What could Bush, right, be telling Blair; Syria next?

LONDON, April 8 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – One of the main topics on the agenda of the Belfast summit meeting ending Tuesday, April 8, between U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair is Syria, the Pentagon's next likely target for "regime change", a leading British newspaper reported.

The two leaders are expected to push a threshold plan for global security after the invasion of Iraq. The talks are expected to be dominated by intense argument over how much of a role the United Nations should be given in running post-Saddam Iraq, according to Daily Telegraph.

Downing Street said in advance of the summit that another of Blair's key aims would be to try to find ways to repair the damage done to relations between the EU and America and, by implication, Britain and those of its EU partners who opposed the controversial conflict.

However, Syria is expected to jump high on the table of the meeting in Hillsborough near Belfast as American officials intensify their allegations that they have seen growing evidence of support for “terrorism” by Damascus and suspect it allowed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to transfer weapons of mass destruction within its borders.

Blair and Bush are at loggerheads as to the relations with Syria, with the former implicitly condemning the Pentagon's bellicose language against the Arab state and London working hard to improve relations with it.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld accused Syria of providing military equipment, mainly night-vision goggles, to Iraq and threatened the only Arab country on the United Nations Security Council to stay clear of Iraq. 

Syrian President Bashar Assad has led Arab opposition to the Iraq war, stating that he the U.S. war against Iraq is "clear occupation and a flagrant aggression against a United Nations member state", warning that if the U.S. and Britain were to take over Iraq, they would be confronted by a "popular resistance" that would prevent them from controlling the country.

American officials stressed that regime change in Syria should be achieved without military action.

"Quite Possible"

They are also convinced that Assad has actively collaborated with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and agreed to take weapons, including Scud missiles, from him so they would not be discovered in Iraq by U.N. inspectors.

"Significant equipment, assets and perhaps even expertise was transferred, the first signs of which appeared in August or September 2002," a Bush administration official told The Telegraph.

"It is quite possible that Iraqi nuclear scientists went to Syria and that Saddam's regime may retain part of its army there."

Before the beginning of the war against Iraq, Syria urged Arab Gulf countries not to provide facilities to the U.S. and British forces. Damascus also dismissed a CIA report that it develops weapons of mass destruction as an attempt "to exaggerate matters concerning the Middle East to show that the security of the United States is really in danger,”

Firm Resistance

But the U.S. official said that there were also well-founded fears that Iraq and Libya had also been co-operating and that weapons proliferation in the Middle East was one of the major problems facing the world. Colonel Gaddafi's regime was "scary close" to developing a nuclear weapon, he said. But Libya already denied the allegations

In December, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon claimed that "we are certain that Iraq has recently moved chemical or biological weapons into Syria."

This claim was subsequently investigated by John Bolton, U.S. under-secretary of state for arms control and a prominent hawk in the Bush administration. Israeli sources said Bolton told Sharon that war with Iraq would force Syria and Libya to "come off the fence".

Israel has been occupying Syria' Golan Heights since the 1967 Mideast War. 

When asked by The Telegraph last week whether Saddam had exported some of his weapons to Syria, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, said: "We just don't know."

There is firm resistance within the U.S. State Department to Rumsfeld's hard-line stance on Syria with many officials arguing, like their British counterparts, that Syria can be a partner in the war against terrorism if it is given encouragement rather than being threatened.

Richard Murphy, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs from 1983 to 1989, said he did not believe armed conflict with Syria was on the immediate horizon.

"Talk of a broader military conflict with Syria does not represent a decision taken by American policy makers. This is the view among the neo-conservatives, some of whom are in the administration," he said.

"There's a perception that the time has come to spread democracy in the Middle East. Their view is that the U.S. paid heavily on September 11 for having not stood by its principles in dealing with autocracies in the Middle East."

But neo-conservatives, former Democrats with socially liberal views but a hawkish and ambitious vision of the use of American power abroad, include Wolfowitz and  Bolton and enjoy growing influence within the White House.