WASHINGTON (IPS) — Despite the clear opposition of the
Barack Obama administration and apparent ambivalence on the part of the
right-wing government in Israel, neo-conservative hawks here have set their
sights on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who they hope will be the next
domino to fall to the so-called “Arab Spring.”

In a much-noted op-ed published Saturday by the Washington
Post, Elliot Abrams, who served as George W. Bush’s top Mideast adviser, called
for the administration to take a series of diplomatic and economic measures
similar to those taken against Libya before the U.S. and NATO’s military
intervention, to weaken Assad’s hold on power and embolden the opposition.

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad acknowledges applause before addressing the parliament in Damascus in this still image taken from a video footage March 30, 2011. Al-Assad said on Wednesday that Syria is the target of a “conspiracy” to sow sectarian strife, but some Syrians who have demonstrated against his rule had legitimate demands. REUTERS/Syrian state TV via Reuters TV

He was joined the same day by the Wall Street Journal’s
hard-line editorial page which urged Washington to support the opposition
“in as many ways as possible.”

“It’s impossible to know who would succeed Assad if his
minority Allawite regime fell, but it’s hard to imagine many that would be worse
for U.S. interests,” the Journal’s editorial board asserted. Its
increasingly neo-conservative counterpart at the Washington Post, which last
week called Assad “an unredeemable thug,”  urged the administration to side “decisively with those
in Syria seeking genuine change.”

And on Tuesday, a major candidate for the 2012 Republican
presidential nomination, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, chimed in with a
full-throated endorsement of Abrams’ recommendations and described Assad
himself as a “killer.”

The latest campaign, which comes as the administration finds
itself ever more deeply embroiled in a civil war in Libya and remains
pre-occupied by challenges to friendly regimes in Bahrain and Yemen, was
launched as it became clear over the past week that Assad faces what most
observers here believe is the biggest crisis of his nearly 11-year-old reign.

More than 60 people have reportedly been killed in clashes
between protestors and police around the country since demonstrations erupted
in the southern town of Dera’a two weeks ago.

Expectations that Assad, who dismissed his government
Tuesday, would announce a series of reforms, including an end to a nearly
50-year-old emergency law, were dashed Wednesday when he blamed
“conspiracies” for the unrest in a speech to parliament. Although he
suggested that major reforms were indeed impending, he failed to specify either
what they were or when they might be implemented.

“There will be more demonstrations,” predicted
Bassam Haddad, a Syria expert at George Mason University, who added that the
regime remains divided between reformists and conservatives. “If Bashar
gets his way, I feel the response [to further protests] will be mild. But if
the hard-liners get their way, there will be a crackdown that will have a
snowball effect and that could turn into a nightmare for the regime.”

That would likely be welcomed by the neo-conservatives, some
of whom have already suggested that a violent repression will enable them to
invoke Washington’s intervention against Libya as a precedent for taking strong
action against his regime.

The Obama administration, which has tried to engage Damascus
as part of a broader strategy to weaken its alliance with Iran, has regarded
Assad himself as reform-minded, but limited in his ability to move against an
entrenched opposition in the security forces and his ruling Baath party.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described
Assad as a “different leader,” noting that “many of the members
of Congress who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s
a reformer.”

The remark infuriated neo-conservatives who have long
considered the Assad dynasty as Public Enemy Number Two, after Iran, in the
Middle East due to its ties with Tehran, its long-standing support for
Lebanon’s Hizbullah and Palestine’s Hamas, and, since the 2003 U.S. invasion of
Iraq, its alleged backing for Sunni insurgents there.

Indeed, the notorious 1996 “Clean Break” memo that
was prepared for then-incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu by
several prominent neo-conservatives who, seven years later, would take senior
posts in the Bush administration, depicted the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as
one crucial step in a larger strategy designed to destabilize Syria.

During the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah, Abrams
reportedly urged Israel’s defense minister to expand Israel’s bombing campaign
to include targets inside Syria, a course that was supported publicly by other
neo- conservatives outside the administration. To their frustration, the
Israelis rejected their advice.

Neo-conservatives and their Congressional allies have fought
tooth and nail against efforts by the Obama administration to begin normalizing
relations with Damascus that were effectively broken off by the Bush administration
after it blamed the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik
Hariri in Beirut on Assad’s regime.

Now, however, they clearly believe that the Arab Spring has
presented a new opportunity for “regime change” in Damascus, one that
must be seized without delay.

Abrams, who exerted a major influence on Bush’s policy
toward Syria, has called in particular for the administration to strongly and
continuously denounce the regime, withdraw its ambassador, press for
international action against Assad, including seeking his indictment by the
International Criminal Court, and using Washington’s influence with the new
governments in Egypt and Tunisia to persuade the Arab League, which expelled
Libya earlier this month, to apply the same sanction to Damascus.

But, aside from condemning specific incidents of violence by
the security forces, as well as an expression of disappointment Wednesday at
Assad’s speech before parliament, the administration has shown no inclination
to follow this advice.

“Washington already has its hands full in the Middle
East,” noted Dov Zakheim, who served in a senior Pentagon post under Bush.

Syrians hold national flags and posters of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad during a pro-government rally at the central bank square in Damascus March 29, 2011. Assad accepted his government’s resignation on Tuesday after nearly two weeks of pro-democracy unrest that has posed the gravest challenge to his 11-year rule. REUTERS/Wael Hmedan

“In an environment in which American forces are engaged
in three Muslim countries, the last thing Washington needs is to verbally trap
itself in a situation in which pressure for yet more military action begins to
mount,” he wrote in the Shadow Government blog at foreignpolicy.com
Monday.

“The last thing the United States need is to get
enmeshed in Syria’s troubles,” he added, noting that “[a]n unstable
Syria might be tempted, as neither Assad pere nor fils were, to attack Israel
on the Golan front, or to push Hizbullah into a war that Damascus would then
widen…”

Similarly, Paul Pillar, a retired CIA analyst who served as
National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East between 2000 and 2005, warned
that regime change could turn out very poorly for both the U.S. and Israel and
that Abrams’ and the Journal’s confidence that any successor regime would be
preferable to Assad’s was ill-founded.

“Syria under Assad is probably the most secular place
in the Middle East,” he noted in his blog at the nationalinterest.org
website. “The influence of Islamism, in whatever form, in Syria has
nowhere to go but up if there is regime change. That would not be welcome to
those in Israel and the United States who worry about any political role for
Islamists.”