|
Syria, Arabs fear Iraq war
Syria is making an intense diplomatic effort among its Middle Eastern neighbors and further abroad to prevent an apparently inevitable U.S.-led war on Iraq. Damascus suspects that Washington's plan to reshape the Middle East region after the removal of Iraq's Saddam Hussein includes Israeli hegemony over the region. "Syria fears Washington would restructure the region in line with its new vision," a Western diplomat told United Press International. This vision, the diplomat said, sees Israeli hegemony as possible after the liquidation of the Palestinian cause and the acceptance of Israel continuing to occupy Syria's Golan Heights and the Shabaa farms. The latter is territory on the Israeli border that Syria says belongs to Lebanon but Israel insists is part of Syria.I think they're a lot more worried about the idea of a democratic libertarian Iraq next door. They probably don't have as much to worry about as they think they do, since all the usual authoritarians will be trying to grab power for themselves, but it'll still be a contrast to Syria. The Israeli scare is probably valid, to a point, because without Sammy the PLO's going to be in pretty dire straits; without the PLO the Paleostinian problem assumes a different dimension and the Arab states will have to do something different from what they've been doing for the past 50 years... Another worry is an influx of Iraqi war refugees and chaos on its border with Iraq should civil war break out there. Equally troubling to Damascus is a dread it shares with Ankara: the appearance on its border of an Iraqi Kurdish state that would be a lure for its own Kurds. These number 1.5 million or so in Syria and about 12 million in Turkey. Maybe they should have worked for regime change within an Arab context before now, so that we wouldn't have had to do it. Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-02-05 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=9939 |