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Syria, US: Honeymoon and
heartbreak
By Dr Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - In December 1990,
US secretary of state James Baker described Syria
as "a major Arab country who happens to share the
same goals as we do". In December 2004, US
President George W Bush said, "Syria is a very
weak country, and therefore it cannot be trusted."
The huge difference in US policy toward Syria over
these 15 years shows, if anything, how difficult
it is today to mend a very fractured and perhaps
irreparable relationship.
At the end of
World War I, the US became a dream for many
Syrians, as the land of equal opportunity, freedom
and democracy. Coming out of 400 years of Ottoman
occupation, the Syrians were enchanted by the
14-point declaration of president Woodrow Wilson.
In 1919, Wilson dispatched a fact-finding
commission to Syria to inquire on public opinion
toward establishing a French Mandate in Syria. The
team, known as the King-Crane Commission, toured
Syrian cities and villages, meeting with Syrians
from all walks of life.
The
result was an overwhelming
majority refusing a French Mandate in Syria,
claiming that if they were to be tutored on nation-building
and democracy by a foreign power, they
would prefer that this be done by the United States.
Today, 86 years later, if a
fact-finding commission were to arrive in Damascus, sent
by Bush, it would find results very different
from those of 1919. This article tries to show where
and why things went wrong between Syria and the
US.
Feeble involvement in Syrian
affairs (1943-70)
US
interests in Syria began to crystallize in 1943
when US president Franklin Roosevelt decided to
create a sphere of influence in the Middle East through
countries such as Syria and Saudi Arabia. He
lobbied for international recognition of Syria's
need to become independent from the French
Mandate, for the election of Shukri al-Quwatli, a
nationalist leader from Damascus, as president in
1943, and for Syria to be a founding member of the
United Nations in 1945.
Love for the United
States was paramount in Syria and, in 1947, ignited by
their political leaders, many students stormed the
Communist Party headquarters in Damascus,
destroying it just because its occupants "were the
enemies of America".
Relations hit
rock-bottom during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and
under Harry Truman, in 1949, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) toppled the
democratically elected regime of Quwatli,
considering it an obstacle to US interests in the
Arab world.
Quwatli had refused
three US demands: to sign an armistice with
Israel, grant passage rights to a US oil
company through the Syrian desert, and crack down
on the Syrian Communist Party. The CIA propped
up General Husni al-Za'im, a dictator by all
accounts, as president, and after fulfilling all
three requests that Quwatli had refused, he too
was toppled by the Syrian army. Za'im outlawed and
persecuted Syrian communists and signed an
armistice agreement with Israel in July 1949.
The CIA was involved in another coup attempt
during the second era of Quwatli in August 1957,
which failed and resulted in Syria asking US
ambassador James S Moose to leave Damascus, along
with architects of the failed coup: Howard Stone,
the US military attache in Syria, Robert Malloy,
the second secretary of political affairs, and
Francis Jetton, the vice consul in Damascus.
Quwatli recalled his ambassador Farid Zayn
al-Din from Washington. President John F Kennedy
enjoyed excellent relations with Damascus,
supporting the coup d'etat that toppled the union
regime in 1961 and courting the post-Nasser regime
of President Nazim al-Qudsi (1961-63), who had
been Syria's first ambassador to the US in 1945.
The temporary Syrian-American honeymoon in
1961-63 was cemented by the poet and ambassador
Omar Abu Risheh, who promoted his country well in
Washington. Conflicts rose again when in March
1963, the Qudsi regime was toppled by the Ba'ath,
and General Amin al-Hafez, Syria's new president,
pursued an anti-American and anti-Western agenda.
This was repeated, with more radicalism, during
the regime of Dr Nur al-Din al-Atasi and Salah
Jadid, the military strongman of Syria in
1966-70. The two countries remained at opposite
ends over the issue of Israel, passing through
very troubled times in 1967 and 1973, until the
Gulf War broke out in 1991.
