Conservatives within the Bush administration would like to see a change of government in Syria but want it to happen through peaceful means rather that U.S. military action, according to current and former senior U.S. officials.
On Sunday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said, "There's got to be a change in Syria," which has been accused by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of allowing war materials and Islamic fighters to cross its border to help the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "The Syrians need to know . . . they'll be held accountable," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Wolfowitz and other officials have not spelled out how they expect a peaceful change of government in Syria would occur. But many are beginning to speak about a successful conclusion of the war in Iraq providing a possible springboard for change.
"I think a lot of countries, including Syria, will eventually get the message from this [Iraq war] that it's much better to come to terms peacefully with the international community, to not acquire these weapons of mass destruction, to not use terrorism as an instrument of national policy," Wolfowitz said.
Rumsfeld's remarks, which included a warning to Iran to not permit armed Iraqi exiles in Iran to return to Iraq outside U.S. control, encouraged other Bush administration supporters to speak out on the issue. R. James Woolsey, a former CIA director who has been considered for a post in the U.S. group that would help reestablish a new Iraqi government, told an audience at UCLA last Wednesday that the "fascist" government in Syria had to be replaced.
The Syrian government considered Rumsfeld's remarks a threat, triggering statements from other U.S. officials aimed at easing Syria's concerns. "Nobody in the American administration [has] talked about invading Iran or Syria," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview with the London-based Arab daily Al Hayat published April 5. "It seems that there is a constant desire by everybody to accuse us of invasion operations. That didn't, and won't, take place."
Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, yesterday dismissed a report first mentioned last December by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that Iraq had shipped some of its chemical and biological weapons to Syria. At the time, U.S. intelligence officials said that several large Iraqi truck shipments with guards had been observed heading to Syria but that no one knew what was inside them.
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