The White House has privately ruled out suggestions that the US should go to war against Syria following its military success in Iraq, and has blocked preliminary planning for such a campaign in the Pentagon, the Guardian learned yesterday.
In the past few weeks, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, his undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, and William Luti, the head of the Pentagon's office of special plans, were asked to put together a briefing paper on the case for war against Syria, outlining its role in supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein, its links with Middle East terrorist groups and its allegedly advanced chemical weapons program. Feith and Luti were both instrumental in persuading the White House to go to war in Iraq.
However, US President George W. Bush, who faces re-election next year with two perilous nation-building projects, in Afghanistan and Iraq, on his hands, is said to have cut off discussion among his chief advisers about the possibility of taking the "war on terror" to Syria.
"The talk about Syria didn't go anywhere. Basically, the White House shut down the discussion," an intelligence source in Washington told The Guardian.
Faced with rising apprehension over the prospect of a new conflict, Tony Blair also offered categorical assurances to anxious MPs yesterday that Britain and the US had "no plans whatsoever" to invade Iraq's neighbor.
Dismissing fears of an Anglo-American invasion as another "conspiracy theory," the prime minister said that Bush had never mentioned an attack on Syria during their regular talks.
"I have the advantage of talking to the American president on a regular basis and I can assure you there are no plans to invade Syria," he said.
"Neither has anyone on the other side of the water, as far as I am aware, said there are plans."
The Bush administration is nevertheless determined to use its military ascendancy in the region to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on Damascus and resolve what Washington sees as longstanding problems, including the threat to Israel posed by Damascus-backed Islamic extremists, Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Syria's chemical weapons.
Rumsfeld repeated accusations yesterday that Syria had tested chemical weapons in the last 12 to 15 months. However, Syria is not a signatory to the chemical weapons convention and would not be breaking international law if it did possess such an arsenal.
One US administration official conceded: "They've not taken any actions that we can see so far that would justify military action."
Blair made clear to Syria yesterday that it must not accept high-level political fugitives or weapons of mass destruction from Iraq.
"It is important Syria does not harbor people from Saddam's regime or allow any transfer of material from Iraq to Syria. I have spoken to President Assad and he has assured me that is not happening and I have said it is important that assurance is valid," Blair told MPs.
A diplomat in Washington with close ties to the administration agreed there was no sign of military action on the horizon.
"There's no question of this at the White House," the diplomat said, pointing out that the Syrian army would be a far more potent adversary than Iraq's bedraggled forces. "Anyone who lives in the real world would never see this as more than noise."
Instead the administration expects that the loss of income from smuggling arms and oil to and from Iraq will make Damascus vulnerable to economic pressure. Congress is examining the Syrian accountability act, which would impose tough sanctions on Damascus.
British officials confirm they share US alarm about Syria's recent conduct and its sponsorship role in Palestinian terrorism. But Blair has cultivated Bashar al-Assad, its British-educated president, and adopts a more conciliatory tone towards Damascus.
"It's a bit of a good cop, bad cop routine," one Whitehall official said of the tougher line coming from the US. The prime minister's upbeat report to MPs on what, for the first time, he called victory in the three-week Iraq war was marred by skeptical challenges from both sides based on reports from Washington that hawks within the Bush administration want to move on the Baathist regime next door.
Evidently exasperated, Blair denounced "conspiracy theories" and insisted that he could not be clearer about his determination to tackle Syria by diplomacy.
His remarks came hours after the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, warned President Assad that he would have to face up to "the new reality" of the post-Saddam world. Speaking in Kuwait on the second leg of a four-country tour of the Gulf, Straw said: "There are a number of questions it is very important that Syria should answer and in a cooperative way."
His tough remarks were echoed by the defense secretary, Geoff Hoon, who warned that Britain had concerns for some time about Syria's desire to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Hoon referred to a government paper, presented to parliament in February last year, which raised questions about Syria's weapons program. The document said that Syria was one of five countries attempting to "obtain inventories of longer-range ballistic missiles". The other countries included North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Libya.
The Syrian ambassador to London angrily rejected suggestions that Damascus had any weapons of mass destruction or was harboring members of Saddam's regime. Mouafak Nassar told Radio 4's The World at One: "I will say I am wondering why they are targeting one Arab country after the other. They are ignoring totally the country that has mass destruction weapons -- Israel."
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