October 9, 2001
On Sunday, the United States formally notified the United Nations Security
Council that its counterterrorism military attacks may not be limited to
Afghanistan. The legal document the United States sent to the U.N. Security
Council asserted that the United States reserved its right to attack terrorist cells
beyond Afghanistan, a senior administration official told the Associated Press.
Clearly, one leading candidate for later attack is Syria, which has sponsored
terrorism and harbored and protected terrorists for decades, including several
groups operating in Lebanon, which Syria considers a province.
Yesterday, the U.N. General Assembly elected Syria to one of the 10
rotating seats on the Security Council, a development that Democratic Rep.
Tom Lantos rightly decried as a “mockery of the council’s recent
counterterrorism resolution.”
Syria has remained a fixture on the State Department’s list of states that
sponsor terrorism since it became a charter member of the list in 1979.
Demonstrating yet again that Orwellian doublespeak is an integral part of
all totalitarian regimes, including Syria’s, earlier this month Syrian Foreign
Minister Farouk Sharaa announced that Syria was “determined to help the
international effort to combat terrorism.”
Syria’s “help,” however, was conditional. Alluding to the Arab-Israeli
conflict, Mr. Sharaa declared that terrorism could not be eliminated until its
“roots and causes” were addressed, notably the Israeli occupation of Arab
lands, which Mr. Sharaa called “the highest level of terrorism.”
Never mind that the occupation to which Mr. Sharaa referred was the direct
result of the 1967 Six Day War, which was precipitated by Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s expulsion of U.N. peacekeepers and Egyptian and Syrian
mass military mobilizations. And never mind that Israel returned the Sinai
Peninsula to Egypt in the historic 1979 land-for-peace agreement negotiated at
Camp David.
Regarding the Golan Heights, which Syria lost to Israel in 1967, it is worth
recalling what happened following last year’s negotiations in Shepherdstown,
W. Va., between then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Mr. Sharaa himself.
Less than three weeks later, Mr. Sharaa delivered a speech in Syria at the Arab
Writers Association meeting. He was asked whether the recent land-for-peace
negotiations indicated that Syria would be granting “the Zionists a right in
Palestine.”
Mr. Sharaa confirmed what Israel had always feared was Syria’s
long-term strategy. “estoring Palestine in its entirety is a long-term strategic
goal that cannot be achieved in one stage,” Mr. Sharaa declared. “The first
stage is the stage of restoring the occupied lands of 1967.” He left no doubt
what stage two would be.
Indeed, the Syrians have rarely disguised their long-term objective of
obliterating Israel. Terrorism and war are merely the means. For years Syria has
provided a safe haven for some of the most extreme members of the Palestine
Liberation Organization. It strongly supports Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah
in Lebanon.
In short, Syria deserves to be in the crosshairs of the anti-terrorism campaign,
not on the U.N. Security Council.
