WASHINGTON - Mocked just months ago as a
fool and a lightweight compared with his
legendarily shrewd father, Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad appears increasingly to have become the
"go-to guy" in resolving the two-week-old war
between Hezbollah and Israel.
While
neo-conservatives and other hardliners in the
administration of US President George W Bush ruled
out any thought of Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice's traveling to Syria - or of even inviting
its officials to attend Wednesday's multilateral
conference on Lebanon in Rome - the notion that
Washington will have to deal with Damascus is
gaining steam, even among
some influential hawks.
"Come
back, Bashar ..." was the headline of a column by
Edward Luttwak in the neo-conservative Wall Street
Journal's editorial
page, in which he argued that
Damascus should be invited back into Lebanon to
disarm Hezbollah, even if that meant the
"recognition of Syrian suzerainty" over its
smaller neighbor.
"Let's be friends with
Syria" was the title of a second article appearing
in the right-wing National Review by contributing
editor James Robbins on Monday, in which he, too,
argued for a rapprochement with Damascus as part
of a "new international alignment in the Middle
East" of Sunni-led states against Iran.
"Syria is the linchpin of the equation,"
he wrote. "Bashar Assad should be offered the same
deal as [Libyan leader] Muammar Gaddafi -
basically stop doing things that annoy us, get rid
of your [weapons of mass destruction] and missile
programs and you can be our friend. And it is good
to be our friend, particularly if you are a
dictator seeking to avoid regime change."
That Syria will indeed prove pivotal to
resolving the ongoing violence one way or another
has become increasingly accepted in the US over
the past week as it became apparent that Israel
will not come close to achieving its initial war
aim of dismantling Hezbollah as a fighting force
once and for all.
Not only has the Shi'ite
militia proved much stronger and more resourceful
than either Israeli or US analysts had
anticipated, but its resistance and fighting
spirit - coupled with the destructiveness of
Israel's offensive - have bolstered its popular
support throughout the Arab world and even among
some non-Shi'ite groups in Lebanon, according to
virtually all independent reporting.
"Israel is losing this war," said Ralph
Peters, a staunch pro-Israel columnist and
military expert with the neo-conservative New York
Post. "Israeli miscalculations have left Hezbollah
alive and kicking."
To some hawks like
Peters, as well as Washington Post columnist
Charles Krauthammer, the answer lies in a major
Israeli ground invasion to clear out Hezbollah
infrastructure and militants from southern
Lebanon.
But the government of Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, haunted by the
disastrous Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon
between 1978 and 2000, appears reluctant to
consider this option, unless it can be combined
with the insertion of a "robust" international
force capable of confronting and disarming
Hezbollah that would enable Israel to retreat back
behind its border.
With Israel unwilling
to attack Damascus itself and unable to crush
Hezbollah - and the Lebanese army both unable and
unwilling to take it on - the only alternative
appears to be the intervention of such a "robust"
international force that Rice had been pushing
before she traveled to the region on Sunday.
But with the US itself unwilling to
contribute troops to such a force, most US
analysts believe it unlikely that the United
Nations or even the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, which is already struggling to meet
its current commitments in Afghanistan, can put
together an operation that can do much more than
what the existing, largely ineffective UN
monitoring force (UNIFIL) already does,
particularly if a still "alive and kicking"
Hezbollah opposes its deployment.
"Another
and larger UNIFIL, which would do nothing
effective against Hezbollah while freezing the
Israeli army in its tracks, would be much worse
than useless," said Luttwak.
In that
context, the only power capable of curbing
Hezbollah, if only by slowing or stopping the
transit of equipment from Iran that it needs to
sustain itself as a fighting force, is Syria.
Indeed, as pointed out by Luttwak, Damascus, as
Hezbollah's main ally in Lebanon until it was
forced to withdraw its 30,000 troops under
international pressure last year, is likely to be
the only power capable of persuading Hezbollah to
disarm and "follow the political path".
Even before Rice set out for the region,
the US administration appears to have understood
Syria's pivotal position in bringing the current
crisis to an end. But what it has clearly been
unable to decide is how best to get Damascus to
cooperate.
Some believe that only sticks -
and particularly harsh ones - will work.
Hardline neo-conservatives, such as former
Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and
his colleagues at the American Enterprise
Institute, have called for Washington to encourage
Israel to carry its war against Hezbollah into
Syria - presumably to persuade it to cut off
Hezbollah and even, if possible, to realize a
long-held dream of theirs - to overthrow Assad's
Ba'athist regime.
But that option appears
to have been firmly rejected by Olmert, who, like
many others in Israel's policy elite, concluded
some time ago that Assad was preferable to anyone
who might replace him, particularly in light of
what has happened in Iraq since the US ousted
Saddam Hussein.
"Any political vacuum
would almost surely be filled by the same sort of
extreme Islamists now embittering the lives of
Iraqis," said Aiman Mansour, an analyst at
Israel's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.
Others argue that Syria is in such a
strong bargaining position that only carrots, and
very big carrots at that, can induce its
cooperation. This indeed was the message presented
to Bush and Rice by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud
al-Faisal at a White House meeting on Saturday in
which he argued that weaning Syria from its
alliance with Iran and Hezbollah was critical to
any regional effort - one that already includes US
allies Jordan and Egypt - to contain a far more
dangerous Iran.
In this view, Washington
made a major error last year in insisting, against
the advice of the Sunni Arab states, on a
precipitous withdrawal of Syrian troops from
Lebanon and Damascus' diplomatic isolation.
That position is now echoed by a number of
other commentators, including some, such as
liberal interventionist New York columnist Thomas
Friedman, who strongly supported Lebanon's "Cedar
Revolution" but now argue that Damascus must be
recruited for the escalating confrontation with
Iran.
"To me, the big strategic chess move
is to try to split Syria off from Iran, and bring
Damascus back into the Sunni Arab fold. That is
the game-changer," wrote Friedman last week. "What
would be the Syrian price? I don't know, but I
sure think it would be worth finding out."
Luttwak, who has long viewed Iran as the
greatest threat faced by Israel and the US,
believes the price will be steep - including, of
course, "recognition of Syrian suzerainty over
Lebanon" and thus a major rollback of the Cedar
Revolution - but worth it for the sake of
Washington's regional strategy.
It might
be "tremendously embarrassing" to the Bush
administration to agree to such a price, but there
is little alternative, he noted.
