"They do, indeed, harbor terrorists. Syria is a terrorist state," Fleischer

WASHINGTON, April 15 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Tensions between the United States and Syria grew Tuesday, April 15, as Washington threatened a military aggression alongside diplomatic and economic sanctions against the Arab country for allegedly accepting fleeing Iraqi officials and aiding the flow of Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon into Iraq.

Top aides to U.S. President George W. Bush tuned up the heat against Iraq’s neighbor and warned Damascus to turn away fleeing supporters of Saddam Hussein, shun weapons of mass destruction, and sever ties to terrorism.

"They do, indeed, harbor terrorists. Syria is a terrorist state," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, adding Syria's "untested" leader, President Bashar al-Assad, "has a chance to be a leader who makes the right decisions."

"Gone is the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Next, hopefully, is a reexamination by Syria and, perhaps, others about how they conduct their affairs," Fleischer added, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

He quoted from a 2002 CIA report that Syria "already held nerve gas ... but is trying develop more toxic and persistent nerve agents."

Fleischer spoke hours after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Damascus had conducted a chemical weapons test during the last 12-15 months, and that Washington had intelligence Syria has allowed Syrians and others to enter Iraq with arms and leaflets indicating that they would be rewarded for killing Americans.

Bush has also claimed Syria has chemical weapons and renewed allegation that remnants of Saddam's regime and his Baath party had found refuge there.

Powell called on Syrian leaders to "review their actions and their behavior, not only with respect to who gets haven in Syria and weapons of mass destruction, but especially the support of terrorist activity."

Britain and Israel have made similar allegations, all denied by Syria, and other Arab states have expressed concern at the mounting pressure on the Damascus regime.

A Syrian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Bouthana Shaaban, insisted that "the only country in the region which has chemical, biological and nuclear weapons is Israel".

And the fact that a senior Iraqi official had been found near the Iraqi-Syrian border was "evidence that Syria didn't let him in, and didn't let any member of the family in or anybody of the regime in," she told the BBC News Online.

"We never had friendly relations with them and certainly none of them even applied to come to Syria," she said.

Syria is a vociferous opponent of the U.S.-led war against Iraq, with Assad calling it a "clear occupation and aggression against a U.N. Security Council member state".

Damascus has since come under mounting US pressure and allegations over weapons of mass destruction, for allegedly harboring Saddam regime members and its support for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups.

The U.S. and Britain went to war without getting the authorization of U.N. Security Council of which Syria is the only Arab country member state.

"Dangerous"

Sharon described Bashar as dangerous

Facing this diplomatic heat, Syria finds itself caught between burnishing its pan-Arab credentials by criticizing America and facing a new, painful fact: the United States is now on Syria's doorstep, across the border in Iraq, and the American administration has already shown it is ready to flex its muscles again even before the battlefield smoke cleared, said New York Times

Washington also pledged to tackle the Syrian-backed Hizbollah group in the next phase of its 'war on terror' in a move which could threaten military action against the Arab country as part of Washington's efforts to persuade Israel to support a new peace settlement with the Palestinians, sources in the Bush administration told the British daily The Observer.

Washington has promised Israel that it will take "all effective action" to cut off Syria's support for Hizbollah- implying a military strike if necessary, the sources said.

Hizbollah is a Shia Muslim organization based in Lebanon, whose fighters have forced the Israeli forces in southern Lebanon to carry out a humiliating and messy withdrawal in 2000 after 18 years of occupation.

The new U.S. undertaking to Israel to deal with Hizbollah via its Syrian sponsors has been made over recent days during meetings between administration officials and Israeli diplomats in Washington, and Americans talking to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem, the paper said.

It would be part of a deal designed to entice Israel into the so-called road map to peace package that would involve the Jewish state pulling out of the Palestinian West Bank, occupied since 1967 and which also calls for mutual recognition between Israel and a new Palestinian state, structured according to U.S.-backed reforms.

This came as Sharon described Syrian President the Syrian president as "dangerous" in a newspaper interview Tuesday because he could misjudge the balance of power between their countries.

"Bashar Assad is dangerous because he is capable of making the same error over the balance of forces with Israel as he made with the Americans, and he has a force which obeys his orders: Hezbollah," Sharon told Yediot Aharonot.

"He is dangerous because his judgement is defective. During the war in Iraq, he proved he does not have the ability to reach the right conclusions from relatively obvious facts," he said.

"All those who considered the facts (before the war) could have known that Iraq would lose. But Assad thought the United States was going to lose," the prime minister said.

The Israeli Prime Minister called for the United States to put "very heavy pressure on Syria, not necessarily by going to war, but through political and economic pressure".

He laid down a list of demands for Washington to present to Damascus, notably the ouster of Palestinian resistance groups based in the Syrian capital and the expulsion of Hezbollah from Lebanon's border with Israel.

Powel said that the U.S. administration will examine "possible measures of a diplomatic, economic or other nature as we move forward,"

Israel still occupies Syria's strategic Golan Heights since the 1967 Middle East war and Lebanon's Sheba farms.

Anti-American sentiment is high in Syria, and perhaps nowhere more so in Palestinian refugee camps such as Damascus' Palestine Camp, one of several for more than 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in Syria.

The United States is accused across the Arab world of unfairly siding with Israel against the Arabs, and the attack on Iraq was seen as more evidence of that

Hawks inside and aligned to the U.S. administration who believe that war in Iraq was first stage in a wider war for American control of the region. Threats against Syria come daily out of Washington.

Hawks in and close to the Bush White House have prepared the ground for an attack on Syria, raising the specter of Hizbollah, of alleged Syrian plans to wel come refugees from Saddam Hussein's fallen regime, and of what the administration insists is Syrian support for Iraq during the war.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - regarded as the real architect of the Iraqi war and its aftermath - said on Thursday that 'the Syrians have been shipping killers into Iraq to try and kill Americans', adding: 'We need to think about what our policy is towards a country that harbors terrorists or harbors war criminals.

'There will have to be change in Syria, plainly,' said Wolfowitz.

War Plans "Vetoed"

However, the White House has privately ruled out suggestions that the U.S. should go to war against Syria following its military success in Iraq, and has blocked preliminary planning for such a campaign in the Pentagon, the Guardian learned.

In the past few weeks, Rumsfeld ordered contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, his undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, and William Luti, the head of the Pentagon's office of special plans, were asked to put together a briefing paper on the case for war against Syria, outlining its role in supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein, its links with Middle East terrorist groups and its allegedly advanced chemical weapons program.

Feith and Luti were both instrumental in persuading the White House to go to war in Iraq.

"The talk about Syria didn't go anywhere. Basically, the White House shut down the discussion," an intelligence source in Washington told the Guardian.

Faced with rising apprehension over the prospect of a new conflict, Tony Blair also offered categorical assurances to anxious MPs that Britain and the U.S. had "no plans whatsoever" to invade Iraq's neighbor.

Dismissing fears of an Anglo-American invasion as another "conspiracy theory", the prime minister said that Bush had never mentioned an attack on Syria during their regular talks.