The Guardian in England writes the following today:

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Bush vetoes Syria war plan

Julian Borger in Washington, Michael White, Ewen MacAskill in Kuwait City and
Nicholas Watt
Tuesday April 15, 2003
The Guardian

The White House has privately ruled out suggestions that the US should go to
war against Syria following its military success in Iraq, and has blocked
preliminary planning for such a campaign in the Pentagon, the Guardian
learned yesterday.
In the past few weeks, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ordered
contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of
Baghdad.

Meanwhile, his undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, and William Luti, the
head of the Pentagon's office of special plans, were asked to put together a
briefing paper on the case for war against Syria, outlining its role in
supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein, its links with Middle East terrorist
groups and its allegedly advanced chemical weapons programme. Mr Feith and Mr
Luti were both instrumental in persuading the White House to go to war in
Iraq.

Mr Feith and other conservatives now playing important roles in the Bush
administration, advised the Israeli government in 1996 that it could "shape
its strategic environment... by weakening, containing and even rolling back
Syria".

However, President George Bush, who faces re-election next year with two
perilous nation-building projects, in Afghanistan and Iraq, on his hands, is
said to have cut off discussion among his advisers about the possibility of
taking the "war on terror" to Syria.

"The talk about Syria didn't go anywhere. Basically, the White House shut
down the discussion," an intelligence source in Washington told the Guardian.

Faced with rising apprehension over the prospect of a new conflict, Tony
Blair also offered categorical assurances to anxious MPs yesterday that
Britain and the US had "no plans whatsoever" to invade Iraq's neighbour.

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The entire article can be had at:

     http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,13031,937140,00.html

Wirt Atmar

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