The early
years (1970-90)
When the Gulf
War started, Syria was on America's blacklist because of a
failed attempt by one of its intelligence officers
at blowing up an Israeli airplane at Heathrow
Airport in London in 1986. Syria's late president
Hafez al-Assad, realizing that the days of the
USSR were numbered, searched for channels to ally
himself with the US, with whom he had enjoyed a
cordial relationship in the 1970s.
After
the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, and during the
disengagement talks between Assad and secretary of
state Henry Kissinger in April-May 1974, the two
men met for a total of 130 hours, developing
admiration and respect for each other. Kissinger
then served as an intermediary for Syrian-Israeli
disengagement talks in Washington, between Syria's
chief-of-staff Hikmat Shihabi and Israeli defense
minister Moshe Dayan.
Assad then met US
president Richard Nixon in Damascus (in June
1974), who remarked in his memoirs that the Syrian
president was a "tough negotiator but he has a
great deal of mystique, tremendous stamina, and a
lot of charm. All-in-all he is a man of substance,
and at his age [Assad was 44], he will be a leader
to be reckoned with in this part of the world."
Nixon's visit to Syria served both
men's interests well. For Nixon, it came in the midst
of the Watergate scandal, giving him a chance
to achieve international acclaim as a
peacemaker while he was being disgraced in Washington.
For Assad, it was great public relations for Syria,
to be visited, for the first time ever, by a
US president. Nixon's successor Gerald Ford, who
came to power in August 1974, was in the White House
when Assad decided to send his troops to Lebanon
in 1976.
Ford sent Assad a message,
through his ambassador Richard Murphy, saying that
Israel would consider Syrian involvement in
Lebanon as a "very grave threat" to itself,
warning him not to venture. Kissinger, who stayed
on from the Nixon administration, outflanking the
inexperienced Ford, had other plans for Syria.
Instead of telling Syria, "If you go in, so will
Israel," as Ford had done, Kissinger said, "If you
don't go in, Israel certainly will."
He
reasoned that Syria's intervention in Lebanon
would weaken the Syrian army and divert Assad's
attention from the Golan Heights. As a result, the
US said nothing when Syrian tanks crossed the
border into Lebanon on the night of May 31-June 1,
1976.
When Jimmy Carter came to the White
House in 1977, he invited Assad to Washington, but
Assad refused, believing that the new US president
would be no different from his predecessors
regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Wanting to
find a solution to the Middle East crisis, Carter
insisted on meeting Assad in neutral Geneva in May
1977.
Their highly publicized meeting also added
points to Syria's international standing, elevating
Assad to new heights. He commenced the seven-hour
meeting with a long lecture on Arab history,
current insecurity of the Arab world, and Israeli
expansionism. Carter took notes. Cooperation
between both men broke down, however, when
Assad refused to join Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat's
peace initiative in 1978, then angered Carter by
embracing the Iranian revolution of 1979.
President Ronald Reagan was highly critical
of Syria throughout the 1980s, and his successor,
president George H W Bush, wanted to punish
Syria for its alliance with the mullahs of Tehran,
accusing it without evidence of the bombing
of the US Marine Corps contingent at Beirut's
airport in October 1983, which left 241 dead, and
the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in April
1983, killing 17 Americans.
Yet, in light
of the Gulf War, Bush realized that as much as he
would have loved to punish Syria for its
anti-Israel and anti-American activities, he
needed Syria to prevent the occurrence of similar
activities. Damascus, Bush believed, was needed in
Operation Desert Storm because it gave his war
great legitimacy and because otherwise it had the
ability to destabilize the Middle East.
Assad, eager to comply, met with Baker for
the first time on September 14, 1990, signaling
the start of a 10-year honeymoon between Damascus
and Washington. Then, on November 23, Assad met
with Bush, who requested Syrian support in Desert
Storm, and promised to hold an Arab-Israeli peace
conference once Kuwait was liberated.
