The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday accused Syria of helping senior members of Iraq’s Ba’ath regime to escape.
In some cases the fugitives were stopping when they got to Syria, but others were travelling on to other countries. ”Senior regime people are moving out of Iraq and into Syria,” Rumsfeld said. Asked what evidence he had, he said the US was getting ”scraps of evidence” Syria had been ”facilitating” the traffic in leading Ba’athists.
Rumsfeld also said that the US had evidence that some Syrians were moving into Iraq ”unhelpfully”. He did not make clear whether he was accusing Syria of actively assisting resistance to the coalition advance.
Rumsfeld also warned Syria, Iran and North Korea to draw the ”appropriate lesson” from the demise of the Iraqi regime, and abandon their own pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
His warning came hours after another of Washington’s leading hawks pointed an accusatory finger at Damascus. John Bolton, the under-secretary of state for arms control and international security, appealed to Syria and other Middle Eastern countries to open up to ”new possibilities” for peace in the region.
Syria is not formally a member of President George Bush’s ”axis of evil” — Iraq, Iran and North Korea — but it is nervous that it might attract the attention of a US emboldened by the fall of Saddam.
”I think Syria is a good case where I hope that they will conclude that the chemicals weapons programme and the biological weapons programme that they have been pursuing are things that they should give up,” Bolton said on a visit to Rome
”It is a wonderful opportunity for Syria to foreswear the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and, as with other governments in the region, to see if there are not new possibilities in the Middle East peace process.” He made no mention of Israel’s nuclear weapons capability, routinely cited by Arab states as justification for their own interest in non-conventional weapons.
Britain has been alarmed by recent US threats against Iran and Syria, fearing that Washington hardliners believe they can go on to force regime change elsewhere. Tony Blair’s urgent priority is to persuade President Bush to engage with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, both for its own sake, and to persuade sceptical Arabs that the west cares about the Palestinians as well as freeing Iraqis from tyranny.
On Monday Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said Britain would have ”nothing to do” with threats against Damascus and Tehran, and announced a relaxation of export controls on dual-use civilian and military equipment for Iran.
Blair then phoned the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, to assure him that Britain opposed ”targeting” his country, which is also ruled by a branch of the Ba’ath party.
The US has warned Damascus over reported shipments of night-vision goggles to Iraq. Rumsfeld described the shipments as ”hostile acts”.
Washington also takes a harder line than Britain on Syrian support for Hizbullah, the Lebanse guerrilla group that fights Israel.
US and British forces have yet to uncover any of the chemical or biological weapons UN inspectors failed to find in Iraq. But Bolton made clear that Washington had not abandoned an active disarmament agenda. ”With respect to the issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the post-conflict period, we are hopeful that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq,” he said.
Mention of North Korea and Iran will also cause alarm. Britain and its European partners take a far more benign view of the regime in Tehran, and also believe diplomatic engagement is the only way to deal with Pyongyang.
Bolton said ”the peaceful elimination” of these programmes was the guiding principle in Washington. – Guardian Unlimited Â