CAIRO - It's now clear that the
administration of US President George W Bush just
doesn't know what to do about Syria. It can't live
with Syrian President Bashar Assad, the only
significant Arab potentate indifferent to US
interests, and it is bewildered at whether or how
to bring him down.
The potential
implication by United Nations investigators (and
even by former Syrian vice president Abd al-Halim
Khaddam) of
high
Syrian officials in the murder of former Lebanese
prime minister Rafiq Hariri seems the ideal
pretext for the United States to pursue regime
change aggressively, a la Iraq.
Yet
the Bush administration has balked, restrained by
the international community's unwillingness to
sanction Syria, the political cost of unleashing
military power, and its own fears of what might
replace Assad. The US State Department's
announcement on February 18 that it intends to
fund the fractious Syrian opposition to the tune
of US$5 million hardly justifies five years of
saber-rattling and suggests a poverty of options
rather than the emergence of a plausible strategy
for toppling Assad.
In a bygone era,
successive US administrations treated Syria with a
deference that now seems unthinkable. Though a
paradigmatic dictatorship, Syria was considered a
key player in the "peace process" and a pillar of
regional stability. That all changed when George W
Bush came to power, adorning his staff with
neo-conservatives for whom Syria was a roadblock
to newly imagined US interests and an
unreconstructed enemy of Israel.
The
rhetoric descended from respect to contempt, and
many analysts, this one included, speculated that
after Iraq, the Syrian regime could be the next
victim of US power.
But despite a war of
words and several mini-crises, no coherent
anti-Syria policy emerged. The US Congress passed
the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty
Restoration Act (SALSA), and Syrian officials such
as Asef Shawkat (Assad's brother-in-law and the
head of military intelligence) have been
personally targeted by financial sanctions.
But these limited measures have hardly
been sufficient to force Damascus to bow to
Washington's demands - chiefly, ending support for
so-called "terrorist" organizations and making an
all-out effort to stop insurgents entering Iraq
via Syria. Even the Syrian army's withdrawal from
Lebanon likely had more to do with internal
Lebanese pressure than US (or French) fiat.
Dr Joshua Landis, an expert on Syria from
the University of Oklahoma (and author of the blog
syriacomment.com), says the US has gone out on a
rhetorical limb without the wherewithal to back up
its bravado. "The US is in a bad policy position
because it has pursued a very aggressive
anti-Syrian policy yet it doesn't have the power
to follow through with it, to change the regime,
which I believe will take military force," he told
Asia Times Online. "It's unwilling, on the other
hand, to come to some understanding with Assad,
which could also produce benefits for the US,
whether in Iraq or in Lebanon and Palestine."
Washington is also paralyzed by the fear
of what might come after Assad. The majority Sunni
population could be even less amenable to US
interests than the ruling minority Alawite clique,
and Islamist gains in elections in Palestine, Iraq
and Egypt hint at similar rumblings beneath the
opaque shell of Syria's body politic.
The
initiative to fund the Syrian opposition and
recent State Department efforts to gather it under
one banner cannot be effective in the short term,
said Landis. "The problem is the Syrian opposition
in exile are extremely weak and none of them have
many followers in Syria."
Longtime secular
opponents of the Syrian regime living inside Syria
issued a statement on February 21 rejecting US
funding. And Landis believes that the effort is
further weakened because the exiled opposition
does not reflect the Islamist trend. "There is
every indication ... that if you were to have
elections you would have something along the order
of what you've had in every other [Arab] country,
which is 65% of people voting for some kind of
Islamist tendency."
US attempts to isolate
Syria, however haphazard, are also foundering on
the international community's unwillingness to
destabilize Damascus, with the region already
groaning beneath the shadow of Iraq's maelstrom.
Also, for such states as Russia and China, Syria
as well as Iran are chips in the great game in the
Middle East in which the teetering Iraq project
has illuminated hairline fractures in US regional
hegemony.
Thus, even as the investigation
into the murder of Hariri reveals the possible
culpability of Syrian officials, it also reveals a
lack of international political will to hold them
accountable. Landis points out America's failures
to get the UN Security Council to take decisive
action.
"Both Detlev Mehlis [the former UN
chief investigator into Hariri's death] and Serge
Brammertz [the current one] have indicated that
they have evidence that they feel confident would
implicate the top Syrian administrators, so in
theory they should just go to an international
court, prove it and put them in a jail," he said.
