In fewer than six months, on May 12, President Bush is required under law to provide Congress with a progress report on Syria’s cooperation in the war on terrorism. The Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act, which the president signed without ceremony on December 12, says that he must update our legislators on Syria’s long- and medium-range missile programs as well as any aid it gives to the assassins who are operating against GIs seeking to secure and rebuild Iraq. The bill also stipulates that the report include information on America’s plan to fight Hezbollah and other terror groups aided by Damascus.

If the president’s report concludes that Syria has been an active ally of the confederation of terrorists attempting to return the Baathists to power in Iraq or that Syria is a principal sponsor of Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian organizations that direct the murder of Israeli civilians, then he is given the power to impose an array of penalties. He could, for example, limit the travel of Syrian diplomats in Washington and New York to a 25-mile radius or impose a ban on any military-related trade with Damascus.

Whether Mr. Bush will act, however, bears constant watching. In the statement that accompanied his signature on H.R. 1828, the president wrote, “A law cannot burden or infringe the President’s exercise of a core constitutional power by attaching conditions precedent to the use of that power.” He went on to say that any report on Syria’s operation in the war on terrorism would “withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive’s constitutional duties.”

In many ways, these stipulations are consistent with the long-running struggle between the executive branch and Congress over the authority of the legislative branch to direct foreign policy. But in the case of Syria, this constitutional fight has troubling implications. Since September 11, 2001, the national security bureaucracy has been deadlocked on the basic question of whether Syria is a friend or foe in America’s war against Islamic terrorism. A case in point is the dismissal by the CIA recently of photographs Israel submitted to Washington last December showing convoys containing chemical decontamination trucks traveling to Syria from Iraq. While many of the president’s advisers believe the Israeli tip from last December may well unlock the mystery of Saddam’s missing weapons of mass destruction, the territory controlled by Bashar Assad does not fall under the jurisdiction of David Kay’s team of weapons inspectors.

One does not need a top secret clearance to conclude that the Syrian government is an obstacle to President Bush’s vision of a democratic and terror-free Middle East. The evidence is in plain sight. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, busloads of terrorists migrated to Iraq from Syria to join the fight. Before the war, Saddam’s government collected an estimated $2 million a day by illegally shipping oil through two pipelines that went to Syria’s ports. Despite a warning from Secretary Powell last spring, the offices of terror groups in Damascus remain open. The Syria Accountability Act, like so many other accountability acts and sanctions on regimes passed by Congress in recent years, allows the president to waive its measures for national security reasons. But the SAA makes it harder for any administration to dodge this issue in the years ahead.