summary: We -should- invade Syria, but we just have too much on our plate right now.
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The Road to Damascus
The Bush administration is right to be alarmed and angry about Syria. There is reason to believe that both military equipment and potential suicide bombers have been sent from Syria for use in Iraq against American troops. Now, American officials are convinced that Syria is permitting Saddam Hussein's top lieutenants to escape across its border. As the United States begins to exercise its new role as godparent of a new, freer government in Iraq, it will have to figure out how to handle many hostile neighbors, starting with Syria.
Syria, like Mr. Hussein's Iraq, is a totalitarian state run by a religious minority that has not shied away from relying on repression to maintain power. The former president, Hafez al-Assad, was often a shrewd operator, however, who joined the American-led coalition in the first war against Iraq in 1991 and later considered a peace deal with Israel while financing and arming anti-Israel groups in Lebanon.
It is a tribute to Hafez al-Assad's reasonableness as a diplomat and irresponsibility as a leader that Syria is the only country called a sponsor of terrorism by the State Department that has diplomatic relations with the United States.
Mr. Assad's son, Bashar, who assumed power after his father's death in 2000, was at first viewed as a potentially more progressive and thoughtful leader, but he has failed to meet those expectations. He did offer cooperation against Al Qaeda after Sept. 11, but he has also raised anti-American and anti-Israel feeling to new heights while doing nothing to improve Syria's pathetic economy or oppressive political regime.
One of the biggest concerns facing American troops in Iraq is that a combination of suicide bombings and internecine warfare could paralyze efforts to stabilize the country. Syria helped engineer just such a nightmare for Israel in Lebanon in the 1980's by financing and arming Shiite Muslim groups. In addition, Syria has long given refuge to anti-Israel terror groups, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It may also have an active chemical weapons program.
War against Syria, however, makes no sense. The United States has its hands full in Iraq. More important, Washington will only live up to the worst expectations of the Arab world if it now adopts a belligerent military approach to every nation in the region that it dislikes. It may be possible, however, to use the threat of diplomatic or economic sanctions to encourage Damascus to reconsider its hostile policies in the wake of the fall of Mr. Hussein.
But President Assad, like his father, has shown little interest in pulling his people out of the misery in which they exist, and Syria may turn out to be one of the most complex problems facing the Bush administration as it rebuilds Iraq.