Paul Roberts, a former Wall Street Journal opinion editor and Reagan Administration official, writing in the venerable conservative journal Human Events ..This is just one small example, a lesson in why you cannot trust Bush nor the US media that parrots his lines.  When it comes to understanding Iran, Iraq, Syria - or whatever the current Evil Du Jour may be - the CW in this country probably is based on "facts fit around the policy"

Syria a menace? Probably not. Iran - likewise. You'll find the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq in a moble bio weapons lab. Forget facts, forget intelligence, forget policy making, forget about informed decisionmaking -- only the sales pitch matters. Facts that don't fit around the slogan have a hard time fitting into the US press.

U.S Orders Syria to Do the Impossible
by Paul Craig Roberts


Is there a person anywhere in the world who still thinks there is an ounce of sanity in the Bush administration? If so, let that person read John Bolton's orders to Syria in the Jan. 24 online edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Bolton is Bush's unconfirmed ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton, a neoconservative warmonger, has managed to get the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 23 to instruct Syria to disband and disarm the Lebanese militias. Bolton says, "I hope in Damascus they read it very carefully and then comply."

How is Syria to meet this demand?

Last year, Syria complied with U.S. demands to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. As Syria has no military presence in Lebanon, it could not disarm a local police force, much less the Shia militias that defeated the Israeli army and drove it out of Lebanon, and that have representatives in the Lebanese parliament.

After three years and unimaginable expense, the superpower American military has proved that it cannot disarm the recently formed Iraqi militias. Yet the idiot Bolton thinks puny Syria can disarm the Lebanese militias that defeated the brutal Israeli army!

Syria was never in Lebanon as a conqueror or invader, as the United States is in Iraq and Israel is in the West Bank and Golan Heights. Syria was invited into Lebanon by the Lebanese government for peacekeeping purposes, adding the weight of its military to indigenous militias in order to create stability where U.S., Palestinian and Israeli bungling had brought disorder and massive bloodshed.

Until they were withdrawn, the Syrian troops were a counterweight to the Shia militias. Now that the Shia crescent is spreading from Iran through Iraq to Lebanon, the stupid neoconservatives are confronted with the error of their ways. The Bush administration was trying to set Syria up for U.S. attack by demanding that it withdraw from Lebanon. The neocons thought Syria would refuse and thereby become a target for demonization and invasion.

Alas, the Syrians departed. And now the problem is how to turn back the Shia advance, which is increasing in power inside Lebanon as well through the Hizbullah and Amal movements. Bolton's solution is a ridiculous attempt to turn Syria into a neocon proxy and set it at war with the militias. Otherwise, Bolton intends to damn Syria for "noncompliance" and again threaten Syria with U.S. invasion.

It will be interesting to see whom Syria fears most, the militias that triumphed over Israeli military might or the U.S. forces that have been defeated in Iraq.