Getting Syria inside the tent
REPERCUSSIONS FROM Israel's still unexplained raid Sept. 6 on a site in northern Syria extend to some of the world's most sensitive security issues. These include recent steps by North Korea to begin implementing a laboriously negotiated denuclearization agreement, and preparations for a Mideast peace conference next month in Annapolis, Md.
Israel and the United States have been exceptionally tight-lipped thus far about the target that was hit, the result of the attack, and the intelligence used to justify the strike. But some of the policy consequences are evident. They suggest that President Bush has sided with advisers who were not persuaded by Israeli intelligence briefings that North Korea has been peddling nuclear materials to Syria. This is a healthy sign of Bush's newfound interest in solving grave security problems by diplomatic means.
A year ago, after North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, Bush warned: "The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or nonstate entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable." If Bush believed North Korea has been selling centrifuges - or other materials - for a nascent nuclear weapons program in Syria, he would not have permitted the denuclearization agreement with the North to proceed without interruption.
There is another sign that Bush rejects the argument that the intelligence suggesting nuclear commerce between North Korea and Syria is credible enough to spur a revision of US policy toward both regimes. If he agreed, Bush would have revoked his invitation to Syria to attend the November Mideast peace conference.
Syria's hereditary president, Bashar Assad, has indicated he has no interest in going to Annapolis unless a return of the Golan Heights is added to an agenda that is currently focused on forging a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. But that is Assad's choice, not Bush's. In refusing to change course on the diplomatic tracks Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been pursuing in Northeast Asia and the Middle East, Bush appears to be heeding pragmatic skeptics in his administration such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates - who, as a former director of CIA, may be expected to know how to evaluate ambiguous intelligence data.
Assad's Syria is known to have chemical and biological weapons. His regime may have been seeking to acquire heavier warheads for its missiles or an airburst capability that could spread chemical agents over a populated area. But if Bush is now refusing to allow crucial policy decisions to be based on anything other than credible and convincing evidence of something more than the most rudimentary Syrian nuclear program, he has learned something from bitter experience.
