THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
Exclusive from Popeye Chicken's betting house.

Odds of who will next place the Bush administration "liberated" from their oppressor
Syria: 2-1
Libya: 5-1
Iran: 10-1
North Korea 25-1
Cuba 50-1
Saudi Arabia: 75-1
Haiti 150-1
The staff of Yankee Stadium: 200-1
The staff of the Justice Department: 5000-1


The scoop
Syria: Overwhelming favorite. Surrounded by US allies, led by Baa'thist regime, weak military, despotic regime. Plus Iraq could serve as a launching base for the invasion.

Libya: Much more vast country than Iraq, but main population centers are along the coast. They have a crackpot as dictator who is easily demonizable, plus they have lots of oil.

Iran: They might choose instead to encourage reformers in their battle against conservative clerics.

North Korea: This regime was always more of a threat than Iraq and have a crackpot leader, but the fact that they have nukes gives them serves as a strong disincentive to invade.

Cuba: Old news. Castro has outlasted 9 US presidents already. Besides, we already tried the invasion thing there.

Saudi Arabia: A regime as repressive as Saddam's and probably more corrupt. Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from there. But they sell us cheap oil so we will probably wait for the House of Saud to crumble and pray it isn't replaced by an Islamist regime. If it is, THEN we might invade.

Haiti: We already "liberated" them back in 1994, when we re-installed the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. There were huge cheering crowds welcoming the US troops in the capital at that time. Haiti's answer to Grover Cleveland is now in his second, non-consecutive term and is proving that democratically-elected does not mean democratic. Human rights are becoming increasingly non-existent. Political violence is common place. Corruption levels are breathtaking. The standard of living is well below what it was in 1986... at the demise of the hated Duvallier regime. Is this what Iraq will look like in 2013? See the excellent article in The New York Review of Books on what Aristide's Haiti has become.

Yankee Stadium: Pres. Bush is a former Major League Baseball owner so he is unlikely to abandon his solidarity with a certain George Steinbrenner.

The Justice Department: The attorney general is firmly in the "our son of a bitch" camp.


Blather
I honestly do believe that Syria will be next if the messianic neo-conservatives get their way. I didn't think much could surprise me in politics anymore, but their disdain for any sense of gravity is truly astonishing. They talk about invading countries in the way that decent people talk about their sports' team playing another sports' team.

A column in today's Globe and Mail of Toronto noted, "Though Secretary of State Colin Powell has assured Arab leaders that the United States has no intention of rolling on to Damascus, Mr. Rumsfeld has been less conciliatory. 'It depends on people's behaviour,' he said this week when asked if Syria was next. 'Certainly I have nothing to announce.' His hawkish deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told an interviewer last Sunday that 'there's got to be a change in Syria.' The Syrians, he said, should "get the message" from events in Iraq and stop supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction."

The Secretary of War didn't even go through the motions of saying a war on Syria is "unlikely" or "we hope the Syrians will get the message." "I have nothing to announce" comes across as "I don't deny that an invasion of Syria is in the works."

And when Mr. Wolfowitz says, "There's got to be a change in Syria," somehow you get the impression that he doesn't mean dictator Assad should switch from Coke to Pepsi.