09Jan04-Bush advisers debating what to do about Syria
By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Senior aides to President Bush are vigorously debating what to do about Syria as evidence mounts that the government in Damascus is stepping up support for the terror group Hezbollah and allowing anti-American insurgents to reach Iraq, according to U.S. officials.
Civilians in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office are pushing for military action against Syria short of an invasion and have drawn up plans for punitive airstrikes and cross-border incursions by U.S. forces, according to three officials.
But Bush's White House advisers, backed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department, are arguing against a new military venture with much of the U.S. military tied down in Iraq and a presidential election year under way.
That view appears to have prevailed, for now.
"We've got all we can handle, and then some, in Iraq, and our military is either stretched to the breaking point or already broken," said one senior administration official.
He and others spoke on condition of anonymity because the debate is ongoing and some of the information involved is classified.
U.S. officials, including those who oppose military action, say that the government of Bashar al Assad continues its sponsorship of anti-Israeli and anti-American terror groups, despite Washington's demands that it cease.
Iran, using Syria as a conduit, has resumed deliveries of supplies to Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese-based Shiite group responsible for bombing the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980s, the senior official said.
Israeli media reported Friday that Syrian planes carrying humanitarian aid to Iran's earthquake victims returned with weapons for Hezbollah. Iran denied the report, and U.S. officials in two agencies said they had no information to confirm it.
Nor has Assad made good on a promise to Secretary of State Colin Powell last summer to close the Damascus offices of Palestinian terrorist groups, numerous officials said. While electricity and phone lines have been cut, the groups continue to operate using cell phones and generators.
Yet some U.S. and Israeli officials say there are concrete signs that Assad is pondering a course change as a result of sustained American diplomatic and economic pressure. Last month, Bush signed the Syria Accountability Act, which imposes economic, diplomatic and military sanctions on Damascus. Bush can waive the sanctions if he chooses.
Assad's government has embarked on a drive to improve its image and signaled that it wants to resume peace talks with Israel.
"The Syrian rhetoric is different. It could suggest the Syrians are starting to wake up to the kind of deep kimchi they're in," a State Department official said.
"The United States should keep the pressure on," said Tel Aviv University President Itamar Rabinovich, one of Israel's leading experts on Syria. It "seems to be working ... in a limited way."
Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, said he doesn't expect a direct U.S. move against Syria and added that the United States faces a potential political problem there similar to the one it's dealing with in Iraq.
"I don't think that there is a coherent alternative to the current regime," he said, alluding to Assad, whose father, Hafez, ruled from 1970 until 2000. Ousting Assad and the Syrian Baath Party could spark "internecine war and anarchy," he said.
The reassessment of Syria policy apparently began in late November, officials said, when Rumsfeld distributed a memo - known in government as a "snowflake" - complaining of Syrian behavior.
Rumsfeld charged that insurgents were continuing to cross unhindered from Syria into Iraq to attack the 130,000 U.S. troops there, according to a U.S. official who has seen the document. He also suggested that Assad had colluded with the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al Sistani, who has issued edicts complicating U.S. plans to organize a post-Saddam Hussein government.
"It came over like a brick through a window," the official said of the Rumsfeld memo.
Some of Bush's hard-line advisers have argued for two years that Syria's regime should be the next U.S. target after Iraq. A defense official Friday night disputed that Rumsfeld and his aides are pushing for military action against Syria or that there is a split between civilians and the uniformed military on the issue. "That is absolutely groundless. It has no basis in fact," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The situation along Syria's lengthy border with Iraq is in dispute.
Assad recently told a visiting American delegation that he has bent over backwards to accommodate U.S. pressure to patrol the border and to crack down on terrorist financing.
Some insurgents continue to cross by bribing Syrian military officers, U.S. officials said.
But the senior official said cross-border activities "are down slightly. They've been tightening up to some extent."
There have been persistent reports that Hezbollah members are among those entering Iraq from Syria.
But some CIA and State Department experts believe that the Hezbollah operatives aren't terror cells but political officers looking to revive links with Iraq's Shiite majority, which was ruthlessly repressed under Saddam.
Damascus also is resisting returning Iraqi assets that Saddam had moved into Syrian banks, officials said. The amount of such funds appears to be about $1 billion, not $3 billion as first reported, they said.
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