Washington – President Bush and his top aides are weighing new steps against Syria, according to U.S. officials involved in Middle East policy.
Bush’s national security team was scheduled to meet Saturday to review U.S. policy toward Syria, the officials said. Options range from tougher economic sanctions to limited military action. One official involved in the deliberations said military action is unlikely for now.
The meeting comes as a United Nations investigator nears completion of a report that’s expected to provide evidence that Syrian security agencies were involved in the February assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
The investigator, German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, is drawing on debriefings from one or more defectors from the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The defectors have provided evidence of Syrian government complicity in Hariri’s death, said two U.S. officials, who requested anonymity.
The U.S. government also has accused Syria of allowing insurgents to cross its territory and enter Iraq, and recently has ratcheted up its demands that the traffic be halted.
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad warned in mid- September that “our patience is running out.”
“There’s sort of a sense that the Syrians have to get serious about shutting down these pipelines,” a senior administration official said Friday, describing two major routes by which insurgents cross from Syria into Iraq.
Syria represents a complex challenge for Bush and his national security team as they wrestle with the war in Iraq.
There’s disagreement within the White House over the extent of the Syrian regime’s backing of the Iraqi insurgency, support that Syria denies.
The CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency have reported that the evidence is inconclusive, one official said.
Others argue that military action could destabilize or even topple Assad’s regime, with no good replacement at hand.
Since Hariri’s assassination, Bush has pursued a policy of increasing pressure on Syria, with backing from the international community.
“It’s an undeclared posture of ‘regime change’ on the cheap,” said Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst and author of a recent book on Assad. The administration hopes to topple Assad without resorting to a costly invasion as in Iraq, Leverett said.
The options on the table for Saturday’s White House meeting include imposing more sanctions on Syria, authorized under the 2003 Syria Accountability Act; reaching out to Syrian opposition groups; and taking limited military action, such as the use of U.S. special forces, to stop the flow of insurgents, according to an official involved in the deliberations.
The Bush administration, he said, calculates that the Mehlis investigation is putting significant pressure on Assad and is helping to build an international consensus to isolate Syria.
“We don’t want to blow that,” he said, in explaining why military action is unlikely.
