Syria: US goes it alone again

Simon Tisdall
guardian.co.uk, Monday October 27 2008

"Syria's shrill protests over yesterday's US special forces raid are a measure of the political and military weakness, bordering on impotence, of Bashar al-Assad's hollowed-out regime. But the hit-and-run attack, similar in concept and execution to September's US incursion into Pakistan, also reflects the near-bankruptcy of the Bush administration's "war on terror" strategy, which seems to grow more dangerously reckless by the day.

In some ways it is surprising Assad is still around to protest. Syria's humiliating troop withdrawal from Lebanon, sanctions, internal dissent, and UN inquiries into the Syrian president's alleged link to the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri all suggested, not so long ago, that regime change in Damascus was imminent.

Assad's survival has come at a high cost to Syria's standing and freedom of manoeuvre. Attempting to fend off isolation, he has edged uncertainly into indirect peace talks with Israel, into a diplomatic accommodation with his Lebanese blood-foes, and into the hot embrace of France's Arabophile president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Assad's foreign minister was in London today, pursuing this ambivalent western rapprochement.......

The US attack is but the latest in a series of unanswered affronts to Syria. In September last year Israeli bombers destroyed a supposed nuclear facility. There have been several violent deaths of senior regime figures, such as the army general Mohammed Suleiman, and of Syria's proteges, such as Hizbullah's Imad Mughniyeh. And there have been "hot pursuit" US cross-border attacks before, notably in 2005 when a border guard was killed.

"The common denominator of all these operations is that nobody takes the Syrians seriously any more, given the repeated violations of their sovereignty. It is doubtful the domestic security situation there has ever been this unstable," said Amos Harel of the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz......."