AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

“So now Syria is in America’s gun sights. First it’s Iraq, Israel’s most powerful enemy, possessor of weapons of mass destruction — none of which has been found. Now it’s Syria, Israel’s second most powerful enemy, possessor of weapons of mass destruction, or so President George Bush Junior tells us. No word of that possessor of real weapons of mass destruction, Israel — the number of its nuclear warheads in the Negev are now accurately listed — whose Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, has long been complaining that Damascus is the [quote] “centre of world terror.” That was the beginning of Robert Fisk’s piece in The Independent today, the British newspaper.

The U.S. yesterday threatened Syria with diplomatic and economic pressure, as a series of top officials accused Damascus of supporting terrorism. Donald Rumsfeld alleged Syria had carried out chemical weapons tests over the past 12 to 15 months. “Rogue state” is now White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer’s description of Syria. And Secretary of State General Colin Powell hinted economic sanctions against Syria might be in order.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned last night that recent U.S. warnings to Syria could contribute to a wider destabilization of the region, already wracked by the War in Iraq.

Syria has denied Washington’s accusations. They’ve called it an attempt to obscure the events in Iraq, and yesterday accused Israel of being behind the weapons and terrorism accusations.

Today we’re going to have a conversation with Patrick Seale, longtime reporter who has covered the Middle East for more than 30 years. His book is Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East. We’ll also be joined by Scott Davis, publisher of CUNE Press and author of Road from Damascus: A Journey Through Syria. He was in Syria for the first 10 days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But we’ll start with what Colin Powell, Secretary of State, had to say.

SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL: The basic point is that the card deck of 55, 53, plus others who have knowledge about weapons of mass destruction development activity over the years, plus those who are in other senior political leadership positions in the former regime or in the Ba’ath Party, these are the kinds of individuals who should not be allowed to find safe haven in Syria. And this is a point that we have made to the Syrians directly and we’ll continue to make to the Syrians.

And as the president noted over the weekend, we are concerned that Syria has been participating in the development of weapons of mass destruction, and, as the president noted, specifically on chemical weapons. And we believe, in light of this new environment, they should review their actions and their behavior, not only with respect to who gets haven in Syria and weapons of mass destruction, but especially the support of terrorist activity.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was General Colin Powell, secretary of state.

Patrick Seale is on the line with us from Paris, a British reporter who’s covered the Middle East for over 30 years, written a biography of the late leader of Syria, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

PATRICK SEALE: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: As you listened to Colin Powell, your thoughts?

PATRICK SEALE: Well, you see, the United States is engaged in, really, what is an imperial project. Its attack on Iraq, the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, this is a Western intervention such as we’ve not seen in the region since the drawing of the Middle East political map after the First World War. It dwarfs the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt of 1956. So this is a major, major intervention. The United States has assumed, and is assuming, a gigantic task of reconstruction, political and economic reconstruction of this fairly large country.

I would say that America’s immediate aim is to prevent any interference from outside in what it’s doing. You see, I think what they were frightened of, perhaps are still frightened of, is a Lebanese-type situation in which you get hit-and-run attacks, suicide bombings by local guerrilla groups. Now, these groups, to be effective, would need outside help, for safe havens outside, supplies of funds and weapons. Now, I think that the immediate threat to Syria is to prevent any such interference in the ongoing pacification of Iraq. That, I think, is a sort of minimum agenda that the Americans are now seeking. But, of course, their agenda is much wider than that. It is, of course, to achieve total preeminence in the region, in what is a very important strategic and oil-rich region.

Then I think this dovetails with a more limited Israel agenda. And, of course, as we all know, Israel has many prominent friends in the administration. And their agenda is much more focused on the sort of Syria-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Palestine axis. And the Israeli interest is, of course, to weaken all those parties, to weaken Syria ahead of any possible negotiation over the Golan Heights, to weaken the Palestinians ahead of any negotiation over the West Bank, to bring Hezbollah to heel, to sever relations between Syria and Hezbollah. These are the immediate preoccupations of Israel as it incites the United States to take on Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Davis, you’ve written Damascus: A Journey Through Syria, and you’ve just returned from Syria. You were there for the first two weeks of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Can you describe what it was like there?

