WP: "Justice for Syria" (Assad = the new Saddam)

[allemand]

Monday, December 19, 2005; Page A22

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S challenge to international security was exceptional in part because of his flagrant defiance of resolutions by the United Nations Security Council and his equally crude actions to obstruct the work of U.N. inspectors. Now another Arab Baathist dictator, Bashar Assad, has adopted the same tactics. Not only has Mr. Assad sought to obstruct a U.N. investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, but his agents in Lebanon are continuing to murder Syria's Lebanese critics.

The latest crime sets a new international standard for brazenness: On the very day that an investigating commission presented a report to the Security Council detailing Syrian complicity -- and stonewalling -- in the car bombing that killed Mr. Hariri, another car bomb took the life of Gebran Tueni. Mr. Tueni was one of Lebanon's best-known journalists and politicians and a fierce critic of Syria's interference in Lebanon. No, it isn't yet known for sure who carried out the assassination one week ago, just as the cases of Mr. Hariri and several other Lebanese activists murdered in the past 14 months have not been closed. But there are powerful reasons to share the belief of Lebanon's elected leaders, who have no doubt that Mr. Assad is systematically murdering some of their most courageous and distinguished citizens in order to defy the international coalition that forced him to withdraw Syrian troops from Lebanon. (...)

Mr. Assad seems to be calculating that his acts of terrorism eventually will force Lebanon to accept Syrian dominion again and that the Security Council will shrink from an all-out confrontation with him. If so, he might be encouraged by the council's latest resolution, approved Thursday; while it extended the term of the Mehlis investigation, it shrank from expanding it to cover the other murders and from imposing direct sanctions against Syria.

Lebanese leaders, such as Gebran Tueni, know very well that such weak measures will not stop Mr. Assad's campaign of murder. "When will this despotic regime come to its senses?" he asked in one of his last columns. He might have answered: Not until the Security Council, led by the United States, ensures that those who murder are brought to justice.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/18/AR2005121800674.html

Ironically, this editorial is a very good argument why the killing of Tueni was not in the interest of Bashar al-Asad, but rather in the interest of those who want to remove him from power (including Syrians) as it could only increase the pressure on his regime.

In contrast, Cairo-based New York Times reporter Michael Slackman sees a "certain naïveté" in the Mehlis report which reads like a bad spy novel because it is no better than a bad spy novel. To make the case for an invasion, the WP editorial quotes the testimony of Hussam Taher Hussam which implicated Asad's brother-in-law in the crime. Hussam has since recanted his testimony and so has the second key witness who currently sits in a French prison. In a letter to the Syrian embassy in Paris, Mohammad Zuhair al-Siddiq wrote that "he had been kidnapped and forced to make his previous testimony".
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=6314710&cKey=1134515124000

And even before Hussam recanted there were many doubt about his testimony, yet Mehlis decided to make it a central part of his report:

Who Killed Rafik Hariri? Searching for the Truth in the Middle East

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: December 18, 2005

(...)

But even before Mr. Hussam's self-exposure, many analysts outside the investigation doubted his spectacular account because it did not ring true to Syria. People like Mr. Shawkat, they knew, rarely get their hands dirty, and would be unlikely to let someone like Mr. Hussam, who worked as a barber in Lebanon, know about it.

"For him to know that would be very difficult socially," said a political analyst with residences in both Lebanon and Syria who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because his remarks could compromise his ability to work in both places. "Syria is a country where the leadership and the security chiefs have a small circle around them. They are not deeply engaged in society."

And yet to many political analysts and diplomats involved the region, the investigation also appeared to reflect a certain naïveté about political and cultural realities. (...)

In Syria, for example, there are half a dozen branches of the secret police. And, as in Lebanon, where government power is distributed among major religious groups, each power center has its own agenda. This means that government institutions in both countries are generally weak; the quest for power and dominance among Christians, Druze, Shiites, Sunnis, Alawites and Kurds often matters more than job titles or government documents. And an investigator who lacks a thorough understanding of all those relationships and interrelationships may not be able to judge the significance of the evidence he is given.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/weekinreview/18slackman.html

[bemildred]

1. I notice that nobody wanted to put their name to this drivel. nt

[allemand]

2. There is a similar editorial in today's NYT. A mere coincidence?

Letting Down Lebanon
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/opinion/19mon2.html

It reminds me of what Scott Ritter said about John Bolton, the Security Council and Iran:

"And we're looking at the United States working very hard to get the issue of Iran's nuclear program transferred from Vienna to the United Nations. And I guarantee you when it is transferred and when the Russians veto the American effort to put sanctions on Iran, John Bolton has already written his speech. He will stand up, and he will condemn the Security Council as an ineffective body that is unwilling to stand up and deal with genuine threats to the security of the United States of America, and the United States cannot afford to stand by and let this situation exist, and if the Security Council won't deal with Iran, then we will deal with it unilaterally. That speech has been written. I know the people that helped draft that speech. And he's ready to give it when it occurs."
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/21/144258
(my emphasis)

[bemildred]

3. Mere coincidence.

There is, of course, nobody who is able to tell the august editors of the NYT and WaPo what to put in their OpEd pages on any given day. :sarcasm:

[Demeter]

4. Beating the War Drum for Bush?

The Washington Post should be ashamed of itself.