"But you have to get the UN Security Council to
vote on all of this, and it's clear that America
doesn't have the votes."
Without an
international consensus, the United States has
forsaken the unilateral route it chose in Iraq,
even though by hair-trigger Bush administration
standards it has a more plausible casus
belli. It's not that the US could not attack
Syria if it wanted to, according to John Pike, the
director of GlobalSecurity.org. He believes the
recent talk of military overstretch in Iraq
limiting US options elsewhere is vastly
overstated.
"If the president told the
military to do it [occupy Syria] they will do it,"
he told Asia Times Online. "They've only got a
very small fraction of their total force in Iraq
... Presumably with the Iraqi security forces
starting to have the potential to take up some of
the slack, if we thought that the initial buildup
in Syria was going to be a relatively short-term
proposition, I think that either General [Peter]
Shoomaker [the US Army chief of staff] would make
it happen - or [Vice President] Mr [Dick] Cheney
would find somebody who would."
Pike said
there are also numerous effective military options
short of occupation. Regime assets could be bombed
to the degree that life would become extremely
uncomfortable for the Syrian regime, he said.
"There are a lot of things that we could do to
cramp his style that we could do from 20,000 feet
that don't require boots on the ground."
US restraint, said Pike, reflects a
political rather than military calculus. While he
believes Iran's nuclear infrastructure will
certainly be attacked next summer, he sees no
enthusiasm for destabilizing or attacking Syria,
save within a narrow circle inside the Bush
administration. "There is a community of opinion
[in Washington] that has always felt that Syria is
low-hanging fruit ... that it doesn't look as if
Bashar has a firm grip on things, and if we just
hit him hard enough, he'll fall over."
But
the US administration is too preoccupied with Iraq
and Iran to worry about conjuring uncertainty in
Syria, he said. "At this point they just have to
say to themselves that if it ain't broke don't fix
it. Whatever level of aid and comfort Syria is
providing to the enemy [in Iraq], it just doesn't
seem to be that big of a factor overall."
And despite the Hariri affair, he credited
the Syrian regime with playing its hand with
notable guile. "Whatever level of aid and comfort
they are providing to various other regional
troublemakers, at this point they seem to have
gauged successfully how annoying they can be
without provoking a significant response," said
Pike.
Advantage Bashar For the
moment, Syria has grasped the advantage in its
continuing confrontation with the Bush
administration and its standoff with the
international community over the Hariri
investigation. In his past two major relevant
speeches, Assad in essence implied that he would
give up some minor officials to investigators, but
that Syria would resist if the UN aimed too
high.
In the meantime, Assad is
consolidating control at home and buffering
Syria's regional standing. Syria is slowly
reasserting its influence in Lebanon, where it
maintains the backing of Hezbollah, which
represents Lebanon's largest community, the
Shi'ites. Hezbollah recently withdrew from the
government to demonstrate its ability to derail
the Lebanese political process and has found
allies in powerful Christian leaders such as
Michel Aoun.
"There are more and more
Lebanese that are coming to the conclusion that
the US has a losing policy in the region," said
Landis. Inside Syria, he said, "Assad has purged
the old guard. Khaddam's departure from Damascus
[to Paris] demonstrated that he lost an internal
struggle that was hard-fought for five years ...
so people inside Damascus began to put two and two
together and realize Assad is going to last."
Syria's neighbors have also made it clear
to the US that they have no stomach for sudden
upheaval in another Arab power. Iraq simply makes
the prospect of further chaos too forbidding and
the possibility of Islamist gains too frightening.
Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia have tried to
arbitrate the Hariri affair, telling visiting US
officials such as Cheney that regime change in
Damascus is not an option.
Syrian fortunes
have also been boosted by Hamas' triumph in the
Palestinian elections. Hamas has strong ties to
Damascus and its victory gives Syria crucial sway
in the conflict with Israel. Further solidifying
the Syrian position is its reinvigorated alliance
with Iran, whose President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is
reveling in his new role as the Bush
administration's bete noire. Ahmadinejad's
visit to Damascus in January was meant in part to
remind the United States of the pain Iran and
Syria might inflict together if either were
attacked.
Either through luck or design,
Assad now looks, if not quite as wily as his
father, certainly like more of a survivor than
many imagined. He has, for the present, called
America's bluff and lived to tell the tale.
Ashraf Fahim is a freelance
writer on Middle Eastern affairs based in New York
and London. His writing can be found at
www.storminateacup.org.uk.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing
.)
