Los Angeles Times April 17, 2013:
Syria’s Bashar Assad warns ‘terrorism’ will come back to West
President Bashar Assad says the U.S. and Europe are supporting his Islamist opponents, which will come back to haunt them.
Los Angeles Times April 15, 2003:
Next, Turn the Screws on Syria
The anti-terror effort must go on. Pressure all the jihadist regimes.
By Yossi Klein Halevi
JERUSALEM — Though Syria was conspicuously omitted from President Bush’s “axis of evil,” the regime of Bashar Assad has now replaced Saddam Hussein as the Arab world’s leading supporter of terrorism and stockpiler of weapons of mass destruction.
Syria is the only Arab country that actively backed Hussein, reportedly encouraging suicide bombers to cross into Iraq, sheltering Iraqi war fugitives and possibly storing nonconventional weapons for Hussein.
By focusing on those provocations, the Bush administration is correcting a serious flaw in its war against terrorism. The region’s most vicious terrorist groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, maintain operational centers in Damascus. As one administration insider put it, any taxi driver in the Syrian capital knows the address of half a dozen terrorist groups.
A divided Syria might be good for Israel but it is horrible for the West.
Europe was better off when Qaddafi ruled Libya, Assad ruled Syria and Hussein ruled Iraq.
