A Shot Across the Bow

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The Syrian Baath assassinated Rafik Hariri because to them that type of extraordinary action was normal.


The consequences were never fully absorbed because to them, it was normal to murder a democratic head of state as long as a thin veneer of plausible deniability was maintained. In a similar vain, terror attacks against U.S soldiers are being carried out on the Syrian border because to the Baath, serving as a logistical and operational base of support to terrorists in Iraq is what you do if you are to bring major Western powers like America to the negotiating table – it is normal.


When terror is institutionalized by regimes like Bashar al-Assad’s, people die – civilians are maimed, democratic leaders assassinated, and American personnel blown up. The prime minister of Lebanon was merely another victim amongst the scores killed in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq at the behest of a Baathist regime still operating under the precepts of terror normalization.


Without total regime change in Syria, all we will get is a repackaging of the same old stale Baathist belief that terror is a legitimate means to achieve their political objective. That objective has become, primarily, the active rollback of the current trend of democratization in the Middle East.


Terrorism has become the Baathist regime’s main line of life insurance; take it away and you take away the driving impetus behind the Assad regime.


In this light, the report of the U.N. investigator into Hariri’s assassination, Detlev Mehlis, not only implicates mere members of the regime for their direct involvement in Rafik Hariri’s assassination, but in essence the regime itself.


An amoral regime like the Baath in Syria that finds little qualm with ending the lives of its own citizens is incapable of empathizing with the demands of Western powers that hold human life at a higher premium.


The Baath will never be capable of moving past a foreign policy predicated on murder. Terror as a tool of foreign policy became normal to them; the shock of the radical departure from past Western appeasement of state sponsors of terror that this Bush administration ushered in has yet to set in – and likely never will.


The actions demanded today of the Syrian Baath by America and the United Nations effectively undercut the measures of normalization that Assad II has imparted upon acts of terror.


If America or the United Nations take a less confrontational path, the effect would be to allow Assad II and his Baathist functionaries a relatively free hand in deciding when and if terror attacks were to be ebbed only to be allowed to flow again at a propitious time. It would be, in other words, a de facto acquiescence to the normalization of such acts of terror. And when terror is the norm, it can never be eradicated.


To back off from fully confronting the Assad problem in the wake of the Mehlis report – a flinching of the sort that the ostensible Syrian experts Flynt Leverett and Joshua Landis are recommending – would relieve pressure upon the Baathists to recognize the abnormality and unacceptability of sponsoring terror attacks against democracies. Such a retreat can only come to haunt us, just as previous American reluctance aggressively to pursue terrorists and their sponsors culminated in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.


If anything, every past passive Western reaction toward adversarial third world terror regimes has come to exacerbate exponentially the problem of terror in modern times. The short term gains proved superfluous. The terror regimes of the Middle East today find it difficult – even with U.S and Coalition troops stationed at the heart of Mesopotamia – to operate according to a different paradigm than the one in which a pre-9/11 West had done so much to bolster for the past 50 years.


The Mehlis report is a very close shot across the bow for the Baathist regime in Syria, a signal for the end. Hopefully it is a shot that will land in other terror-normalizing regimes in the region as well. To close this chapter of misery that terror has become to humanity, we must first impart a fitting denouement to the Baathist tragedy in the Arab world. Give us one, two, three, many Mehlis Reports and let us get on to the work that needs to be done, the justice that so desperately needs to be enacted, so that we many ensure that many more Hariri assassinations, September 11s, suicide bombs, roadside bombs never become the norm.


Mr. Ghadry is president of the Reform Party of Syria and a democratic leader advocating a liberal market economy in Syria.


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