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Was George Bush a sleeper agent for Iran?

In spy talk, a “sleeper” is somebody who lives his life in the target country, keeping his nose clean and climbing up the ranks of the local hierarchy, until he reaches a position in which he can be of great service to his true employers abroad.

In spy talk, a “sleeper” is somebody who lives his life in the target country, keeping his nose clean and climbing up the ranks of the local hierarchy, until he reaches a position in which he can be of great service to his true employers abroad.

It’s time to inquire if that description fits former U.S. president George W. Bush.

The question arises because Bush’s actions as president did much more for Iran’s interests in the Middle East than for those of the United States. Consider a little-noticed development in the confrontation between pro-democracy protesters and the Baathist regime that rules Syria with an iron hand.

The Baath Party seized power in Syria in 1963. Since 1970 it has been led by members of the Assad clan — the current president is Bashar al-Assad. The Alawite (Shia Muslim) sect they belong to dominates government and intelligence services.

Alawites are only 10 per cent of Syria’s population and are seen as heretics by many in the Sunni Muslim majority. The Baathist Party is as corrupt and incompetent as it is oppressive. It was bound to be challenged by the “Arab spring.”

The regime’s response has been brutal. Justifying its actions with the brazen lie that protesters are “armed terrorist gangs,” Assad’s government has sent the army into one city after another to crush demonstrations. At least 1,700 Syrian civilians have been killed, and an estimated 30,000 have been arrested. The violence is so horrifying that even the Baathist regime’s former friends denounced it.

Last weekend, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Syrian authorities to stop the crackdown, warning that if the attacks on Syrian cities do not end, “there will be nothing more to discuss about the steps that will be taken.” In diplomatic-speak, that is a very serious threat, and Turkey is Syria’s most powerful neighbour.

Most of the Arab world has also denounced President Assad’s regime, including the Arab League, the Saudi Arabian, Jordanian and Egyptian governments, and Yasser Abed Rabbo, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), who said recently that the Baathist regime’s actions are “a crime against humanity.”

Even Russia and China voted for the United Nations resolution two weeks ago that condemned the Syrian government.

The regime’s only ally, Iran, remains loyal.

You can’t assume that George Bush was in Iran’s pay just because his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq destroyed that country’s two most serious enemies in the region, the Taliban regime in Kabul and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. It could just have been deep ignorance and ideologically driven blindness.

But how else can you explain this?

Iraq, almost uniquely among Arab states, supports and defends the Baathist regime’s actions in Syria. Last week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki warned the protesters not to “sabotage” the Syrian state. And this Iraqi government was created and nurtured by the Bush administration.

Before the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq was ruled by a rival branch of the Baath Party, led by Saddam Hussein. He was a murderous dictator, though not significantly more so than the Assad regime. And Hussein was Iran’s worst enemy.

The Iraqi dictator was not working on nuclear weapons, as the Bush administration asserted, nor did he have any links to al-Qaida, as it also claimed. Bush had access to the output of the best (or at least the most numerous) intelligence agencies in the world, and they all knew that the claims were false.

Iraq had a nuclear weapons program before the first Gulf war in 1990-91, but it was dismantled by United Nations teams in the mid-nineties, and Iraq was subsequently under a strict arms embargo right down to 2003. Moreover, far from being an ally of al-Qaida, Saddam Hussein, the leader of a strictly secular regime, was a target for its assassins.

Yet the invasion went ahead anyway, Saddam Hussein was killed and the United States devoted immense efforts to creating a new government. Almost 5,000 American soldiers died in support of that enterprise. Around half a trillion dollars were spent on it. All that to build a government, led by Nuri al-Maliki, that is a close ally of Iran, and Syria’s only supporter in the Arab world.

There is a case to answer here, and a Congressional investigation into George W. Bush’s secret links to the Iranian mullahs is long overdue. They could start by figuring out where Bush was really born. Tehran? Tabriz? Maybe the “Birthers” could help the investigators to establish the truth.

Gwynne Dyer is a freelance Canadian journalist living in London.