Inside the Ring

Assad’s weakness

An intelligence source tells us Bashar Assad, who inherited leadership of Syria, is no strongman like his late father, Hafez. In his sixth year as leader, Bashar is largely controlled by Ba’ath Party operatives who oppose better relations with the West.

The source tells us it is Bashar Assad’s aides who push the 40-year-old dictator to support Hezbollah destabilization activities in Lebanon and allow al Qaeda jihadists to use Syria as a staging point for infiltrating Iraq and killing Americans and Iraqis. “He could not keep them out even if he wanted to, unless he cracks down on his own operatives,” said the source, who estimates there are hundreds of al Qaeda terrorists moving through Syria unencumbered.

Syria, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, is a Ba’ath Party socialist police state. Damascus has no interest in seeing a Democracy sprout next door. The Bush administration once hoped that Bashar Assad, an ophthalmologist by training who only sought power after the death of his older brother, would moderate Hafez’s strident anti-Israel policies. But he has not.

The one time that Bashar Assad appeared triumphant over his coterie of advisers is when he pulled army troops out of Lebanon, as the United Nations demanded. But he has kept operatives inside the war-torn Lebanon and is furiously rearming Hezbollah in violation of a U.N. cease-fire.

Pakistan and Iran

It is somewhat surprising how little the Bush administration knows about what could be become a historic agreement in the war on radical Islamists. Last summer, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf approved a deal with tribal leaders with whom his army had been fighting and dying in Waziristan, an ungoverned expanse on the Afghan border.

Gen. Musharraf insists the deal is good for the U.S. It calls for a cease-fire as long as the tribes stop providing aid and comfort to Taliban members who regroup in Pakistan before going back into Afghanistan. Some pundits have ripped the agreement as a surrender to tribal militants who may be hiding Osama bin Laden.

R. Nicholas Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs, said he did not know much about the deal when he met recently with reporters and editors of The Washington Times. The CIA declined to comment.

Now we see that the top U.S. commander in the region, Gen. John Abizaid, is at best skeptical.

“Well I guess like anybody I’m kind of wait and see,” he recently told a group of defense reporters. “I hate to answer one of your questions with ‘I don’t know,’ but I don’t know. I did talk to President Musharraf about it. I told him I was concerned about it … The long run is, you’ve got to go forward in the tribal areas with economic, political and military solutions that the tribes cooperate with. But I’m very, very skeptical about this notion that people that have been harbored in the tribal areas are no longer going to be harbored. I’ll believe that when I see it.”

Gen. Abizaid, who heads U.S. Central Command, also presented facts on which any observer could conclude that the U.S. is in a war in Iran.

It appears that Iran is supplying insurgents with RPG-29, a dual-headed warhead that is destroying U.S. armored vehicles. Worse, Iran is manufacturing and exporting explosively formed penetrators (EFPs). It is a more devastating edition of the ubiquitous improvised explosive device. The EFP unleashes an array of warheads certain to hit any object within range. Iranian-backed Hezbollah developed the bomb to kill Israelis. Now, Iran is making EFPs and shipping them into Iraq to kill U.S. troops.

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