It’s no secret the neocons and their fellow travelers have pasted a big bull’s eye on Damascus. “The road to Damascus, which is at the center of the Bush administration’s roadmap for restructuring the Middle East, doesn’t run directly from Baghdad. Its starting points are in Washington, Jerusalem/Tel Aviv, and Beirut—charted by the neoconservative think-tanks, the Christian Right, and the right-wing Zionists who move easily back and forth between Capitol Hill and the Middle East,” writes Tom Barry.

The neoconservatives, strongly backed the right-wing Zionist lobby through such groups as the Orthodox Union and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, have followed a similar strategy to advance their agenda for political transformation in Syria and Lebanon. In much the same way that they moved forward their agenda for regime change in Iraq step by step, the neocon advocates for a radical transformation in the Middle East have in the case of Syria and Lebanon also formed a “front group”—USCFL [the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon]—and supported bipartisan legislation that establishes the political base for sanctions against Iraq—and eventual U.S. military action. USCFL’s page of “selected links” recommends just three lobbying organizations: Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Christian Coalition of America.

“The US Committee for a Free Lebanon led the anti-Syria charge,” explains Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen. “Founded as an Israeli front in 1997, under Ziad K. Abdelnour, the Free Lebanon Committee worked with AIPAC and the neo cons to push for anti-Syria sanctions.” Abdelnour is “a famous Christian Lebanese investment banker who currently lives in New York City,” according to Wikipedia. “Born in Lebanon, Ziad always had a strong sense of nationalism for his country, however he also had a desire to see and live in the United States.” In other words, he is waiting for the neocons to unleash Armageddon-like violence against Syria and Lebanon, reducing both countries to wastelands resembling the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, minus a lot of water, and then Abdelnour will return to his homeland where he will likely, with his experience as a Wall Street investment banker, pick up the pieces for pennies on the dollar.

Of course, the neocon plan to destroy Syria is nothing new or especially surprising and Zalmay Khalilzad’s comment is nothing more than a reminder of what the neocons have had in mind for some time. In April, 2003, soon after Bush invaded Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld “ordered contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of Baghdad,” reports the Guardian. “Meanwhile, his undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, and William Luti, the head of the Pentagon’s office of special plans [i.e., the lie factory that cooked up the “evidence” against Saddam], 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 program,” the vast majority of this the same sort of fallacious nonsense the Bushites used as a pretext in the lead-up of the invasion of Iraq. At the time, Bush shifted this plan to the back burner because the election was coming up. Now that he was safely “re-elected” (through hook, crook, and rigged Diebold voting machines), the attack Syria (and Iran) plan, long ago cooked up by the neocons and their Zionist allies (recall Feith and the neocons advised the Likudite government in 1996 that it could “shape its strategic environment… by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria,” a plan that has not changed an iota over the last decade), may in fact be moved to the front burner and brought up to a rolling boil, now that master trickster Karl Rove need not worry about the Pentagon going overboard and imparting the impression Bush is a warmongering criminal in the lead-up to the election. In short, if the neocons have their way, it will soon be business as usual.

It was just a couple days ago Adam Ereli, spokesman for Condi Rice’s State Department, blamed Syria for all manner of trouble not only in Iraq, but just about everywhere else in the neighborhood. “Syria, more and more, is being recognized as a destabilizing element in the region. It’s not just about Iraq—it’s about Iraq, it’s about Lebanon, it’s about the Palestinian Authority. Because there’s a connection between Syria and terrorism and murder and mayhem in each of these three different areas…. Innocent people are getting blown up in Iraq because Syria is allowing its territory to be used by terrorists bent on sowing murder and mayhem in Iraq. And they’re not going to succeed. The international community is not going to let this continue to happen.”

Of course, when Ereli mentions the “international community,” he really means neocon and Zionist-worshipping sociopaths in the Bush administration, since most of the rest of the real international community believe the Bushites have gone stark raving bonkers.

Likely scared witless—having witnessed Bush’s shock and awe chaos inflicted on Iraq—the Syrians smell carnage blowing in the wind and are bending over backwards to accommodate the Bushites. “Syria strongly condemned bomb attacks which have killed scores of people in Baghdad this week and said it was ready to do ‘whatever it takes’ to cooperate with US and Iraqi authorities in bringing security and stability to its neighbor,” the AP reported on September 15. Bush, of course, did not hear this and hates the idea of cooperation. “The (Syrian) government is going to become more and more isolated as a result of two things: one, not being cooperative with the Iraqi government in terms of securing Iraq and, two, not being fully transparent about what they did in Lebanon,” said Bush. In short, the Syrians have not groveled sufficiently and, besides, nothing will stop the Zionist plan to “roll back” Syria (i.e., assassinate Bashar al-Assad and subject the Syrian people to the sort of misery the Iraqis are suffering).

Bush has nothing to lose by attacking Syria—regardless of his dismal approval ratings and the public relations spin-out in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—and Zalmay Khalilzad’s trial balloon may signal the beginning of the long sought after campaign to kill a whole lot of Syrians.