SCOTT C. DAVIS: Good to be here, Amy. My name is Scott C. Davis. And the name of my book is The Road from Damascus: A Journey Through Syria. I’ve been completely dismayed to see this campaign of smear, innuendo and disinformation taking place. I’d love to respond kind of technically and historically, the way Patrick has been, but he’s an expert at that. And my initial response is it’s just a crime to take a nation of 17 million people, most of whom love America more than anything in the world, and to turn them into this terrorist nation, which is actually a figment of somebody’s imagination in the United States or possibly in Israel, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with what people in Syria think and what they feel day after day.

Just about three weeks ago, I met with a woman actually across the border in Lebanon, Amal Mudallali, who’s the press secretary to the president of Lebanon — actually, they call it the prime minister, but the number one guy. And she works both in Beirut and in Washington, D.C. And we talked about the political situation leading up to war. And she said, “You know, I’ve spent a lot of time in America. I love America. I love American culture. I love the ideals of America. I love the openness, the generosity, th friendliness of Americans.” And she says, “I just hope the Americans don’t decide that we Arabs have to be their enemies.” You know? And that’s exactly what’s happening right now with Syria.

Why is it that all of a sudden Syria’s the bad guy, when right after September 11th Syria was the Arab country that, you know, the foreign minister, I believe it was, jumped up in parliament and spent two or three hours denouncing the September 11th attacks immediately after they happened? Now, I didn’t see news coverage of this in the United States. Also, across the border in Lebanon, the spiritual leader of the Hezbollah, a man named Imam Fadlallah, went public and offered condolences to the victims of the September 11th attacks. OK? So, you know, we don’t hear these things. There’s tremendous sympathy. There’s tremendous generosity expressed by Syrians and by the Syrian government toward the United States. None of that stuff comes onto our media.

What do we get? We get tremendous, tremendous, tremendous air play to completely unfounded, as far as we know, accusations and smears. How do you defend against a question like “When did you stop beating your wife?” And we have all of these kind of accusations coming from the very highest political level in the United States, and it’s like completely embarrassing. What happened to the American sense of fair play? What happened to the idea that we present at least a little bit of evidence to back up our accusations and smears? And, you know, isn’t it — isn’t it really unfair that the American people have almost no experience of Syria, no understanding of Syria, they never met Syrians, they don’t know what’s going on in Syria, they don’t understand how much Syrians admire and love the United States, and then, on top of that, the administration makes these outrageous charges? Americans have no other way to deal with them but to accept these outrageous charges, and they have no context.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break. Scott C. Davis, author of Road from Damascus: A Journey Through Syria. Patrick Seale has written the biography of Assad, called Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Helwa Ya Baladi,” Dalida, here on Democracy Now!'s War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. We have on the line with us Patrick Seale, author of Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East. Before we go through the Arab press and what they’re saying around Washington’s warnings to Syria, could you give us a little history lesson about Syria, about Assad, about his son, the current leader? What should we understand?

PATRICK SEALE: Well, the young leader of Syria took over in July 2000. His father, Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria for 30 years, died in June 2000. Now, one has to say that the father, Hafez al-Assad, his main preoccupation was in the geopolitics of the region, and especially, of course, countering the threat from Israel, which he saw as an expansionist and aggressive neighbor.

