I know Syria is not officially a member of Bush’s "axis of evil," but that’s only because he hasn’t taken Iraq off yet. Once Iraq is gone, Syria will be entered. Hariri was assassinated Monday in a terrorist bombing in Beirut, and U.S-Syrian relations have been on a nosedive since then.

The bombing may be just the excuse Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice are looking for to annex another evil country.

And I was thinking Iran would be next.

I was talking with a former Army soldier recently and he was saying he heard from contacts that Iran would be the target this summer. Iran, of course, has been an axis of evil member since it was announced and more recently has been the object of a war of words over its use of nuclear materials.

Gee, I hope the $82 billion the president wants for his occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is enough. If he needs more money for another invasion or two, he might have to try to shut down even more programs that benefit real Americans, the ones who don’t qualify for most of his tax cuts.

The trigger fingers in Washington have been itching for a way to go after Syria for years now. Just weeks after the Iraq invasion the president got out his Lone Ranger costume with allegations that Syria possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Yeah, right. Just like Iraq had them. Unfortunately for Syria, we now know all it takes is an unfounded suspicion, bad intelligence, a lie or a fantasy to start a war and kill 100,000 people.

To add to the drama after Monday’s bombing, on Tuesday we recalled our ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobey, who dropped off an official note saying how upset we were about the attack. All this while we’re saying we don’t know if Syria is behind the killing.

The president paved the way for an invasion of Syria in December 2003 when he signed the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. The law provides for sanctions against Syria if it does not meet a set of goals, such as ending its support for Palestinian terrorist groups, its military and security presence in Lebanon, its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and its lack of support for the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq.

Syria apparently had six months to achieve those goals, because in May the president determined they were unmet and authorized the sanctions, which primarily were economic except for a few Patriot Act provisions that allowed us to freeze the assets of certain Syrian institutions and people.

Now, it all seems like part of the president’s new foreign policy, which was the highlight of his inaugural speech, that authoritarian countries that are not our allies are going to be liberated by force if necessary and installed with democracy.

The president is pointing to Iraq as a success story now that we were able to pull off an election, albeit at the point of an assault rifle, less than two years after the invasion. The White House calls it the first major victory in the war on terrorism and now most Americans believe the same way.

Americans were duped and apparently the president and his puppeteers think they can easily sell more invasions to the American people in the same way.

It’s simple: Iran and Syria are totalitarian and, worse, won’t play along with our influence and power in the Middle East. At a mere cost of 100,000 of their people dead and 1,500 Americans troops killed per invasion, we can get them on our side and install democracies at the same time.

Then we can give them the weapons of mass destruction that they really didn’t have so they can defend themselves against other evil countries that haven’t been liberated yet.

Nations can be forgiven their lack of commitment to freedom, however, if they are willing to play with us and help with our military and petroleum needs. Other than Israel, the authoritarian Saudi Arabia is our main ally in the region even though it does not permit women to vote or run for office. Likewise Kuwait. Maybe someday we’ll invade them, too.

The trouble is that Americans and Congress may have gone along with the deceit used to justify the Iraq invasion, but I don’t think they are ready to sign on to foreign policy that has one Iraq after another lined up for liberation, even if that were a moral mission.

We just can’t afford all these wars. When the president took office Social Security had a huge surplus. Now it has projections of a critical deficit. And the wars caused the crisis that now results in a budget proposal full of cuts for social and educational programs that help people.

I think the government should be more concerned about the freedom of Americans. Let’s leave Syria and Iran alone.

Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star and can be reached at 432-1000 ext. 217 or at cary@thedailystar.com.