George Bush to Syria: stop interfering in Lebanon’s electoral process and get your intelligence agents out of Lebanon.
Subtext (undefined consequence): or else. If you recall, during the last round of this crisis Syria had withdrawn its troops and, amid much journalistic fanfare, reports said it was withdrawing its intelligence agents, too. Few believe that has happened now. CNN reports:
President Bush said Friday that he was disturbed by reports that Syria might still have intelligence agents operating in Lebanon.
“Obviously, we are are going to follow up on these troubling reports and we expect the Syrian government to follow up on these troubling reports,” Bush said during a media availability with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun.
Bush said the message of the United States and the United Nations is for Lebanon to be free, Syria must remove both military and intelligence personnel.
A U.N. investigation team will be sent into Lebanon to check into the allegations, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said Friday. No date was set.
And the U.S. is not expressing concerns about a general problem but a very specific one, involving Lebanese politicos it feels may actually be targeted:
A senior State Department official told CNN that the United States has received what it believes are credible reports that Syria has drawn up a “hit list” of Lebanese political figures targeted for assassination in an effort to regain control of the country.
The official said “credible” Lebanese politicians in recent days contacted political officers at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and told them about the list, which they say includes Lebanese opposition leader Walid Jumblatt and other anti-Syrian politicians “who pose a threat to Syrian political hegemony” in Lebanon.
“We haven’t seen the list and we don’t know for sure it exists,” the State Department official said. “But given that the Lebanese are scared, given the fact that a number of people to date have been assassinated and given that Syrian intelligence officers are still in Lebanon, we are convinced and have to give it credibility.”
The Washington Post has this response from Syria:
At the United Nations, Syrian ambassador Fayssal Mekdad said that any intelligence operatives in Lebanon were from France, the United States, or Israel. ”Let them investigate themselves,” Mekdad told Reuters.
And Syrian’s Misinformation Information Minister was equally blunt, telling the Khaleej Times:
Syria’s information minister denied late Friday US accusations that Syria still had intelligence agents in Lebanon as “baseless and non-objective’, SANA news agency quoted him as saying.
Mahdi Dakhlallah stressed that Syria has withdrawn all its troops and intelligence agents and is dealing with Lebanon in an “overt way and without any acts that have secret nature�, the report added. �All Syrian troops, of all their different divisions, have withdrawn from Lebanon, and this was verified by the United Nations,� Dakhlallah said.
The question now is where all of this leading. Is this a matter of continued verbal warnings and threats? Or is there a real prospect of some kind of special UN sanctions against Lebanon (if evidence is undercovered) or U.S. military action?
SOME RELATED READINGS:
–In an analysis, one website, Watching the Watchers, calls the administration hypocritical, pointing to U.S. treatment of its prisoners and the Bush administrations overall attitude towards other ideas:”(Free) societies depend on oversight and welcome informed criticism. Good point. The Bush administration welcomes NO criticism, and suppresses oversight at every opportunity. Truthfully, the people who have lost any claim to objectivity or seriousness are the people running the United States of America.”
—Watching America, a wonderful website that carries analyses done by various foreign newspapers (many of them with translations done by that site) contains this from the Syrian newspaper Teshreen:
Today, everyone in the region and the world knows that the American neo-conservatives (whose star was waning, were it not for the September 11 attacks!) are trying to benefit from the current situation by any means. Their tools include – or rather is primarily – the use of military force, which seeks to tighten America’s grip on the world, and especially on our strategically vital region. Since Syria is the primary opposition force, and in many ways the only opposing block, it has seen a daily increase in pressure, threats, and preposterous accusations that have no factual basis or any credible evidence…
–Primer on Syrian intelligence services. Documents a fact: Syrian intelligence most certainly does exist.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.