Now, one of the highlights of his life was the struggle for Lebanon following the Israeli invasion of 1982, which, incidentally, killed about 18,000 people in its first few weeks. And the Israelis stayed on for 22 years. It was a much more vicious and brutal invasion, incidentally, than Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But what followed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was an attempt by the United States, at the time by Secretary of State George Shultz, to broker an agreement between Israel and Lebanon, which would have brought Lebanon into Israel’s sphere of influence, made Lebanon, in fact, a sort of vassal state. And Assad of Syria, next door, fought this and managed to torpedo the agreement which George Shultz had brokered, and brought Lebanon, in fact, into Syria’s sphere of influence, saving it from Israel’s embrace, as it were. And this was judged to be really one of the highlights — one of the highlights of his career. But, as I say, particularly in the last 10 years of his life, when he was fighting and confronting people like Israel’s prime minister at the time, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the axis which Israel forged with Turkey, these were all seen as threatening moves to Syria.

Now, a result of his preoccupation with foreign affairs was a certain neglect of internal affairs. And when his son took over, he found he really had a very heavy legacy of stagnation, of backwardness, in almost every field. He’s tried in the last couple of years to institute reforms in things like higher education and the government administration and the prison system and the judiciary and many other areas of life. But he hasn’t been able to touch the core political structures of the regime, of which he is, after all, the main beneficiary. So it remains, essentially, a one-party system, under the rule of the Ba’ath Party. It remains a fairly authoritarian system, though, of course, nothing like the system which we’ve just seen overthrown in Iraq. But nevertheless, he has a very, very difficult task in a very hostile environment.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the big question the administration is asking right now is: Did Ba’ath Party officials from Iraq go into Syria? And then, of course, there’s the question of Saddam Hussein. While Al Jazeera yesterday had an interview with an Iraqi journalist close to the Iraqi regime who said that he believes Saddam Hussein and his sons died in the April 8th-9th attacks, the U.S. says that is maybe disinformation. What about the relationship of Assad with Saddam Hussein, and now his son, Bashar al-Assad?

PATRICK SEALE: Now, that’s a very important question. And I think one should look a little bit at the history of it. The two countries have been at loggerheads for 18 years. From 1978 'til 1996, they were absolutely not on speaking terms. In fact, Syria suffered a good deal from maneuvers by Iraq, arming Syria's opponents in Lebanon, sending terrorists into Syria and such like.

But in 1996, towards the end of Assad’s rule, last few years, there was an improvement in relations, and it was essentially an economic and trading relationship which was built up then. In fact, in the last few years, between 1997 and 2002, Iraq became Syria’s principal trading partner. In fact, in those last four years, trade is thought to have totaled about $5 billion. And many, many Syrian factories reopened in order to supply goods to the Iraqi market under the Oil-for-Food Program. And, of course, Syria also benefited from Iraqi oil, which flowed from the pipeline, the pipeline from Iraq to Syria, allowing Syria to export more of its own oil production. So, the war has dealt a very severe blow to the Syrian economy. The United States bombed the Syrian trade office in Baghdad and destroyed the pipeline, the oil pipeline.

So, I must stress that the relationship was essentially an economic and trading relationship. Politically, the two regimes remained on very cool terms. In fact, there were many opponents of the Syrian — of the Iraqi regime living in Damascus, both Arab and Kurd, Kurdish opponents of Saddam Hussein’s regime. So, politically, the relations were cool, but, economically, they were very, very important to both countries.

Now, if you were a member of the former regime in Baghdad and you were being hunted and potentially killed by American forces, where would you seek to run? Saudi Arabia would be very difficult to penetrate; Kuwait, of course, impossible; Jordan, very short frontier there, very difficult; Iran, very difficult. It’s likely that you would try and come to Syria, particularly right up in the north of Syria, near Qamishli. It’s possible that some people tried to escape that way. But I think one should also say that the frontier there is fairly flat, easily monitored from the air. And in recent weeks, the Americans bombed one convoy, which happened to contain the Russian ambassador in Baghdad who was making his way to Syria. They bombed that convoy. They hit another convoy which had five Syrians in it returning home. It killed all five. So, it’s not a very safe route out of Iraq. My guess is that those members who haven’t already fled may well be hiding up in Iraq, waiting for better days in which to make their escape.