WASHINGTON: A group of Bush Administration hawks, many of them Jewish, has begun openly portraying Syria as the next candidate for \u201cr\u00e9gime change\u201d in the Middle East\u2039though making clear they do not envisage Iraq-style US military intervention. <\/p>\n
Widely described in Washington political and media circles as the \u201cNeo-conservatives\u201d, \u2018Neo-cons,\u2019 for short, the group includes deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, a close adviser to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Among other leading lights are William Kristol, editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard, who is close to Vice-President Dick Cheney, and the syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. <\/p>\n
Speaking on NBC\u00b9s \u00b3Meet the Press\u00b2 at the weekend, Mr Wolfowitz reiterated US allegations that the r\u00e9gime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been allowing military equipment and fighters into Iraq to support its fight against US and British forces. <\/p>\n
\u201dThere\u00b9s got to be a change in Syria,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Syrians need to know they\u00b9ll be held accountable.\u201d <\/p>\n
Emphasising what he saw as the longer-term impact of the defeat of Saddam Hussein\u00b9s r\u00e9gime, he said: \u201cI think a lot of countries, including Syria, will eventually get the message that it\u00b9s much better to come to terms peacefully with the international community, to not acquire weapons of mass destruction, not use terrorism as an instrument of policy.\u201d <\/p>\n
Mr Perle said in an interview this week: \u201cYou can arrive at Damascus and ask a taxi driver to take you to one of several terrorist organisations.\u201d <\/p>\n
But on the issue of possible US military action, he added: \u201cThere are different ways to get people to change, and I hope the example of Iraq after Afghanistan will prove persuasive \u201c <\/p>\n
\u201dWe should be using all the instruments of US influence to accomplish that purpose, and most of those instruments are not military.\u201d <\/p>\n
Some in the Bush Administration were explicitly playing down the prospect of direct US action against Damascus\u2039 and of possible links between the Syrians and Saddam Hussein. <\/p>\n
General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there was \u201cno evidence\u201d to support recent allegations by Israeli leaders\u2039and some US intelligence officials, which suggested Iraq might have moved weapons of mass destruction across the border into Syria. <\/p>\n
http:\/\/thejc.com\/News.asp?Page=3&Type=4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: A group of Bush Administration hawks, many of them Jewish, has begun openly portraying Syria as the next candidate for \u201cr\u00e9gime change\u201d in the Middle East\u2039though making clear they do not envisage Iraq-style US military intervention. Widely described in Washington political and media circles as the \u201cNeo-conservatives\u201d, \u2018Neo-cons,\u2019 for short, the group includes deputy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Miscellaneous"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}