WASHINGTON - The United States said Wednesday it was sceptical over Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's pledge to withdraw his troops from neighboring Lebanon, calling for greater international pressure against Damascus.
"Words are one thing, actions are another," deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said of Assad's promise in a recent interview with Time magazine to pull his troops back in "the next few months."
"I guess there's a ... lack of clarity and therefore, a healthy degree of scepticism until there is clarity about intent and visible movement," Ereli told reporters.
A senior official, who asked not to be named, said Syria had already issued a series of unkept pledges on troop withdrawals.
"It always turns out to be less than they said they will do," the official told reporters on the plane taking Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice home after attending a meeting on Palestinian reform in London.
The United States and France are in the forefront of calls for Syria's withdrawal of its 14,000 troops and undetermined number of intelligence agents from Lebanon.
Pressure has been piling up on Damascus since the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese premier and architect of Lebanon's postwar reconstruction, Rafiq Hariri, in a massive bomb blast in Beirut, for which Syria and the Syrian-backed Lebanese regime have been widely blamed.
The dramatic fall on Monday of the Lebanese government of Prime Minister Omar Karameh has accelerated the pressure ahead of upcoming parliamentary elections.
Rice and the top French diplomat, Michel Barnier, on Tuesday used a joint press conference in London to boost pressure on Syria to comply with UN Security Council resolution 1559 requiring it to pull out troops.
"We have to keep up the direct pressure up on the Syrians," the State Department official said, indicating the possibility of wider US sanctions against Syria.
US officials, armed with the Syrian Accountability Act passed in late 2003, moved last May to impose a near-blanket ban on US exports to Syria and give a green light for the freezing of Syrian assets in the United States.
Lawmakers have recently called on US President George W. Bush to ratchet up the pressure on Syria, giving him the powers to adjust the level of sanctions against Damascus as he sees fit.
David Satterfield, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, just completed a mission to Lebanon to underscore the US complaints against Syria and press for the withdrawal of its troops.
Ereli said Satterfield also made clear to the Lebanese "that the United States supports them in their pursuit of an independent, democratic and sovereign Lebanon free of outside interference and intimidation.
"And he, I think very importantly, reaffirmed our call and the call of the international community for a full, credible and transparent investigation into the terrorist murder of Prime Minister Hariri," Ereli said.
03/02/2005 19:53 GMT