The Road to Damascus

Front Page Mag ^ | 5.1.03 | Itamar Rabinovich

[Enemy Of The State]

The Road to Damascus
By Itamar Rabinovich
The Wall Street Journal | May 1, 2003

The war in Iraq was about more than toppling Saddam Hussein and destroying his arsenal. Its more ambitious proponents have argued that it should bring democracy to Iraq and serve as the catalyst for a radical transformation of Middle Eastern politics. More modest supporters have expected greater American ability to bring about incremental improvement in the region. In either case, America's victory is now being tested in several arenas: in Iraq itself; in the effort to implement a "road map" for Israelis and Palestinians; and in the complex arena of Washington's relationship with Damascus.

For a while, it seemed that the U.S. and Syria were set on a collision course, that Syria may become the third target of the "war against terror." In fact, this was not a real prospect. Washington was not about to -- nor in a position to -- launch war against Syria in mid-April. But it was incensed by Syria's support for Saddam before and during the war. As the U.S. looked for Iraq's leadership and weapons of mass destruction, it had information suggesting that some of both were actually concealed in Syria. The Bush administration's threats, and its denunciation of Syria's other "sins" -- its own arsenal of chemical weapons and support of Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist organizations -- proved effective, at least in part, and the immediate crisis was defused. But basic issues linger, and Colin Powell -- his visit to Damascus imminent -- must address the following with a particular urgency:

• Iraq's future: Syria voted for Security Council Resolution 1441 but it was vigorously opposed to war against Iraq. The Syrian Baath regime is firmly entrenched, yet it is a minority regime with an endemic sense of insecurity. It has hostile relations with three neighbors (Israel, Turkey and Jordan) and feels safe only with its Western neighbor, Lebanon, where Syria holds sway. It views America's military presence and anticipated supremacy in Iraq as threatening, and would like to expedite the U.S.'s departure and to see a friendly, or at least non-hostile, regime in Baghdad. Syria is also Iran's strategic ally in the region and could conceivably join Iran's unfolding effort to destabilize Washington's position in Iraq.

• Weapons of mass destruction: Syria has Scud missiles, some of them with chemical warheads, stored in underground silos. For Damascus these are the "poor man's nuclear weapons" -- a way of deterring Israel in the event, or prospect, of war. Syria's armed forces in their present state are no match for the Israelis and its deterrents are the Scud missiles and medium-range rockets deployed by Hezbollah along the Lebanese-Israeli border. When challenged on this issue, Syria's formal response is a demand to turn the Middle East into a zone "free of all weapons of mass destruction" -- a transparent reference to Israel's nuclear potential.

• Support for terrorist organizations: Syria hosts several Palestinian terrorist organizations -- most notably Islamic Jihad -- and facilitates the activity of Hezbollah, an arm of the Iranian regime, which operates in Lebanon under Syria's umbrella. This has kept Syria on the State Department's list of states supporting terrorism. Past efforts to change Syria's conduct were rebuffed by arguments that these are not terrorists but national liberation fighters, or that Syria did not have real influence over Hezbollah.

• Syria and Israel: The decade-long effort in the 1990s to settle the Syrian-Israeli conflict collapsed in March 2000 during President Clinton's abortive meeting with Hafez al-Assad. The latter died in June 2000 and was succeeded by his son, Bashar, who does not have the authority required for a resumption of the negotiations. Bashar revived some of the traditional hostile rhetoric of the earlier decades and has allowed Hezbollah to draw Syria twice to the brink of collision with Israel. On the Israeli side of the equation, Ariel Sharon seems absolutely uninterested in a revival of the negotiations, as he is totally consumed with the Palestinian issue. A Syrian-Israeli modus vivendi could conceivably be worked out, but Syria is not likely to be watching idly as Israel and the Palestinians go back to negotiations. Bashar would not want Syria to be the only Arab party to the 1967 defeat that did not regain territory it had lost in that war, and would be likely to seek to obstruct the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations -- as Syria had done in similar instances in the past.

Since the launching of the Arab-Israeli peace process in 1973, a pattern has crystallized in Washington's relationship with Damascus. Successive American administrations invested considerable efforts in bringing Syria into the U.S. orbit in the Middle East -- away from the Soviet Union, Iran and Iraq, into the Arab-Israeli peace process, and into whatever scheme the U.S. had at the time for organizing the Middle East.

Much of it had to do with the person and leadership of Hafez al-Assad. He charmed and intrigued a succession of American policy makers. He himself was intrigued by America but could not quite shake himself loose from the radical dimension of his political persona. He also excelled in playing a game -- responding to Washington some of the time, eluding and obstructing its politics on other occasions.

The Bush administration was willing to continue this pattern with his son and successor. It authorized an informal American-Syrian dialogue at the Baker Institute in Houston and it delayed a move in Congress to impose sanctions on Syria. But more recently, the policy collapsed. Bashar al-Assad quite clumsily shifted to an active pro-Iraq policy and the Bush administration lost its patience and temper.

The mid-April crisis with Damascus subsided, but the issues remain real. When Mr. Powell goes to Damascus as part of his Middle Eastern tour, Syria will try to offer a compromise -- satisfy Washington's demands on some issues and stick to its guns on others. As this familiar scenario unfolds, the Bush administration should bear in mind that its leverage over Syria after the victory in Iraq is unprecedented.

President Bush will not demand a total realignment of Syrian politics. Democracy in Syria or real independence for Lebanon are not likely to be on the agenda. Yet his administration must realize that other major goals -- the end of Syria's interference in Iraq, as well as of its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorist organizations -- are all within reach. This is an opportunity not to be spurned.

Mr. Rabinovich, president of Tel Aviv University, was Israel's Ambassador to Washington and chief negotiator with Syria in the mid-1990s. He is the author of "The Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations" (Princeton, 1998).