WASHINGTON – President Bush’s denunciation of Syria on the heels of anti-Western violence there – sparked by the publication in the West of political cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad – could be the first step toward regime change in Damascus, Syrian opposition leaders said yesterday.

The violence spread to neighboring Lebanon yesterday, where demonstrators set fire to the Danish Consulate in Beirut – which also housed the Austrian Embassy and the Slovakian consul – and then spread the destruction through one of the city’s Christian neighborhoods, killing at least one person, the Associated Press reported. The Syrian regime exercises significant influence in Lebanon, and, according to AP accounts, 76 of the 200 people arrested for the riots were Syrian and 38 were Lebanese.

On Saturday, Muslim rioters in Damascus torched the Danish, Norwegian, Chilean, and Swedish embassies, purportedly expressing outrage over Danish political cartoons featuring Islam’s foundational prophet. The illustrations, including depictions of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban and of Muhammad lamenting that heaven has run out of virgins for suicide bombers, initially were published in September in Denmark’s largest daily newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. The newspaper commissioned the cartoons from Danish artists to illustrate the dangers of self-censorship.

Some forms of Islam prohibit any depiction of Muhammad, favorable or unfavorable, as idolatrous.

The cartoons were reprinted last week across Europe by newspapers in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Hungary, setting off an international uproar that has led to massive demonstrations and violence in some Muslim countries. Demonstrations also have rocked Europe, including protests by Muslims in Denmark, France, and Britain. The Palestinian Arab terrorist group Hamas called for slayings in response to the cartoons, which it labeled “an unforgivable insult,” according to the AP.

The anti-Western violence in Syria prompted a swift response from the Bush administration, which issued a statement condemning the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad for assisting the riots.

“The Government of Syria’s failure to provide protection to diplomatic premises, in the face of warnings that violence was planned, is inexcusable,” the White House statement said. “We will hold Syria responsible for such violent demonstrations since they do not take place in that country without government knowledge and support,” the statement added, calling the demonstrations in Damascus “outrageous acts.”

The president of the American based opposition group Rally for Syria, Mohammed Aljbaili, told The New York Sun yesterday that the regime was “encouraging these particular demonstrators to achieve certain political gains.”

One goal, the Syrian exile said, was for the secular Baathist dictatorship to gain credibility among the country’s Islamists, especially since Mr. Assad and his ruling family are part of Syria’s Alawite Muslim minority. The country is overwhelmingly Shiite. “They are trying to be seen as pro-Islam, and defenders of the prophet and the writing of Islam and the Koran,” Mr. Aljbaili said. “The real people who believe in Islam and believe in religion – I don’t believe they were behind this.”

The embassy attacks in Damascus and the violence in Beirut, Mr. Aljbaili said, could also lessen the Western diplomatic presence in both Syria and Lebanon as European countries withdraw their diplomatic representation out of safety concerns. Having violent protesters effect the withdrawal of European observers in Beirut and Damascus, Mr. Aljbaili said, was a shrewd method of erecting obstacles to an international, U.N.-led investigation into the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.

The president of the Washington based Reform Party of Syria, Farid Ghadry, raised questions about the timing of the riots, given that the offending cartoons were initially published in September.

The exile said that the embassy attacks bore all the fingerprints of President Ahmadinejad of Iran, who met with Mr. Assad and a noted Lebanese terrorist, Imad Mugniyah, in Damascus late last month. Mr. Ghadry likened the Syrian attacks on the Western embassies to the Iranian assault on the American embassy in 1979. Mr. Ahmadinejad is said to have been one of the perpetrators of the 1979 attack.

This weekend’s assaults, Mr. Ghadry said, were a “war-waging message,” warning Western powers not to interfere in Middle East affairs. Iran, Mr. Ghadry said, was likely using Syria as a proxy, and the riots there served the dual purpose of getting Western powers to back off both the Hariri investigation and their mounting pressure on the Ahmadinejad regime over its nuclear ambitions.

The administration’s harsh language against the Syrian regime after the assaults could be maneuvering by the Bush administration in advance of taking a sterner position against the Assad dictatorship, against which America has exhausted all diplomatic avenues for reform, Mr. Ghadry said, prompting increasing signs of fatigue from the administration.

Faulting Syria for the violence could be the first step toward issuing an executive order identifying regime change in Syria as official American policy, Mr. Ghadry said, based on signals to the exile community. Highlighting the Assad dictatorship’s role in the attacks against Europeans would be an early move to garner European support for democratic, Syrian-opposition-led regime change, according to the exile.

Mr. Aljbaili, too, said the statement was “a change in the Syria policy, and it shows that the American government is going a little more aggressively.” Messrs. Ghadry and Aljbaili said independently that it was possible the regime-supported violence would sow discord among the Syrian people and foment internal hostility toward the Assad dictatorship.

In Europe, meanwhile, the outrage and violence over the cartoons is forcing Western countries to steel themselves in defense of their civilizations, a scholar of the Middle East and a former board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace, Daniel Pipes, said. Denmark and other countries would now have to determine whether they would be governed by the religious rules of their immigrants, or whether Muslims would be governed by European traditions and laws.

Mr. Pipes, who also writes a column in the Sun, said the outrage over the images was genuine. “Over the centuries, Muslims have acquired a romanticized, idealized view of Muhammad … he is a sensitive topic as no other is.” The depiction of the prophet, he said, was a “flashpoint” of Christian-Muslim tensions dating back 14 centuries.

Mr. Pipes anticipated further violence in response to the cartoons, particularly in France, where Muslims rioted after two African youths were killed by police. A “second French intifada” stemming from the cartoons was possible, the scholar said.

Muslims were expressing their objections against European states “because they believe there should be censorship,” Mr. Pipes added, saying it would be impossible to communicate to outraged Muslims why Western papers were not prohibited by state censorship authorities from printing the allegedly blasphemous cartoons.

“When you say, well, the same thing happens to Jesus, they dismiss that as Western decadence,” Mr. Pipes said.

Indeed, cartoons scornful of Judaism and Jews are common in the Arab press. Yesterday on CNN’s “Late Edition,” the Saudi ambassador to America, Prince Turki al-Faisal, was asked about the “double-standard” in the Arab world, after being shown examples of cartoons in Saudi publications depicting Jews drinking blood and superimposing a Nazi swastika on a Jewish Star of David.

“You have to take into account, though, that the issue of Palestine and the unresolved issue of Palestine is a generator of most of this feeling that we have in the Arab world, particularly towards Israel,” the ambassador told anchor Wolf Blitzer yesterday. “And the need for resolution of that problem, I think, will go a long way to meeting the requirements of things like that not happening,” he added.