Newsmax.com
Wednesday, April 16, 2001

Sharon suggested that the U.S. put "very heavy pressure on Syria, not necessarily by going to war, but through political and economic pressure.”

Calling Bashar al-Assad “dangerous,” Sharon added that the Syrian leader “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: Hizbollah. He is dangerous because his judgment is defective. During the war in Iraq, he proved he does not have the ability to reach the right conclusions from relatively obvious facts."

Despite Syrian denials that it has weapons of mass destruction and is aiding and abetting Saddam henchmen to flee, Secretary of State Colin Powell has broadly intimated that the U.S. is indeed mulling some forms of diplomatic and economic sanctions against Syria. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly warned the Arab state and most recently announced that a pipeline feeding Syria Iraqi oil has been interrupted.

The Bush Administration has so far stopped short of threatening military action against Syria.

The latest developments manifest against a strange backdrop of Syria remaining on a State Department list of terrorist-sponsoring nations while maintaining uninterrupted diplomatic ties with the U.S. Syria is the only country on that list with diplomatic ties.

Most analysts suggest that the continuing firm U.S. diplomatic ties to Syria are owing to its sharing of information with U.S. intelligence agencies. Since the 9-11 attacks, for example, Syria claims to have detained more than 30 members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

Furthermore, last summer, U.S. and Syrian officials jointly disclosed that Syria had fed the U.S. information that helped foil an al-Qaida attack on American military personnel in the Persian Gulf.

But Middle East experts suggest that Syria’s good deeds are done only in its self-interest and only on its own terms.

"There is good anti-terrorism cooperation with a narrow focus on al-Qaida," a Western diplomat recently told NewsDay. "We're still as far apart as ever about the presence of Palestinian militant groups in Damascus and Syrian support for Hezbollah."

Syria's ruling Baath Party has its own bone to pick with al-Qaida-style militants. In 1982, the country crushed a rebellion by a Syrian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood with troops who killed more than 10,000 people and destroyed much of the city of Hama.

Analysts believe that Syria's cooperation against al-Qaida serves its own interests -- while helping to defuse the potential of becoming a hot target in the sights of the Bush administration's war on terrorism.

What still defines the ambiguous relationship between Syria and the U.S. is how each defines terrorism. Syrian leaders say militant Palestinian groups with offices in Damascus are engaged in a legitimate struggle to end Israeli occupation.

"The United States does not distinguish between terrorism and national resistance," argued Imad Shueibi, a politics professor at the University of Damascus. "Syria will not be intimidated into changing its policies."

The acid test of that intimidation immunity may yet be seen as U.S. patience runs out.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Al-Qaeda

Israel

Saddam Hussein/Iraq

War on Terrorism

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