When
the Gulf War broke out in January 1991, Bush made
sure that Israel stayed out of the conflict, so as
not to anger or lose the Syrians, forcing Israel
to practice self-restraint when Saddam Hussein
showered Tel Aviv with Scud missiles. The US
president got upset with Israeli finance minister
Yitzhak Modai, who claimed that Washington would
have to pay Israel US$2 billion in compensation
for the Scud attacks it had tolerated for the sake
of Syria.
In response, Bush refused
to channel $400 million in housing-development loans
to the Israeli housing minister, who was none
other than now Premier Ariel Sharon, earmarked to
settle Russian Jews coming in from the USSR in the
West Bank and Gaza. Giving them a free hand in
Lebanon was another reward by the US
administration to the Syrians; a reward for
Assad's participation in Desert Storm. A satisfied
Syria smiled at the initiatives and gestures of
the US.
Assad's honeymoon with
Washington (1990-2000)
As Bush promised
Assad, the Madrid Conference took place in October
1991, but Syrian-Israeli negotiations amounted to
nothing. In 1994, he gave a speech at Tufts
University and said, "Syria's role is important to
American interests." Two years later, Baker gave
another speech at Tufts, saying: "Had it not been
for Syria's approval and positive position,
adopted by president [Hafez] al-Assad, the peace
process would not have been launched."
President Bill Clinton tried again to
court Syria, meeting with Assad twice in 1994, one
being during a historic visit to Damascus. He
noted that Syria "is the key to the achievement of
enduring and comprehensive peace" in the Middle
East.
Clinton supervised, and drained himself, in
talks between Syrian ambassador Walid Moualim and
Israel's Ehud Barak in 1994, and in more
talks between Shihabi and his Israeli counterpart
Ammon Shahak that same year, and in 1999 he hosted
foreign minister Farouk Shara and Barak in the
White House.
Hafez al-Assad was, in effect, brilliantly
making peace with the United States,
more so than Israel. Talks between both parties
continued until the Geneva Summit in March 2000,
where Assad refused to accept Barak's offer,
claiming that it did not restore all of Lake
Tiberias, demanding all or nothing. Assad died a
few months later, on June 10, 2000.
The US
initially supported the rise of his son, Dr Bashar
al-Assad, to the presidency, sending secretary of
state Madeline Albright to attend Hafez Assad's
funeral. The outgoing Clinton administration and
incoming one of George W Bush praised the new
Syrian leader as a pro-Western, educated and
cosmopolitan reformer who would work to
revolutionize his country.
Syrian-American relations after September
11
After September 11, 2001, Assad
contacted Bush, pledged his support for the US
"war on terrorism", and his intelligence service
cooperated with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to track down al-Qaeda members in
Europe.
Some of them had been former
members in the Muslim Brotherhood that tried to
topple the Assad regime in 1982. Bush beamed when
Syria provided information on Maamoun
al-Dirkizinli, who controlled the Hamburg bank
account of al-Qaeda, and when it arrested Mohammad
al-Zummar, a Syrian-born Osama bin Laden loyalist
who had recruited members for the September 11
attacks.
In a gesture of goodwill toward
the Syrians, the US did not veto the election of
Syria to a two-year rotating seat at the UN
Security Council. US official William Burns
reassured the Syrians by saying that the
cooperation of Damascus in the hunt for al-Qaeda
had "helped save American lives". In another
gesture of goodwill toward the Syrians, Bush
refused to meet the Maronite patriarch of Lebanon,
Mar Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, who came seeking an
audience in Washington in February 2001.
Sfeir had spearheaded the opposition to
Syria's role in Lebanon since Assad's death in
2000, and wanted US coverage for his campaign;
something that neither Bush nor secretary of state
Colin Powell agreed to give him. Ironically,
today, as tension is rising between Syria and the
US, Bush invited Sfeir to the White House, and met
with him on March 16, to demand a total end to
Syrian hegemony over Lebanon.
