SYRIA IN THE GUNSIGHTS

The argument for taking out the government of Syria is growing by the day. The only things holding back the Marines from seizing downtown Damascus and imprisoning Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as a war criminal are (a) the lack of manpower to prevent the place from collapsing into anarchic chaos before a transition government can be set up, and (b) the literally hysterical objections of the State Department.

Consider these justifications, any one of which would be reason alone to rid Syria of the al-Assad pestilence:

· Syria has a 600-mile border with Iraq. Al-Assad is orchestrating the insertion of thousands of Al Qaeda, Hizbollah, and other Jihadi terrorists into Iraq, arming them, and letting them come back to Syria and resupply. It is these foreign terrorists that are primarily responsible for the atrocities in Fallujah and elsewhere, killing US and Coalition soldiers as well as innocent Iraqis.

· As arms inspector David Kay has noted, Saddam’s “missing WMD” were shipped to Syria before the war began. Starting in January 2004, Al-Assad began flying shipments of WMD components to Sudan to hide them in warehouses in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. Afraid of the US response, Sudan’s leader Omar Bashir is now having second thoughts, and is ordering that Syria take back its Scud-C and Scud-D ballistic missiles and chemical weapons components.

· On April 17, Jordanian police seized an amount of WMD chemicals being carried into Jordan from Syria by Al Qaeda terrorists. Three booby-trapped pickups were loaded with explosives and VX poison gas containers. Jordan’s King Abdullah and his intelligence chief General Kheir publicly announced that if the terrorists had succeeded in their confessed plan to detonate the VX in Amman near the American Embassy, over 20,000 people would have been massacred.

The evidence is becoming overwhelming that the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad provided the hiding place for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, that it has begun providing them to Al Qaeda terrorists, and that it is waging a proxy guerrilla war upon the US and the Coalition military in Iraq.

Sanctions, such as those authorized by Congress last December in the Syrian Accountability Act, and other forms of political and economic pressure, are very rapidly becoming far-too-little-far-too-late solutions, and very dangerously so.

Twenty thousand human beings were almost slaughtered in Jordan this month. Whatever anarchic chaos occurs in Syria after a B2 strike obliterates the Presidential Palace in Damascus, it is preferable to al-Assad-backed terrorists succeeding in their next VX attempt.

Syria is leaving President Bush with little else than the military option. The sooner he exercises that option, the more lives will be saved, American, Jordanian, and Iraqi.