the offing. Bush’s empty bluster comes less than a month after Rummy’s fiasco in chasing alleged Iraqi escapees into Syria, a move that not only caused 80 deaths but was also aimed at destroying intelligence cooperation between Syria and the US.

This was also the subject of Sy Hersh’s latest New Yorker dispatch this week.
Hersh reports that the Administration’s ratcheting up of the rhetoric against Syria is not only dusting off the Rummy/PNAC wet dreams again, but managed to destroy a fruitful intelligence arrangement that George Tenet’s CIA had worked out with Syria.

It turns out that Syria since 9/11 has not only helped us out greatly with providing solid intelligence on Al Qaeda, but has been helping to keep Hezbollah quiet since the Iraq invasion. They were doing this in the hope of cementing a back channel relationship with the Administration through the CIA. Yet,

Instead, in late March Rumsfeld said that Syria would be held accountable for its actions. Syria denied the assertions, and members of the intelligence community I spoke to characterized the evidence against Syria as highly questionable.

“The Defense Department pushed for the hard line on Syria,” a former State Department official told me. “I think Rummy was at least testing the waters—to see how far he could go—but the White House was not ready.” The former official added that Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, “is not going to sit on the Pentagon the way she’d have to in order to give the policy of engaging Syria politically a chance.

In Washington, there was anger about what many officials saw as the decision of the Bush Administration to choose confrontation with Syria over day-to-day help against Al Qaeda. In a sense, the issue was not so much Syria itself as a competition between ideology and practicality—and between the drive to go to war in Iraq and the need to fight terrorism—which has created a deep rift in the Bush Administration. The collapse of the liaison relationship has left many C.I.A. operatives especially frustrated. “The guys are unbelievably pissed that we’re blowing this away,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “The Syrians were a lot more willing to help us, but they”—Rumsfeld and his colleagues—“want to go in there next.”

“There is no security relationship now,” a Syrian foreign-ministry official told me. “It saddens us as much as it saddens you. We could give you information on organizations that we don’t think should exist. If we help you on Al Qaeda, we are helping ourselves.” He added, almost plaintively, that if Washington had agreed to discuss certain key issues in a back channel, “we’d have given you more. But when you publicly try to humiliate a country it’ll become stubborn.”

Robert Baer, a retired C.I.A. officer who served in Syria and is the author of a new book, “Sleeping with the Devil,” on Washington’s relationship with the Saudis, agreed that the Syrians had more to offer. “The Syrians know that the Saudis were involved in the financing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and they for sure know the names,” Baer told me.

“Up through January of 2003, the coöperation was topnotch,” a former State Department official said. “Then we were going to do Iraq, and some people in the Administration got heavy- handed. They wanted Syria to get involved in operational stuff having nothing to do with Al Qaeda and everything to do with Iraq. It was something Washington wanted from the Syrians, and they didn’t want to do it.”

So for the sake of ideological purity and pursuit of the PNAC agenda, we destroy an intelligence arrangement built by the CIA that was paying dividends with Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and which could have brought damaging information about Saudi Arabia’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Which makes today’s actions by Bush to antagonize the Syrians so understandable: Rummy gets to poke Tenet in the eye again, and Bush gets to protect the Saudis once again, just like he is about to try and do with the Congressional 9/11 Committee whitewash.

All of which begs a question we in the center-left blogosphere know the answer to all too well: when faced with the choice of effectively fighting terrorism or fulfilling the PNAC agenda and covering up, which way will George invariably go?