'Is Syria next?'

London Book of Reviews
Charles Glass

<snip>
When Colin Powell visited Bashar Assad after the conquest of Baghdad it was to name the price of Baathism's survival in Syria: ending support for Hizbollah in Lebanon, closing the Damascus offices of Palestinian guerrilla organisations and deporting their leaders. He told President Assad not to allow Palestinian spokesmen in Syria to speak to journalists.

<snip>
'Israel can shape its strategic environment, in co-operation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria,' a Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy advised Benjamin Netanyahu when he assumed office in 1996. This group's paper, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm', suggested that efforts should 'focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions'.
Did the United States invade Iraq with this objective in mind? The advice that Perle, Feith and other American friends of Israel's Likud irredentists gave Netanyahu in 1996 became the Bush Administration's policy in 2003.

<snip>
The reasons stated in public for invading Iraq - sometimes Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, occasionally his mythical collusion with Osama bin Laden, often his brutality - never included 'foiling Syria'. However desirable to the Likud Government, this would not have struck American public opinion as a plausible casus belli. (Did anyone tell Tony Blair about the Syrian objective?) After the toppling of Saddam's statues in Baghdad in April, however, the Bush Administration turned its attention to perhaps the real objective of the war: Syria.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n14/glas01_.html