Expanding the war?
Bush threatens
Syria, Iran
By
Deirdre Griswold
Published Feb 17, 2005 8:02 PM
Could the adventurist neo-con regime in
Washington be poised for yet another aggressive military move in the oil-rich
Middle East? Even though the current conflict--the drawnout and bloody struggle
with an elusive but effective Iraqi resistance movement that refuses to accept
the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country--has earned them worldwide
condemnation and hatred, many signs point in the direction of more aggressions
to come.
If so, it will not be the first time that U.S. imperialist
strategists have tried to rescue a failing colonial adventure by widening the
conflict--as they did in 1970 when, faced with fierce resistance from the
Vietnamese, they launched a calamitous invasion of Cambodia.
The latest
targets of administration hawks are the governments of Iran and Syria. On Feb.
16, after a hasty meeting of high govern ment officials, the two countries
announced a common front against outside threats--clearly a reference to the
Bush administration.
The trigger for this crisis appears to have been the
assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister of Lebanon, in an
extremely powerful explosion. Speculation on exactly what happened and who was
behind the blast is rife, but the U.S. immediately withdrew its ambassador to
Syria in a move obviously meant to cast suspicion on that country. Syria's
ambassador to Washington had already denied and denounced the killing of Hariri,
calling it "a catastrophe for Syria."
However, like the kangaroo court in
"Alice in Wonderland," the U.S. attitude was "sentence first, verdict
afterwards." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, while admitting that the U.S.
has no evidence to accuse Syria formally, called the country a "big problem" in
testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 16.
Washington
has for some time been trying to pressure Syria into allowing U.S. and Iraqi
puppet troops to cross its border in "hot pursuit" of the Iraqi resistance.
Syria has turned them down.
At the same time, Iran has charged that U.S.
drone spy planes have been spotted many times reconnoitering in areas where Iran
is constructing nuclear power plants, and said it will shoot down any
unidentified planes that enter its territory. The U.S. is accusing Iran of
developing nuclear weapons--a charge that the International Atomic Energy Agency
refuses to support and that Iran denies.
The emergency meeting between the
Syrian and Iranian leaders is a sure sign that they are trying to ward off an
attack. Iran has been bracing for such an eventuality ever since President
George W. Bush in 2002 announced it was part of an "axis of evil." In this
year's State of the Union speech, in language reminiscent of the false reasons
he gave for invading Iraq, Bush singled out both Syria and Iran, accusing them
of "promoting terrorism" and seeking "weapons of mass destruction."
Since
Jan. 1, over 100,000 new U.S. troops have been sent to the Middle East. They are
part of a "rotation" that by the end of March will have seen some 230,000 U.S.
soldiers, marines and reservists moved to the area, many of them on a forced
second tour of duty.
The administration is desperate to subdue the growing
resistance in Iraq. It has a tricky political situation on its hands, since the
bloc which got the largest vote in the U.S.-organized elections is that of the
Shias, who have always been close to Iran. And the Shia masses expect that a new
Iraqi government will tell the U.S. troops to leave.
Whatever happens in
the days and weeks to come, the need to get into the streets against this war
will only grow stronger.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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