Relations
between Syria and Bush began to deteriorate when
the war in Afghanistan started in October 2001,
turning into a bloodbath for the Afghans, while
failing to arrest or kill bin Laden. Syria voiced
its objection to the war, refusing to join, as it
had done with Desert Storm in 1991, and had high
objections to the simultaneous atrocities
committed by Sharon in the Occupied Territories.
Syria encouraged Hezbollah to
carry out its own attacks in response from
south Lebanon, but came short of being listed as a
"sponsor of terrorism" in the post-September 11 order because
of the lobbying of Lebanon's late prime minister
Rafik Hariri in Washington. Assad remained
adamant, however, refusing to clamp down on
Hezbollah or expel the Palestinian resistance from
Syria.
Bush responded at first by
side-stepping Damascus in Middle East diplomacy.
In March 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney went to
the Middle East to help solve the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and refrained from
stopping in Syria during his 12-day visit, wanting
to show that the road to peace does not pass
through Damascus.
Syria snapped back
during a visit by Powell to Damascus, where he was
not seen off to the airport by al-Shara. A few
weeks later, Bush refused to meet Shara when the
Syrian minister was in Washington.
Then
came the war of Iraq in March 2003, and Syria's
support for the Iraqi resistance unleashed hell in
Washington against the Assad regime. Many
volunteers did cross the wide Syrian-Iraqi borders
(605 kilometers), joining the resistance and
getting arms from the outgoing Iraqi government.
Syria did not send any fighters to Iraq,
nor did it facilitate the infiltration of such
guerrillas. It did not stop them, however, during
the early war days, in fear that they would
unleash their anger within Syria against the
government and against fellow Syrians.
And
this is in fact what happened when a group of
militant Syrians, angered and defeated by the US
invasion of Iraq, carried out a terrorist
operation inside Syria in April 2004, striking at
a UN building in Damascus. In his parliamentary
speech on March 5 this year, Assad said that when
asked to control Syria's borders with Iraq right
after the war, he told the Americans, "We said
that was impossible." He argued: "In the 1980s,
the Iraqi regime used to send us lorries [trucks] loaded
with explosives in order to go off in Damascus
killing thousands of people; and we could not
control our borders at that time. How can we
prevent individuals infiltrating the borders,
specially that we don't have the high technology
necessary for that job."
A speech by
Syria's Mufti Ahmad Kaftaro, calling on Muslims to
take up arms against US forces in Iraq (made
during the war) enflamed the situation against
Syria in the US. The Syrians were accused, on the
same day that Baghdad was occupied, of having
provided assistance to the ex-Ba'athist regime in
Iraq, and welcomed its top leadership to Syria.
This proved to be untrue since in
the upcoming months each and every one of
Saddam's cronies, with the exception of Izzat
Ibrahim al-Duri, were nailed like rabbits inside
Iraq. Assad replied, "Some of them were in Syria
but were expelled during the war." He stressed
that many might have crossed under fake passports,
asking the US to provide names and information,
but that the US had been very uncooperative on
this matter with Syria.
Sabaawi Ibrahim,
Saddam's half-brother, who had been in Syria, was
recently handed over to the Iraqis by Syria in
February. Assad pointed out, "Of course we don't
regret handing them over because they were
responsible for crimes perpetrated in Syria in the
1980s or 1990s."
In 2003, however, fed up
with playing cat-and-mouse with the Syrians, the
US Congress began to toy with the
Syrian Accountability Act. The Americans began to use
the issue of Lebanon to put additional pressure
on Syria, demanding that it withdraw its army from
Beirut. Syria, thinking that it could escape this
crisis just as it had evaded every other conflict with
Washington since 1948, reacted very passively to
the act. When it was passed by Bush in December
2003, the Syrians were shocked, but put on a brave
face, saying that they would not be affected by US
sanctions, knowing perfectly well, however, that
they were to suffer from political isolation if
relations were not mended with the US. Some
speculated that it was already too late for a
rapprochement.
