DEALING WITH SYRIA

What's next for Syria? War with the US and UK, or more likely, just the US? Economic sanctions, either US-only or directed (improbably) by the UN?

Fat chance. Syria's on the frickin' UN Security Council, remember? Jacques Chirac has already been toadying up to the baby Assad. France will play its usual double games and kill off any peaceful attempt to get justice. And besides, sanctions have little chance of doing any good. A decade of sanctions did little to keep Saddam from lining his toilets with gold, but did help him starve and repress his own people and shame many in the West into wanting to kiss and make up with the brute. So sanctions are out, at least if you actually want to do any good.

But we have to do something about Syria's recent behavior. If the Bush administration isn't blowing smoke, Syria essentially sided up with Saddam once the war broke out. Syria may be harboring Saddamite cronies that we want. Scarier still, Syria may have taken possession of Saddam's illicit weapons, with the possible intent of either keeping them permanently or handing them off to one of Syria's well-trained and well-financed terror operations. If all of this is true, it cannot stand. Syria must either willingly change its behavior, or be forced to change its behavior.

But without sanctions and short of war, how do we do this?

By going in hot pursuit.

Hot pursuit, the way I understand it, is a legal idea that allows forces or authorities pursuing a fugitive from justice to cross borders--state or provincial borders within a nation, or even international borders--if the fugitive is believed to have crossed from one jurisdiction to another. Hot pursuit usually includes cooperation on both sides of the border crossed, but not always. The US famously pursued Mexican outlaw Pancho Villa deep into Mexican territory after he menaced American border towns back in the early 1900s. The US also tossed out the possibility of hot pursuit in the Afghanistan hunt for Osama bin Laden back in 2001, though the pursuits often run into trouble at the Afghan-Pakistan border. Pakistan isn't too keen on Americans running across its tribal territories, where the Paks' ISI may in fact be helping al Qaeda operatives hide.

In Syria, hot pursuit may allow the US to claim legal rights to hunt down Iraqi fugitives without resorting to all-out war. It may also send Bashar Assad an impolite message: Cough up the people and items we want, or you can expect US troops to have free reign in your country to look for them. Oppose those troops with your troops, and we'll have the 4th Infantry at your doorstep in a day or two, and if we're really irritated we'll throw in a Marine expeditionary division too. It's also in its own way a reciprocal strategy to those usually employed by terror-supporting states like Syria--they send terrorists to kill us, we send in Special Forces to challenge them on their own turf. Facing a form of terror for the first time on his own soil, Assad may decide to adopt a more conciliatory stance. Or his people might sense weakness and take him down themselves.

It will be dangerous work for those US forces. Syria is a den of terrorists from one end to the other. But we can't just let Assad get away with spiriting away some of the most potentially dangerous people on the planet--people we have spent billions trying to knock from power and capture--and the WMDs that were the casus belli in the first place. We can't yet just attack him outright--that may inflame the Middle East in a way that Iraq never could have. Not that we couldn't take on all of the backward Arab armies at the same time if we had to--we could. But prudence says you pick your battles more wisely. One war at a time, if you can.

So hot pursuit may be in the cards if Syria doesn't change its behavior, and soon.

(thanks to Chris for planting the seeds that became this post)

UPDATE:

The key to using the Right (or Doctrine) of Hot Pursuit is establishing that we're acting in self-defense due to the ongoing terrorism and destabilization threat from ex-regime members, now in Syria, who already made the critical legal mistake of cross-border deployment of Syrian terrorists in the current war. -- Chris R.