Attack on Syria as seen by Arab analysts

If you thought that Arab all Arab news­pa­pers con­demned the U.S. raid in Syria then read this Saudi news­pa­per edi­to­r­ial “The raid on Albuq­mal [Syria] an open door to the new real­ity of Syr­ian“ which says that Syria is the one to blamed on this raid:

Con­demn­ing the U.S. “aggres­sion” on Syria, will not pre­vent them from repeat­ing it again and again, only a firm Syr­ian posi­tion to cut its rela­tion­ship with al-Qaeda and its sur­ro­gates will.
Syria used Al-Qaeda as a defense line to pro­tect the regime from the winds of changes blow from Iraq, eco­nom­i­cally from Jor­dan and free­dom from Lebanon.

So, the solu­tion is to stop “play­ing” with Al-Qaeda, and coop­er­at­ing with the Iraqi gov­ern­ment will speed up the with­drawal of the Amer­i­cans from Iraq.

Egypt­ian Al-Ahram edi­to­r­ial

What­ever the expla­na­tions Wash­ing­ton is going to fab­ri­cate to try to jus­tify their aggres­sion against the Syria, are unac­cept­able excuses. Espe­cially the U.S. has lost the cred­i­bil­ity in the Mid­dle East espe­cially and the world in gen­eral, since the inven­tion of Baghdad’s weapons of mass destruc­tion lie to jus­tify the inva­sion of Iraq.

Jan Aziz from Al-Akhbar “The U.S. tells Syria talk to us”:

The out­come of for­mer Israel-U.S. raid on the so called Syr­ian “Nuclear facil­ity”, was the start of the Israel-Syria talks medi­ated by Turkey. There is the pos­si­bil­ity that the U.S. is not very com­fort­able with Euro­pean, Turk­ish and even the Israeli break Dam­as­cus iso­la­tion with­out Washington’s per­mis­sion. Pos­si­bly, a direct U.S. mes­sage to the Syr­ian lead­er­ship say­ing: “talk to us” instead of wan­der­ing around in the between the Champs Ely­sees, and Hyde Park.

George Alam to Assafir:

Euro­pean diplo­mats reveal the sig­nif­i­cant mean­ing behind this raid, as a mes­sage not only to Syria but also to other Iraq’s neigh­bor­ing coun­tries con­tains an invi­ta­tion to reverse the course and to take into account the inter­nal Iraqi polit­i­cal and secu­rity with the gen­er­ous U.S. offers these days. But Syria is no longer vul­ner­a­ble and iso­lated as it was before.

Fathi Atwa on Okaz “The raid is a mes­sage to the Amer­i­can voter in bad tim­ing”:

The tim­ing of the raid raises the ques­tion, many experts and observers con­sider it inap­pro­pri­ate, because it put an end to recent efforts to revive the coor­di­na­tion and coop­er­a­tion between Dam­as­cus and Wash­ing­ton over issues such as secu­rity and peace in the region.

Alkhaleej inter­viewed a group of Egypt­ian polit­i­cal analysts:

Strate­gic expert, Mah­moud Kha­laf said that U.S. Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s pol­icy was hos­tile to Syria even before the occu­pa­tion of Iraq and the hos­til­ity increased after the inva­sion of Iraq, believes that Syria is pro­vid­ing sup­port for the Iraqi resis­tance, Pales­tin­ian resis­tance groups includ­ing Hamas and sup­ports Hezbollah.

Add to this the Syr­ian posi­tion against the U.S. pres­ence in the region. Major Gen­eral Nabil Fouad said that the U.S. attack came as a response to remarks made by the Syr­ian Pres­i­dent Al-Assad dur­ing his recent visit to Moscow, where Assad said that Syria is will­ing to pro­vide facil­i­tate for the Russ­ian fleet, which is not the direc­tion desired by Washington.

Major Gen­eral Oth­man said, that the attack is a vio­la­tion and aggres­sion against the sov­er­eign State of the United States of Amer­ica, the cur­rent U.S. admin­is­tra­tion wanted to cover its fail­ure in Afghanistan and Iraq, even with such lim­ited oper­a­tion on the Syr­ian borders.

Lebanese polit­i­cal ana­lysts made their view on Al-Quds:

For­mer min­is­ter Elias Saba: The rea­son is that this U.S. admin­is­tra­tion inter­nally and exter­nally is in a very bad posi­tion, per­haps the worst ever in the U.S. his­tory, iat the polit­i­cal, moral or eco­nomic lev­els. This admin­is­tra­tion is a total failure.

There are many objec­tives behind this attack, includ­ing shift­ing the atten­tion away from Amer­i­can inter­nal cri­sis to an alleged exter­nal threat, in this case Syria. The U.S. admin­is­tra­tion wanted the unde­cided voter to make a fast deci­sion and vote for McCain the Repub­li­can can­di­date as a con­tin­u­a­tion of the cur­rent administration’s policy.

Dr. Walid Arbid: The strike was a U.S. polit­i­cal mes­sage to Syria linked to the Iraqi sit­u­a­tion; the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion wants to sign a secu­rity agree­ment with Iraq, which is rejected by some neigh­bor­ing coun­tries includ­ing Syria, on the other hand, a mil­i­tary step aimed to boost the chances of Repub­li­can can­di­date McCain in the pres­i­den­tial elections.