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CIAO DATE: 12/03
Political Attack Can Remove Terror Masters in Syria and Iran
On The Issues
May 2003
America cannot win the war on terrorism until the terror-sponsoring regimes in Syria and Iran are toppled. Fortunately a military campaign is unnecessary because both regimes are vulnerable to political attack.
The battle for Iraq is over, but the war against terrorism has only just begun.
As President George W. Bush has said since the first days after the September 11 attacks, this will be a long war, involving many terrorist organizations and many countries that support them.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq was never the most threatening of those countries. That dubious honor belongs to Iran, the creator of modern Islamic terrorism in the form of Hezbollah, arguably the world's most lethal terrorist organization.
And then there is Syria, which has worked hand-in-glove with Iran to support Hezbollah both in its terrorist garb (Hezbollah trains in the Bekaa Valley in Syrian-occupied Lebanon) and its political and philanthropic costume, in which Hezbollah members sit in the Lebanese parliament.
A Second Lebanon
Both Iran and Syria have been engaged in a desperate terrorist campaign against coalition forces in Iraq.
And neither country has been reluctant to announce its intentions. Early in April, for example, the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad incautiously told an interviewer that just because Iraq was conquered did not mean the coalition had won. He said the enemies of Britain and the United States would have to be patient, just as they were in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s, driving the United States and Israel out of the country by means of terrorist attacks.
And Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, announced publicly that the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq would be even worse than that of Hussein, arguably the man most hated by Iranians.
Their strategy of a second Lebanon was worked out over many months, and in the run-up to the coalition invasion both Syria and Iran facilitated the movement of terrorists into Iraq.
The joint strategy seems counterintuitive to those who believe it is next to impossible for Sunnis and Shiites to cooperate and that Iran could never cooperate with the Hussein regime. But both Syria and Iran have good reason to contest the coalition victory. Assad and Khamenei have both heard Bush's reference to the Axis of Evil, and they have studied the many White House statements over the past eighteen months. They have concluded that once the coalition victory in Iraq is consolidated, they are next on the hit list.
So the Syrians and the Iranians are going to fight now in Iraq. They are not going to send their armies against us, but rather a swarm of terrorists, from Hezbollah to Islamic Jihad, Hamas, al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, and the rest of the jihad mafia.
Meanwhile, warnings in recent days from U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and secretary of state Colin Powell have signaled something quite new in the war against terrorism. The State Department and the CIA have until recently argued in favor of a sort of strategic engagement of both Damascus and Tehran. Top diplomats and intelligence analysts had maintained that the United States and Syria had common interests in fighting terrorism, since Osama bin Laden had condemned the Assad family's secular tyranny. And despite Bush's harsh condemnations of Iran (an unelected regime defying the Iranian people's clearly expressed desire to be free), the State Department had continued to work for better relations with the mullahs.
But when both Powell and Rumsfeld come out swinging against the mullahs and the Assads, it is safe to assume they have solid and abundant information to show the "second Lebanon strategy" is being implemented.
So we can forget about the happy dream of being able to destroy the Ba'athist regime in Iraq, democratize the country, and then turn our attention elsewhere. We are in a regional struggle, and we are compelled to deal with it.
Now what? The short answer is: regime change.
Nonmilitary Regime Change
It is impossible to win the war on terrorism so long as the regimes in Syria and Iran remain in power. The good news is that both are vulnerable to political attack.
The soft underbelly of the Syrian regime is the very place Bashar Assad hailed as the model for the terrorist campaign against the coalition, namely Lebanon. The world knows Lebanon is a military colony of Damascus, and that despite its parliamentary fig-leaf, it is governed by the Syrian intelligence service.
We should unleash the full panoply of political weapons on behalf of Lebanese freedom: a vigorous human rights campaign, attention to the many stories of brutality and abuse coming from the lively Lebanese diaspora, political observers at every Lebanese election, demands for shutting down the infamous terrorist training camps in the Bekaa Valley, and investigations into the state of religious freedom.
Meanwhile, big brother should get similar treatment. Assad should be forced to account for the occupation of Lebanon. Perhaps one of those sanctimonious judges in Belgium or The Hague might have a look at the domination of Syria by an unelected regime from a minuscule sect.
I do not believe the Syrian people welcome dictatorship any more than the Iranians do, and the Iranians have made clear their hatred and contempt for the vicious mullahcracy that has wrecked their country over the past twenty-three years. In Iran, we have a seemingly irresistible political card to play: Give the people the same sort of political support we gave the Yugoslavs under Milosevic; the Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs under the Soviet empire; and the Filipinos under Marcos. We, and the Iranian people, want a peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. There is even a suitable leader for the transition period: the late shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, widely admired inside Iran despite his refreshing lack of avidity for power or wealth.
As Bush has said, this war has a variety of targets and requires a variety of strategies. No one I know wants to wage war on Iran and Syria, but there is now a clear recognition that we must defend ourselves against them. They are an integral part of the terror network that produced September 11. Left undisturbed, they will kill us in Iraq and Afghanistan and mount new attacks on our homelands.
But unlike Iraq, there is no need for a military campaign. Our most potent weapons are the peoples of Syria and Iran, and they are primed, loaded, and ready to fire. We should now pull the political lanyards and unleash democratic revolution on the terror masters in Damascus and Tehran.
Michael A. Ledeen is a resident scholar at AEI and author of The War against the Terror Masters (St. Martin's Press, 2002).
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