[Peace-discuss] Syrian/US firefight

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Mort asked tonight for the some documentation of clashes
between US and Syrian troops.  --CGE]


        GI's and Syrians in Tense Clashes on Iraqi Border
        By James Risen and David E. Sanger
        The New York Times
        Saturday 15 October 2005

        Washington, Oct. 14 - A series of clashes in the last
year between American and Syrian troops, including a prolonged
firefight this summer that killed several Syrians, has raised
the prospect that cross-border military operations may become
a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according to current
and former military and government officials.

        The firefight, between Army Rangers and Syrian troops
along the border with Iraq, was the most serious of the
conflicts with President Bashar al-Assad's forces, according
to American and Syrian officials.

        It illustrated the dangers facing American troops as
Washington tries to apply more political and military pressure
on a country that President Bush last week labeled one of the
"allies of convenience" with Islamic extremists. He also named
Iran.

        One of Mr. Bush's most senior aides, who declined to
be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said
that so far American military forces in Iraq had moved right
up to the border to cut off the entry of insurgents, but he
insisted that they had refrained from going over it.

        But other officials, who say they got their
information in the field or by talking to Special Operations
commanders, say that as American efforts to cut off the flow
of fighters have intensified, the operations have spilled over
the border - sometimes by accident, sometimes by design.

        Some current and former officials add that the United
States military is considering plans to conduct special
operations inside Syria, using small covert teams for
cross-border intelligence gathering.

        The broadening military effort along the border has
intensified as the Iraqi constitutional referendum scheduled
for Saturday approaches, and as frustration mounts in the Bush
administration and among senior American commanders over their
inability to prevent foreign radical Islamists from engaging
in suicide bombings and other deadly terrorist acts inside Iraq.

        Increasingly, officials say, Syria is to the Iraq war
what Cambodia was in the Vietnam War: a sanctuary for
fighters, money and supplies to flow over the border and,
ultimately, a place for a shadow struggle.

        Covert military operations are among the most closely
held of secrets, and planning for them is extremely delicate
politically as well, so none of those who discussed the
subject would allow themselves to be identified. They included
military officers, civilian officials and people who are
otherwise actively involved in military operations or have
close ties to Special Operations forces.

        In the summer firefight, several Syrian soldiers were
killed, leading to a protest from the Syrian government to the
United States Embassy in Damascus, according to American and
Syrian officials.

        A military official who spoke with some of the Rangers
who took part in the incident said they had described it as an
intense firefight, although it could not be learned whether
there had been any American casualties. Nor could the exact
location of the clash, along the porous and poorly marked
border, be learned.

        In a meeting at the White House on Oct. 1, senior
aides to Mr. Bush considered a variety of options for further
actions against Syria, apparently including special operations
along with other methods for putting pressure on Mr. Assad in
coming weeks.

        American officials say Mr. Bush has not yet signed off
on a specific strategy and has no current plan to try to oust
Mr. Assad, partly for fear of who might take over. The United
States is not planning large-scale military operations inside
Syria and the president has not authorized any covert action
programs to topple the Assad government, several officials said.

        "There is no finding on Syria," said one senior
official, using the term for presidential approval of a covert
action program.

        "We've got our hands full in the neighborhood," added
a senior official involved in the discussion.

        Some other current and former officials suggest that
there already have been initial intelligence gathering
operations by small clandestine Special Operations units
inside Syria. Several senior administration officials said
such special operations had not yet been conducted, although
they did not dispute the notion that they were under
consideration.

        Whether they have already occurred or are still being
planned, the goal of such operations is limited to singling
out insurgents passing through Syria and do not appear to
amount to an organized effort to punish or topple the Syrian
government.

        According to people who have spoken with Special
Operations commanders, teams like the Army's Delta Force are
well suited for reconnaissance and intelligence gathering
inside Syria. They could identify and disrupt the lines of
communications, sanctuaries and gathering points used by
foreign Arab fighters and Islamist extremists seeking to wage
war against American troops in Iraq.

        What the administration calls Syria's acquiescence in
insurgent operations organized and carried out from its
territory is a major factor driving the White House as it
conducts what seems to be a major reassessment of its Syria
policy.

        The withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon earlier
this year in the wake of the assassination in February of
Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, in Beirut
led to a renewed debate in the White House about whether - and
how - to push for change in Damascus.

        With no clear or acceptable alternative to Mr. Assad's
government on the horizon, the administration now seems to be
awaiting the outcome of an international investigation of the
Hariri assassination, which may lead to charges against senior
Syrian officials.

        Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor in charge of the
United Nations investigation of the killing, is expected to
complete a report on his findings this month.

        If Mr. Mehlis reports that senior Syrian officials are
implicated in the Hariri assassination, some Bush
administration officials say that could weaken the Assad
government.

        "I think the administration is looking at the Mehlis
investigation as possibly providing a kind of slow-motion
regime change," said one former United States official
familiar with Syria policy. The death - Syrian officials
called it a suicide - on Wednesday of Interior Minister Ghazi
Kanaan of Syria, who was questioned in connection with the
United Nations investigation, may have been an indication of
the intense pressure building on the Assad government from
that inquiry.

        Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to
Iraq, issued one of the administration's most explicit public
challenges to Damascus recently when he said that "our
patience is running out with Syria."

        "Syria has to decide what price it's willing to pay in
making Iraq success difficult," he said on Sept. 12. "And time
is running out for Damascus to decide on this issue."

        Some hawks in the administration make little secret of
their hope that mounting political and military pressure will
lead to Mr. Assad's fall, despite their worries about who
might succeed him. Other American officials seem to believe
that by taking modest military steps against his country, they
will so intimidate Mr. Assad that he will alter his behavior
and prevent Syrian territory from being used as a sanctuary
for the Iraqi insurgency and its leadership.

        "Our policy is to get Syria to change its behavior,"
said a senior administration official. "It has failed to
change its behavior with regard to the border with Iraq, with
regard to its relationships with rejectionist Palestinian
groups, and it has only reluctantly gotten the message on
Lebanon."

        The official added: "We have had people for years
sending them messages telling them to change their behavior.
And they don't seem to recognize the seriousness of those
messages. The hope is that Syria gets the message."

        There are some indications that this strategy,
described as "rattling the cage," may be working. Some current
and former administration officials say that the flow of
foreign fighters has already diminished because Mr. Assad has
started to restrict their movement through Syria.

        But while he appears to be curbing the number of
foreign Arab fighters moving through Syria, the American
officials say he has not yet restricted former senior members
of Saddam Hussein's government from using Syria as a haven
from which to provide money and coordination to the
Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq.

        "You see small tactical changes, which they don't
announce, so they are not on the hook for permanent changes,"
a senior official said about Syria's response. "They are doing
just enough to reduce the pressure in hopes we won't pay
attention, and then they slide back again."

        In an interview with CNN this week, Mr. Assad denied
that there were any insurgent sanctuaries inside Syria. "There
is no such safe haven or camp," he insisted.

        In this tense period of give and take between
Washington and Damascus, the firefight this summer was clearly
a critical event. It came at a time when the American military
in Iraq was mounting a series of major offensives in the
Euphrates Valley near the Syrian border to choke off the
routes that foreign fighters have used to get into Iraq.

        The Americans and Iraqis have been fortifying that
side of the border and increasing patrols, raising the
possibility of firing across the unmarked border and of
crossing it in "hot pursuit."

        From time to time there have been reports of clashes,
usually characterized as incidental friction between American
and Syrian forces. There have been some quiet attempts to work
out ways to avoid that, but formal agreements have been
elusive in an atmosphere of mutual mistrust.

        Some current and former United States military and
intelligence officials who said they believed that Americans
were already secretly penetrating Syrian territory question
what they see as the Bush administration's excessive focus on
the threat posed by foreign Arab fighters going through Syria.
They say the vast majority of insurgents battling American
forces are Iraqis, not foreign jihadis.

        According to a new study by the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, intelligence analysis and the
pattern of detentions in Iraq show that the number of foreign
fighters represents "well below 10 percent, and may well be
closer to 4 percent to 6 percent" of the total makeup of the
insurgency.

        One former United States official with access to
recent intelligence on the insurgency added that American
intelligence reports had concluded that 95 percent of the
insurgents were Iraqi.

        This former intelligence official said that in
conversations with several midcareer American military
officers who had recently served in Iraq, they had privately
complained to him that senior commanders in Iraq seemed
fixated on the issue of foreign fighters, despite the evidence
that they represented a small portion of the insurgency.

        "They think that the senior commanders are obsessed
with the foreign fighters because that's an easier issue to
deal with," the former intelligence official said. "It's
easier to blame foreign fighters instead of developing new
counterinsurgency strategies."

        Top Pentagon officials and senior commanders have said
that while the number of foreign fighters is small, they are
still responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Iraq.
Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of United States Central
Command, said on Oct. 2 on the NBC News program "Meet the
Press" that he recognized the need to avoid "hyping the
foreign fighter problem."