In 2004, Syria's row with
Washington increased as a Sunni insurrection broke
out in Iraq, led by Abu Musa al-Zarqawi, leader of
the Iraqi al-Qaeda branch. Bush immediately
pointed fingers of accusation against Syria,
claiming that the Damascus regime was also
involved in funding Saddam's ex-officials in an
uprising against the Americans.
Then, in
late 2004, the US media said that recruits were
being trained, armed and funded in Syria to fight
the Americans in Iraq. The new pro-American Iraqi
leaders didn't make things easier for the Syrians,
with Prime Minister Iyad Allawi saying that he had
photographs of leading Syrian officials with the
insurrection leaders, and Defense Minister Hazem
al-Shaalan saying that an Iraqi woman, trained in
Syria, had tried to assassinate him at his office
in Baghdad.
Syria cried foul
play, and worked hard to prevent infiltration
through its borders. This was acknowledged
by Richard Armitage, who came to Damascus this January and
told the Syrians that they were doing well in
terms of maintaining border security.
It
was hard to believe that the Syrians would support
an insurrection in Iraq, because they fear that
chaos in Iraq will spill over into their own
territories. It is also very illogical that a
senior Syrian official would incriminate himself
and have his photograph taken with members of the
Iraqi resistance. Yet all of the accusations fired
against Syria were part of the war of words, which
became a daily routine, since 2003, between
Damascus and Washington.
Then came the
assassination of Hariri on February 14, for which
the US put blame on Syria because it controlled
security in Lebanon. Without a shred of evidence,
US politicians and media began to accuse Syria of
Hariri's death. Whether Syria had done it or not,
they wanted Damascus to pay the price for
Hariri's
murder.
America's problems
with Damascus had really began when in late 2004,
Syria insisted on renewing the mandate of
President Emile Lahhoud, its No 1 man in Lebanon, for three
years, defying Lebanese public opinion and France,
and which meant amending the Lebanese
constitution.
France, a traditional patron of
Lebanon, ended its animosity with the Bush White
House and took the matter to the United Nations, passing
UN Resolution 1559 that called for Syria to
withdraw its 15,000 troops from Lebanon. At first,
Syria refused to comply on 1559, refusing to
withdraw from Lebanon, or sever its relationship
with Iran, Hezbollah or the Palestinian resistance
based in Syria.
Bush
responded to the gridlock
in Syrian-US relations by recalling his ambassador
Margaret Scobey to Washington, 24 hours after
Hariri's death, with no time frame on when
she would return. As tension mounted on Damascus,
Assad appeared before the Syrian parliament on
March 5 and announced that the Syrian army would
be leaving Lebanon, in compliance with 1559.
Since then, the Syrian army has
withdrawn to the Bekaa Valley and crossed the border
into Syria. Now, with the issue of Lebanon off
the Syrian-US negotiating table,
many neo-conservatives are seeking more ways to
pressure Assad further.
On March 8, in the
House of Representatives, a bill was introduced
that is yet to be referred to the Committee on
International Relations, calling for "assistance
to support a transition to democracy in Syria and
restoration of sovereign democratic governance in
Lebanon".
It reads: "The president is
authorized to provide assistance and other support
for individuals and independent non-governmental
organizations to support transition to a
freely-elected, international recognized
democratic government in Syria."
The
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the
most influential Middle East think-tank in the US,
which greatly influenced the policies of Reagan,
George Bush Sr and Clinton, recommends: "Start
talking about democracy, human rights, and the
rule of law inside Syria." The plan for Phase 2 of
the Syrian-US crisis is to create problems for
Syria within Syria, now that Bush has succeeded in
getting it to stop interfering in the affairs of
Lebanon and Iraq.
Assad is
currently walking a very thin tightrope in his
relationship with Washington and, depending on his
performance, Syrian-American relations will either flourish,
as they did in the 1990s, or remain at rock-bottom.
Dr Sami Moubayed is a Syrian
political analyst.
(Copyright 2005
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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