CAN PORTER TURN SYRIA ORANGE?

Immediately after the success of Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution,” all the buzz in foreign policy Washington was: to where can we next export it? Russia? Belarus? Azerbaijan? Iran?

The answer became blazingly clear this week: Syria. With Syria’s assassination of Rafik Hariri in Beirut on February 14, Porter Goss has been handed a golden opportunity on a platinum platter to expand the Bush Doctrine in the Middle East and get rid of the Assad tyranny. The critical question: is his CIA up to it?

Despite the usual denials and red herrings, only Syria could have made the professional hit on Hariri, with 700 pounds of explosives planted under the asphalt after “repairs” a few days before, blowing up his armored convoy as it passed over.

The hit was conducted by a Lebanese unit of Syria’s Shu’bat al-Mukhabarat al-‘Askariyya, Military Intelligence Service, on the orders of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat.

The head of the Mukhabarat, Gen. Hassan Kalil, is just a figurehead. Shawkat runs it, and is married to Bashar’s older sister, Bushra. They are quite a pair. Her brother Basil opposed their getting married so much he had Shawkat arrested four times.

So they arranged for Basil to be killed in a car crash in 1994, and soon after they eloped. This was done so well that Basil’s father, dictator Hafez al-Assad, never suspected his daughter had her brother killed.

Shawkat then befriended another brother of Bushra’s, Bashar, so well that Hafez put him in charge of Bashar’s security. This made a third brother, Maher, so angry that he shot Shawkat in the stomach.

After his recovery, Shawkat persuaded Hafez to replace Maher with Bashar as his successor. Hafez al-Assad died in June of 2000, with Bashar taking over.

In 2002, Saddam Hussein paid Shawkat and his wife Bushra several million dollars to hide the WMD technology everyone knew he had. That’s why they’ve never been found – because they’re in Syria, including chemical and biological samples, plus the tools to mass produce the toxins.

Shawkat is also the principal provider of supply and support for Iraqi terrorists operating out of Syria. Tens of thousands of Shawkat’s Mukhabarat secret police are omnipresent in Syria – and in Syria’s colony of Lebanon.

After years of promoting civil war in Lebanon, Hafez al-Assad formally invaded Lebanon with Syrian troops in June of 1976. They have never left, colonizing Lebanon and providing sanctuary and support for the Hezbollah terrorists attacking Israel.

Any Lebanese leader capable of demanding Lebanon’s freedom, such as Kamal Jumblatt or Basheer Gemayyel, was assassinated. And now, Rafik Hariri.

Yet his killing is a clear sign of panicked desperation by the Assad regime. Its hit on Hariri has catalyzed the Lebanese hatred that has been building against it for 30 years, hatred so intense now that Syria’s stooge president of Lebanon, Emile Lahoud, was too scared to show up at Hariri’s funeral – and face the hundreds of thousands of angry mourners.

You read last month in Global Freedom and Drunk Coal Miners how Porter’s CIA, working with British MI6, orchestrated the Orange Revolution to successful regime change in Ukraine. Perhaps Porter now sees a chance to work with his counterpart, Pierre Brochand, head of DGSE, the French CIA.

Syria and Lebanon were carved out of the Ottoman Empire by France after WWI, which ran them as League of Nations Mandates until WWII. French President Jacques Chirac had a deep personal friendship with Hariri. Bush and Chirac will have a “working dinner” next Monday the 21st, and the subject of how they can cooperate to kick the Syrians out of Lebanon will arise.

With French help or not, it should be duck soup for Porter to channel Lebanese outrage into an irresistible tide sweeping Emile Lahoud out of office, and Syrian soldiers and Mukhabarat agents out of Lebanon.

This is a key test of Porter’s competence. Assef Shawkat played Porter’s predecessor George Tenet like a fiddle, feeding naive CIA agents with so many drabs of intel that desk jockeys in the DO (CIA Directorate of Operations) adamantly oppose going after their “useful friends” in Syria. Porter has to brush them aside – just as Condi has to do with similar folks at State.

For liberating Lebanon from Syria is only the prelude to liberating Syria itself, which is a necessary condition for achieving democracy in the Middle East. Hariri’s assassination thus provides the perfect pretext for a full-court press by the US for regime change in Damascus. This would include the following elements:

*Coordinating an international – not just US – demand that Syria’s military occupation of Lebanon be ended.

*Orchestrating the Triple U: Uncontrollable Urban Unrest in Beirut and other Lebanese cities demanding the removal of all 15,000 Syrian soldiers and all Mukhabarat agents.

*Assisting a unified opposition to sweep the Lahoud government from power in the upcoming May parliamentary elections.

*Militarily destroying Iraqi terrorist sanctuaries and bases in Syria. Sending Delta Force teams into Damascus to covertly apprehend Iraqi terrorist leaders being protected by the Syrian government.

*Providing requested military assistance (via a coalition including France) to the newly-elected government of Lebanon if Syria refuses its demand to remove its occupying force.

*Supporting the democracy movement in Syria, and the Reform Party of Syria in particular (see http://reformsyria.org), with incessant demands for free elections.

*Instigating Triple U in Damascus until the Assads are toppled.

This will also involve, however distasteful, wrangling with the UN Security Council in attempts to extract sanctions – which will all be for show, as Russia will veto them. Condi will have to waste considerable time with the UN charade.

So it comes down to Porter. Carpe diem, buddy – now’s the time to demonstrate to the world what you’re made of.

Watch events in Beirut and Damascus carefully to see if the above elements are being implemented. If they are, you’ll know that Porter Goss and George Bush are determined to paint Lebanon and Syria the orange color of democracy.