Bush's advisers debating military force against Syria

By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott
Knight Ridder Newspapers

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Civilians in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office are pushing for military action and have drawn up plans for punitive airstrikes and cross-border incursions by U.S. forces, according to three officials.

But Bush's White House advisers, backed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department, are arguing against a new military venture with much of the U.S. military tied down in Iraq and a presidential-election year under way.

That view appears to have prevailed, for now.

"We've got all we can handle, and then some, in Iraq, and our military is either stretched to the breaking point or already broken," said a senior administration official. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials, including those who oppose military action, say the government of Bashar Assad continues sponsoring anti-Israeli and anti-American terror groups, despite U.S. demands that it cease.

Iran, using Syria as a conduit, has resumed deliveries of supplies to Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese-based Shiite group responsible for bombing the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980s, the senior official said. Hezbollah also clashes periodically with Israeli border forces.

Israeli media claimed yesterday that Syrian planes carrying aid to Iran's earthquake victims returned with weapons for Hezbollah. Iran denied the report, and U.S. officials in two agencies said they had no information to confirm it.

Nor has Assad made good on a promise to Secretary of State Colin Powell last summer to close the Damascus offices of Palestinian terrorist groups, numerous officials said. While electricity and phone lines have been cut, the groups continue to operate using cellphones and generators.

Damascus also is resisting returning about $1 billion in Iraqi assets that Saddam had moved into Syrian banks, officials said.

The reassessment of Syria policy apparently began in late November, officials said, when Rumsfeld distributed a memo — known in government as a "snowflake" — complaining of Syrian behavior.

Rumsfeld charged that insurgents were continuing to cross unhindered from Syria into Iraq to attack U.S. troops, according to a U.S. official who has seen the document. He also suggested that Assad had colluded with the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al Sistani, who has issued edicts complicating U.S. plans to organize a government.

"It came over like a brick through a window," the official said of the Rumsfeld memo.

Some of Bush's hard-line advisers have argued for two years that Syria's regime should be the next U.S. target after Iraq.

Assad recently told a visiting American delegation that he has bent over backward to accommodate U.S. pressure to patrol the border and to crack down on terrorist financing.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company