What About Bashar?

Syria certainly isn't with us, so she must be against us:

On that terrible morning of September 11, 2001, there was no way to get out of Washington. Sitting in my office about two blocks from the White House and seeing nothing more constructive to do such as run through a subway tunnel, I sat down at my computer and wrote about how we should respond to the most deadly attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor. The article was published in the Washington Times the following day.

The article made two points. First, that we couldn't allow ourselves to be weakened by empty rhetoric urging a "proportional response." Our response to the 9-11 attacks had to be decisive, and to be so our counterattack had to be in proportion to our strength and not the enemy's relative size or weakness. Second, that no matter who the enemy was, and no matter where he chose to seek refuge, we could allow him no sanctuary. We would have had to attack the al Qaeda stronghold wherever it was. Had it not been Kabul but Damascus, Tehran, Beijing, Pyongyang or Moscow our action would have had to be the same. If we had learned anything from Vietnam it was that to allow sanctuary is to hand the means of victory to the enemy.

President Bush took much this same position in his tough speech to Congress a week later. Nations had to choose, he said then, to be with us or with the terrorists. Since then something has been lost. Syria has chosen to be with the terrorists, and we have done nothing decisive about the regime of Bashar Assad. We are paying too high a price -- in the lives of our soldiers -- for this to continue one moment longer.

Commencing weeks before American forces slashed into Iraq in March 2003, our reconnaissance forces saw a steady flow of cars and trucks going into Syria along the Baghdad-Damascus highway. About ten days into the fighting, there was an intense fight near the border city of al-Qaim where our special forces took on a sizeable Iraqi force moving through al-Qaim into Syria. The fierceness of the fight there -- as intense as any other before Baghdad fell -- told us that the Iraqis were moving something they thought was of tremendous value. Was it money, weapons or people the Iraqis moved then? It matters not. What matters is that Syria chose to provide first a sanctuary for members of Saddam's regime and its assets and then comprehensive support for the Sunni insurgents who fight only to prevent Iraq from becoming stable and free, and kill as many Americans as they can in the process.