The latest on Syria

I have long suggested that we should be more suspicious of the Syrian regime. Not only did they gun down anti-Syrian and former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri last year, putting into more details are emerging about the role that Syria had in assisting and encouraging the terrorist insurgency in Iraq. See here:

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria secretly incited Iraq's top Shia leader to declare holy war against US and British forces, according to Washington's former administrator in the country.

In his new book, My Year in Iraq, Paul Bremer said he heard the explosive intelligence in October 2003 as sectarian tensions soared across the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein.

News of Assad's actions ‘stunned’ the US administration in Iraq
The report came from an extremely senior source, the supreme leader of Iraq's majority Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

According to Mr Bremer, the news was passed to him by Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a senior Shia politician involved in negotiations with the ayatollah. The Syrian leader had apparently recalled the Shia-led uprising against the British in 1920 and urged the Shia to repeat history.

The news "stunned" the US administration in Iraq. "This was an act of extraordinary irresponsibility from Syria's president," Mr Bremer writes. "We had good intelligence showing that many insurgents and terrorists were coming into Iraq through Syria."

But the allegation was far more serious, he says. "This message from Assad essentially incited Shia rebellion. If he were to succeed, the coalition would face an extremely bloody two-front uprising, costing thousands of lives."

The revelation that Syria's leader was trying to stoke unrest inside Iraq goes some way to explaining Washington's unrelenting hostility towards the Damascus regime ever since.

While it's well known that while Bashar Assad and Saddam are both Ba'athists, they were hardly brothers-in-arms. (The same applies to Assad's father, Hafez, who ruled Syria from 1971-2000 before passing away.) However, I believe that if Saddam did indeed have WMD, they were hauled to Syria in advance of the invasion. Israeli intel has suggested so and the links between Syria and the insurgency are also suspicious. Then again, Assad has not proven to have the political savvy of his father, so perhaps a lot of his actions since aceding to power and since the Iraq invasion particularly can be chalked up to pure megalomania combined with the fact that he is simply in over his head.

Recently, former allies of Assad have called for his ouster. I wouldn't be surprised to see a coup sometime in the next 12 months.