        But he cautioned that "the foreign fighters generally
tend to be people that believe in the ideology of Al Qaeda and
their associated movements, and they tend to be suicide bombers."

        "So while the foreign fighters certainly aren't large
in number," he said, "they are deadly in their application."

      -------

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051019/OPINION04/510190380

Article published October 19, 2005

  Expanding Iraq War into Syria is lunacy
  Dan Simpson

AS I suspected six months ago, and U.S. military and Bush
Administration civilian officials confirmed, U.S. forces have
invaded Syria and engaged in combat with Syrian forces.

An unknown number of Syrians are acknowledged to have been
killed; the number of Americans - if any - who have died so
far has not yet been revealed by the U.S. sources, who, by the
way, insist on remaining faceless and nameless.

The parallel with the Vietnam War, where a Nixon
administration deeply involved in a losing war expanded the
conflict - fruitlessly - to neighboring Cambodia, is obvious.
The result was not changed in Vietnam; Cambodia itself was
plunged into dangerous chaos which climaxed in the killing
fields, where an estimated 1 million Cambodians died as a
result of internal conflict.

On the U.S. side, no declaration of war preceded the invasion
of Syria, in spite of the requirements of the War Powers Act
of 1973. There is no indication that Congress was involved in
the decision to go in. If members were briefed, none of them
has chosen to share that important information with the
American people.

Presumably, the Bush Administration's intention is simply to
add any casualties of the Syrian conflict to those of the war
in Iraq, which now stand at 1,970. The financial cost of
expanding the war to Syria would also presumably be added to
the cost of the Iraq war, now estimated at $201 billion.

The Bush Administration would claim that it is expanding the
war in Iraq into Syria to try to bring it to an end, the kind
of screwy non-logic that kept us in Vietnam for a decade and
cost 58,193 American lives.

Others would see the attacks in Syria as a desperate political
move on the part of an administration with its back against
the wall, with an economy plagued by inflation, the weak
response to Hurricane Katrina, investigations of senior
executive and legislative officials, and the bird flu flapping
its wings on the horizon. The idea, I suppose, is to distract
us by an attack on Syria, now specifically targeted by U.S.
Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad.

And then there is the tired old United Nations. An invasion by
one sovereign member, the United States, of the territory of
another sovereign member (Syria), requires U.N. Security
Council action.

Some observers have argued that destabilizing Syria, creating
chaos there, even bringing about regime change from President
Bashar Assad, would somehow improve Israel's security posture
in the region. The argument runs that Saddam Hussein's Iraq
was the biggest regional threat to Israel; Mr. Assad's Syria
is second. The United States got rid of Saddam; now it should
get rid of the Assad regime in Damascus.

The trouble with that argument, whether it is made by
Americans or Israelis, is that, in practice, it depends on the
validity of the premise that chaos and civil war - the
disintegration of the state - in Iraq and Syria are better for
Israel in terms of long-term security than the perpetuation of
stable, albeit nominally hostile, regimes.

The evidence of what has happened in Iraq since the U.S.
invasion in early 2003 is to the contrary. Could anyone argue
that Israel is made safer by a burning conflict in Iraq that
has now attracted Islamic extremist fighters from across the
Middle East, Europe, and Asia? Saddam's regime was bad, but
this is a good deal worse, and looks endless.

Is there any advantage at all to the United States, or to
Israel, in replicating Iraq in Syria?

For that is what is at stake. Syria in its political, ethnic,
and religious structure is very similar to Iraq. Iraq, prior
to the U.S. bust-up, was ruled by a Sunni minority, with a
Shiite majority and Kurdish and Christian minorities. Syria is
ruled by an Alawite minority, with a Sunni majority and
Kurdish and Christian minorities. That is the structure, not
unlike many states in the Middle East, that the Bush
Administration is in the process of hacking away at.

It seems utterly crazy to me.

One could say, "Interesting theory; let's play it out," if it
weren't for the American men and women, not to mention the
Iraqis and now Syrians, dying in pursuit of that policy.

What needs to be done now is for the Congress, and through
them, the American people, the United Nations, and America's
allies, the ones who are left, to have the opportunity to
express their thoughts on America's expanding the Iraq war to
Syria.

A decision to invade Syria is not a decision for Mr. Bush,
heading a beleaguered administration, to make for us on his own.

Dan Simpson, a retired diplomat, is a member of the editorial
boards of The Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.