Bush keeps pressure on Syria

President George W. Bush has called on Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon - the latest effort by Washington to increase pressure on a country it accuses of supporting terrorism.

Bush said Syria should adhere to a United Nations resolution demanding that it withdraw the troops it has had in Lebanon for three decades.

Since the assassination on Tuesday of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut, the Bush administration has noticeably increased its rhetoric towards Syria, blurring the lines between the words it uses and the meaning it wishes to imply.

Two years ago the administration used a similar tactic to suggest Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks of September 11.

On Thursday, for instance, while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declined to explicitly blame Syria for Hariri's death, she sought to put pressure on the Damascus Government over this issue.

"We have been very clear that we don't know who is responsible for the bombing," she told a Senate committee.

"But the Syrians - given their position in Lebanon, given their interference in Lebanese affairs, given the fact that their forces are there, given the terrorists that operate in southern Lebanon with Syrian forces in close proximity to them - does put on the Syrians a special responsibility for the kind of destabilisation there."

Bush continued in similar style yesterday and said the US would work with other countries in the region to put pressure on Syria to withdraw its troops.

"I can't tell you yet [if Syria was behind Tuesday's killing]. I don't know that. I'm going to withhold judgment until we know what the facts are."

He went on to say he believed Syria, which the US lists as a state sponsor of terrorism, was "out of step with the progress being made in the greater Middle East".

After the assassination this week the US withdrew its ambassador in an attempt to isolate Syria.

Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said the US objected to Russian plans to sell advanced surface-to-air missiles to Syria.

In Damascus, a Syrian-Iranian united front to face any threats was cast as a natural expression of a longstanding close, strategic relationship between two countries under growing pressure from Washington.

Syrian officials dismissed Bush's remarks, but fears that the diplomatic feud could turn into a military conflict abound and Iran's influential ex-president Hashemi Rafsanjani urged Arab nations to broaden the Iran-Syria alliance to protect against US and Israeli plots.

That idea appears unlikely to go far, with many key Arab countries - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan - closely allied with Washington and long suspicious of Iran's Shiite clerical regime. But the move is clearly aimed at diminishing US efforts to isolate the two countries.

Rafsanjani, who is expected to run for the office again in June, said in Tehran after meeting Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed Naji al-Otari, that strengthening relations among Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and other Islamic states in the region was critical, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

- Reuters and Independent