US piles up pressure on Syria to disarm as ME heavyweight

Until recently, Washington's sole crusade against Syria was to demand that it cut off support to the Lebanese-based Hezbollah and various Palestinian factions that Washington has blacklisted as terror groups.

Then in the wake of the war to depose the regime in Iraq, the United States pressed Damascus to better police its border with its war-torn neighbour to prevent infiltration by foreign fighters.

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After maverick Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shocked the world and renounced efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction, Washington urged the Baathist government in Damascus to do the same.

Last week, the US campaign stepped up a gear. Barely a day went by without US officials warning of stiff and imminent embargoes on Syria.

Neither has Washington missed an opportunity to press Damascus to pull its 17,000 troops out of neighbouring Lebanon in keeping with the law passed by Congress in December that approved sanctions.

On Saturday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell used a visit in Kuwait to urge Syria to withdraw troops from Lebanon to give Beirut "full sovereignty".

In an interview that appeared just 24 hours earlier, a US State Department spokesman was more direct.

"It is time for Syria to withdraw from Lebanon," Nabil Khoury was quoted as saying by the French-language Beirut daily L'Orient-Le Jour.

"The old arguments that this presence was necessary as collateral for recovering the Golan (Heights from Israel) or to protect Syria's flank in the event of an Israeli attack are now obsolete and out of date," Khoury said.

Last week, US President George W. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, demanded that Lebanon's presidential elections, scheduled for later this year, take place without meddling from abroad, in reference to Syria.

Syria sent troops into Lebanon in 1976, a year after the outbreak of a 15-year-long civil war in the country that has come to be politically dominated by Damascus.

It has kept them there ever since, though it has reduced their number in recent years.

Such statements have seen pro-Syrian leaders in Beirut leap to the defence of their dominant neighbour.