October 31, 2005

UN to Syria: It's Déjà-Vu All Over Again - UPDATED

UPDATE 5:18 pm PST: See below.

Once again, I must trot out poor, old Yogi Berra to explain international affairs.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) just voted unanimously to impose an inspection regime on Syria similar to that imposed on Iraq... but in this case, they're looking for evidence about Syria's involvement in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri.

But I have a question: suppose the team investigating Hariri's assassination, poring through records, comes across evidence that Syria accepted "large stockpiles" of weapons of mass destruction from their Baathist brothers in Iraq; is there any way that the investigation can be expanded to include that question?

I suppose I'm really asking three questions:

1. Is there any possibility that the UN inspection team members would decide to follow such a lead if they stumbled across it?
2. Is there any possibility that the UNSC could rein them in if they decided to do so?
3. Is there any wiggle room for Syria to prevent the investigation turning that direction without violating the resolution?

Number 2 is the easiest to answer: since the United States and Britain are both permanent members and have veto authority in the UNSC, if the inspectors did start moving that direction, I don't believe the UNSC would, as a body, stop them; any such attempt to restrict the investigation would be vetoed by us and probably by the Brits as well.

Number 3 is so inside baseball that it could only by answered by an attorney familiar with this particular resolution and with "international law" in this area (those are scare quotes because I am very skeptical about the existence of international law in the first place). It certainly seems as if the leader of the inspection team, Detlev Mehlis, has the authority to pursue the case wherever he wants to take it:

The resolution grants the U.N.'s chief investigator, Detlev Mehlis of Germany, the authority to take his investigation anywhere in Syria, demand any documents and interview any individual, including Syrian President Bashar Assad, inside Syria or abroad. Syria is also required to abide by any request by Mehlis to arrest suspects, including Assad's closest aides and relatives.

So the most interesting question is number 1: suppose such evidence of WMD transfer cropped up... would Mehlis pursue it? He is the investigator who just submitted a hard-hitting report accusing Syria of active complicity in the assassination and also specifically naming a number of top Syrians, including chief of Syrian military intelligence Asef Shawkat (Bashar Assad's brother in law), President Bashar Assad's brother Maher, and other top members of the Assad regime. So it's pretty clear that Mehlis is rock solid on the assassination question.

But I don't know how he would react to discovering evidence on the two questions that are more interesting to me than the fairly settled issue of the Hariri bombing: did Iraq transfer its WMD to Syria before the war to prevent it being found, and is Syria actively complicit (as opposed to passively turning a blind eye) to terrorists crossing the border into Iraq to kill Americans and Iraqis?

How wide is Detlev Mehlis willing to expand his investigation to follow the evidence?

If he is more of a Norm Coleman or Richard Butler type, then I think the answer would be "as far as the evidence leads;" but if he's a Hans Blix clone, I would suspect "not one inch beyond the mandate."

My guess is he is somewhere in between those two extremes, so I'm left in a state of uncertainty.

One delicious Freudian slip on the part of the Syrians is contained in the article, though the Washington Post reporter, Colum Lynch, doesn't seem to have noticed:

The Syrian foreign minister, Farouk Sharaa, said Syria would cooperate, but he argued that the U.N. report produced no evidence that Syrians had committed a crime. He denied that Syrians knew in advance of the plans to kill Hariri and said such suggestions were akin to saying that U.S. officials were aware that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were coming or that British officials expected the subway bombings last summer.

In other words, Sharaa drew a comparison between the United States suffering an attack on American soil and Great Britain suffering an attack on British soil -- with a terrorist attack on Lebanese soil. Is he admitting that the Syrians consider Lebanon a "renegade province" of Syria, as Saddam Hussein used to consider Kuwait to be Province 19 of Iraq, and as China considers Taiwan to be a breakaway part of Red China? An interesting admission!

One excellent sign: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used exactly the same phrase, "serious consequences," to describe what would happen if Syria refused to cooperate as UN Resolution 1441 threatened if Iraq refused to cooperate -- which, of course, is just what he failed to do.

Even if the United Nations refuses, at the end, to enforce its own resolution (again), let's hope that America will show as much resolve in 2006 as we did in 2003.

UPDATE: Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters earlier predicted dire consequences for the Assad dynasty if this resolution passed... which of course it did, unanimously. If Detlev Mehlis exercises his mandate and demands that Bashar Assad hand over military intelligence chief Asef Shawkat or Assad's brother Maher Assad, this puts the Syrian president in a quandry:

Assad doesn't generate the same kind of fear his father did, and that means his enemies will not find themselves cowed merely by his personality the way they might have with his father.

Turning over the suspects, of course, means coughing up his own family and the people at the top of the military intelligence apparatus. Before that happens, the military will likely have something to say about protecting its own, especially after suffering the humiliation of the withdrawal from Lebanon just this year. That looks like actual suicide, rather than political suicide.

If Assad chooses not to turn over the suspects, it will likely trigger real economic sanctions: even Russia and China will be hard-pressed to vote against such sanctions if Syria thumbs its nose at the resolution that they, themselves supported. As Ed notes,

After losing Lebanon for economic exploitation, the Syrians cannot afford any more economic hurdles and will not handle this kind of outside assault. The collapse of the Syrian economy will force the monied interests out of the country, and those have provided Assad with most of his power base.

So if Ed is correct, then the real question is who will follow Bashar Assad in the UnComfy Chair? If Syria suffers an actual coup d'etat, that might well open the door for the US forces just across the border to intervene much more directly and aggressively by launching attacks on so-called "safe cities" inside Syria, where terrorists gather and plot before infiltrating into Iraq.

It also might make it easier for Syrian democrats -- and I am sure they exist -- to try to seize their own country back from the vicious Baathists who have ruled there since 1963, after Syria split from the United Arab Republic (under which Syria had unified into a single country with Gamil Nasser's Egypt). If so, I hope that we offer whatever support such democrats may request from our nearby troops and airpower.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 4:33 PM

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