“Months after the draft CPG [Contingency Planning Guidance] for 2004 was circulated, according to … internal documents, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was directed to beef up its Syria work. The Military Forces Analysis Office of the Directorate for Analysis established a special task force preparing order of battle (OB) and military forces analysis for Syria. Order of battle is an intelligence term that refers to characterizing the force structure, equipment, capabilities, and key military leadership,” Arkin writes. “One novel element of new planning for Syria, according to the documents, involves the work of the IO [information operations] Fusion Support Center of DIA’s Directorate for Analysis. To support target ‘options’ development, analysts have been directed to evaluate the vulnerability of critical ‘nodes’ in Syria, including” killing Syrian leaders (Bashar al-Assad and his family—this act of premeditated murder is called “human factors analysis” in Pentagon parlance) and targeting “communications and information infrastructure” and “electric power generation, transmission and distribution facilities and systems,” in other words making damn sure the people of Syria are pitched into the Dark Ages, same as the Iraqis were in 2003 (and obviously keeping them there, as the Iraqis largely remain without electricity, clean drinking water, or operational hospitals).

“Military planning for Syria was thus initiated long before the United Nations report implicating the Syrian regime in the February assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a vocal critic of Damascus,” Arkin continues. “And it should be pointed out that much of the new military planning is also related to Syria’s overt and clandestine support for the Iraqi insurgency, as well as its continued harboring of former Iraqi Ba’athists and their families.”

In short, the unsolved assassination of Rafik Hariri—who was such an implacable enemy of Syria he had planned to visit Damascus and held a meeting with Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Walid Muallim, a few days before he was killed—has nothing to do with the long-held plan to bomb the heck out of Syria. “Israel’s ambition has long been to weaken Syria, sever its strategic alliance with Iran and destroy Hizbullah. Israel has great experience at ‘targeted assassinations’—not only in the Palestinian territories but across the Middle East. Over the years, it has sent hit teams to kill opponents in Beirut, Tunis, Malta, Amman and Damascus,” Patrick Seale, author of Assad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East, wrote for the Guardian soon after Hariri was killed.

As for Syria’s alleged “overt and clandestine support for the Iraqi insurgency,” this really is a no-brainer, unless we are to believe the Syrians are suicidal. “Washington isn’t having much luck with other strategies for defeating the resistance and Syria has been quite cooperative in the past and will probably be so in the future. So why not mount yet another Syria-bashing campaign?” asks Josh Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. Again, this really is a no-brainer and all one need do is listen to the neocons, for instance William Kristol, the “influential” (he appears on Fox News a lot) neocon, who wrote in the Murdoch-funded Weekly Standard: “We could bomb Syrian military facilities; we could go across the border in force to stop infiltration; we could occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, a few miles from the border, which seems to be the planning and organizing centre for Syrian activities in Iraq; we could covertly help or overtly support the Syrian opposition…”

“In some ways, military officers involved in the high-level planning efforts say Syria has eclipsed Iran in CENTCOM’s play book as much because of practicality as imminent threat,” writes Arkin. “Iran is four times larger than Iraq with three times the population. Syria is in a difficult geographic position, especially with U.S. bases and forces in Iraq and its proximity to U.S. military strength in the Mediterranean. U.S. forces have also been operating along the Syrian border since early 2003, and there have been numerous reports of clashes between U.S. and Syrian forces on Syrian soil, as well as reports of U.S. special operations forces operating inside Syria on select missions.”

In other words, Syria is an easier target and as we know the United States prefers to attack small and vulnerable targets—for instance, Iraq after more than a decade of debilitating sanctions. Remember, the point here is not to capture territory outright but rather to pitch the Muslim Middle East into chaos, thus eventually balkanizing the entire area and making it more amenable to rule along ethnic and tribal lines and thus easier pickings for carpetbagging and loan sharking neolibs. As well, the neocon plan is to make sure Syria or Iran never threaten Israel, not that they would—Israel has nukes and the will to use them (as they planned to do during the Six Day War, regardless of the fact its adversaries didn’t have nukes or were they anywhere close to developing them).

“Though Syria’s possession of WMD was the early justification for contingency planning for the country—even for American nuclear weapons planning—I imagine that in light of the Iraq intelligence failure and the current scandals, the administration would now have an impossible time selling WMD charges to the international community. But now all of the pieces could easily fall into place without even any mention of WMD. Political genius Karl Rove would be proud.”

Of course, Syria does not have a weapons of mass destruction capability, or at least not a serious one, and as U.S. investigators discovered, there is no evidence Syria held Iraqi WMD, as the Bushites claim, as usual sans absolutely any evidence whatsoever (except for the delusions of a Syrian “defector,” who blamed the Assad family for hiding Saddam’s invisible WMD, in particular Assif Shoakat; the Bushcons love these sort of lies, even though they are patently absurd, as they were in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq).

As for “selling WMD charges to the international community,” this is a joke. Bush and Crew don’t do “international community” (much of it, as noted above, they want to bomb) and the “current scandals” are but horse flies circling hungrily around the stink emanating from the neocons. Nothing will stop these criminals from realizing their diabolical plans for total war—except maybe a few million outraged Americans marching on Washington with plenty of tar and feathers.

Short of that, we will simply have to sit back and endure the inevitable.