THE spectacle in the ornate Security Council chamber of the UN in New York on October 31 had all the trappings of a well- choreographed exercise in power diplomacy. The foreign ministers of all three old and new colonial and imperialist powers were there: Jack Straw and his French counterpart jetted into New York especially for this session, as did Condoleezza Rice from Washington. It was a command performance galore.

The show of strength was deemed essential in order to knock the fear of their wrath in the hearts of their latest quarries, the Syrians. The Council was summoned in an emergency to draw up a plan to bamboozle Syria in the name of ‘international community’ — a thoroughly wretched and much-abused terminology that Washington under the neocons has been so fond of deploying at the drop of a hat.

At the end of the day, the imperialists didn’t succeed in cowering the Security Council because the Russians and the Chinese held their ground, drew a line, and refused to go along with the agenda of crude threats and raw intimidations. But the Council did approve resolution 1636 by unanimity and endorsed the demand that Syria must cooperate fully with the special UN investigation commission tasked with the mandate to apportion responsibility and guilt for the murder, last February in Beirut, of former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri.

Obviously piqued that the Council had thwarted their plan to threaten Syria with the imposition of sanctions — a torture medicine used with impunity against Iraq for 13 long years — the western powers fulminated against Damascus to their hearts’ content. France took the high moral ground and demanded full accountability. Jack Straw hectored Syria like a pit bull and warned that UN’s patience was “not unlimited.” Condoleezza Rice weighed in with sharply honed verbal jibes at Syria, threatening it with “serious consequences” if it didn’t play ball according to Washington’s diktat.

To the jaded all this was text-book arm-twisting of the weak by self-appointed gurus of international order and morality. But even to a novice in the arcane punditry of world diplomacy, it would look odd that the old and neo-colonialists have suddenly become so enamoured of Rafik Hariri, that they are prepared to go out on a limb, if necessary, in order to punish his murderer, or murderers, at any cost.

Those familiar with the skullduggery that passes for global politics would recall that as long as he was alive, Hariri was hardly ever a darling of the West. In fact the western media spin doctors variously described Hariri, especially when he was in the saddle in Lebanon, as a wheeler-dealer, a tool of the Saudis who had pampered and patronized him, and a gold-digger who was building his family and personal empire in the guise of Beirut’s rebuilding from scratch to put the Lebanese civil war behind.

But no sooner than Hariri was murdered, he became an icon to those who had freely indulged in his character assassination when he was alive. In feasting on Hariri’s carcass, the vultures of old and new imperialism saw a God-send opportunity to cut Syria to size.

Syria has been in the crosshairs of the neocons in Washington long before 9/11. In 1996 many of those ‘chicken’ hawks that later adorned the ranks of George W. Bush’s kitchen cabinet — the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser et al — had drafted a blue print for ‘Greater Israel’, calling it, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” They had been commissioned into it by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu.

The new strategy decried the slain Israeli leader Itzhak Rabin’s “land for peace” tactic, vis-a-vis the Palestinians and stridently called for “ weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.”

That imperialist strategy was taken to heart by Ariel Sharon when he ascended to power in Israel, and was also adopted in spirit, if not exactly in letter, by George W. Bush as the cornerstone of his policy for the Middle East. As soon as they had accomplished occupation of Iraq, the neocons set about choreographing a scenario to bring Syria to heels.

Almost unnoticed by the outside world, US Congress quietly adopted, in early 2004, a bill against Syria, which Bush signed with alacrity into law as the “Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act”. Its acronym, salsa, became a joke in American circles as it echoed a popular Mexican spread for their staple tortillas. Few in the outside world recalled that under Bill Clinton, the US Congress had adopted an almost identical bill against Iraq.

Bush lost little time availing himself of Salsa to impose economic sanctions on Syria in May, 2004. Then, in September, 2004, he leaned hard on France to co-sponsor a UN Security Council resolution calling on Syria to recall its troops from Lebanon where they had been stationed since the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in mid-’70s.

France saw no harm in joining forces with the neo-imperialists in Washington because it saw in it a virtually cost-free mending of fences with Bush, torn because of France’s refusal to become a Washington sidekick, like Britain, on invasion of Iraq. But France, under a Gaullist Jacques Chirac has imperialist nostalgia of its own regarding Syria and Lebanon.

Lebanon became a French imperialist invention following the breakup of the Ottoman Wilayats of Syria at the end of World War I. The notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement, surreptitiously reached by Britain and France during the war, parcelled out the Ottoman possessions in Levant between them.

Syria fell to France and the new suzerain quickly truncated it by creating a Christian beach-head in Lebanon, harking back to the Frankish colonies established there during the Crusades. The Christian Maronites and Phalangists were given a disproportionate role in the governance of Lebanon as guardians of French interests.

Hariri’s murder provided the trigger to the West to implement the agenda against Syria prepared almost a decade ago. Which poses the obvious question: could the Syrians, knowing all the spade-work done meticulously against them, really be that naive and dumb as to hand their adversaries a loaded gun? Cutting Syria to size and getting rid of the last remaining Baathist regime in the Arab world would serve a number of core imperialist interests and priorities in the region.

First, and foremost, it would take the thorn out of Israel’s flesh. Syria, since the demise of its Soviet patron, has long ceased to pose a military threat to fortress Israel. But even a pin-prick needs to be taken care of. Two, Syria is perceived in western capitals as the mentor of Hizbollah in Lebanon, the only Muslim faction that has the distinction of humiliating Israel on the battle field and forcing it to retreat from Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Beirut, has long been smarting from that rebuff and itching to teach Hizbollah a lesson.

Three, defanging Syria is now seen as an essential prop to salvage the neocon pride in Iraq where their adventure has gone horribly wrong. They have long been pointing the finger at Damascus for fuelling the ‘insurgency’ in Iraq and providing sanctuaries to the partisans of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the mythical Al Qaeda clone.

Last, but not least, down-sizing Syria, and getting rid of the Assad regime perceived as friendly to Tehran, would send a powerful message to Iran, a country on Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’. Syria has been the closest Arab ally of Iran since the Iran-Iraq war of the ‘80s. The neocons have long been shouting from their roof-tops that Hizbollah is an Iranian proxy kept active because of conduit Syria. They think Hizbollah’s umbilical chord could be cut off if Syria were brought to its heels.

Syria’s fate hangs by a tenuous thread. The latest UN resolution makes it incumbent on Damascus to cooperate fully with its investigating team headed by German jurist Detlev Mehlis. He is still far from passing a guilty verdict against Syria for the murder of Rafik Hariri.

The writer is a former ambassador.