Iran-Syria alliance on uncertain
ground By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
On the occasion of Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad's second inauguration, Iranian President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad made his second trip to
Damascus on Thursday in hopes he could shore up
relations in a time of rising uncertainties
regarding their strategic alliance.
That
alliance, solid since the early 1980s when Syria
backed Iran against the other Ba'athist Arab
regime, ie, Saddam Hussein's, invading Iran, has
been subjected to new pressures due to
evolving security and
geopolitical calculations in the Middle East.
These fresh pressures renewed hopes for Israel,
the United States and pro-US Arab regimes such as
Jordan and Egypt for a Syrian "reorientation" away
from Iran.
While such expectations have
been previously dismissed by astute Middle East
observers as far-fetched, the latest round of
speculations on the demise of the Iran-Syria axis
has been fueled by, among others, the United
Nations' special envoy to the Middle East, Michael
Williams, who has stated: "The impression I got
from my visit to Damascus was that if there was
progress in terms of establishing a peace track,
then we would see some changes in Syrian behavior
on the three issues, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas."
Coinciding with news of Syria's new
"flexibility" regarding Iran is the related news
of secret contacts between Syria and Israel amid
repeated calls by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert for Syria to engage in serious peace talks.
Both the US and Israel are hedging their
bets on the combined pressures facing Assad
nowadays. These include the growing Iraqi refugee
crisis, the political stalemate in Lebanon, the
international tribunal on the assassination of
former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, a
stagnant economy and threats of military
confrontation with the superior Israeli Army, all
factors that the US and Israel see as weakening
Syria's ties with Iran. That is why various
Israeli pundits never tire of writing about the
divergent priorities of Iran and Syria,
irrespective of the fact that so far there is
little empirical evidence to corroborate their
predictions.
The underlying reasons for
the durability of Iran-Syria relations remain
intact: Israel has not shown any serious sign of
giving up the Syrian territories it occupies, and
it continues to threaten Syria militarily. That is
enough reason for Syrian leadership not to be
swayed by the small carrots frequently dangled
before them by the US or Israel. At present, there
are several such "gestures" toward Middle East
peace. US President George W Bush has belatedly
and feebly called for an Oslo-type peace
conference, and the European Union's latest
"Mediterranean initiative", which was not well
received by either the US or Israel, since it was
based on the idea of land for peace, much like the
Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative.
Concerning the latter, representatives of
the Arab League are planning to travel to Israel
shortly, and this is yet another sign of the Arab
world's path toward rapprochement with Israel. It
is bound to have ramifications for Iran-Syria ties
in the event it somehow manages to remove the
significant hurdles that have been blocking the
peace process. For the moment that does not seem
likely, particularly as the wounds of last year's
Israel-Lebanon war are still fresh and the
Hamas-Fatah split in the Palestinian camp has been
widening.
Irrespective, the Syrian
government under Assad has been evolving in a
direction not entirely in sync with Iran's
foreign-policy objectives. Its Arab nationalist
ideology notwithstanding, the Ba'athist regime in
Syria has lent its voice in support of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) on the thorny issue of
three islands - Abu Mousa, Little Tunb and Big
Tunb - in the dispute between Iran and the United
Arab Emirates. Given the GCC's financial support
for Syria to cope with the massive refugee
problem, Damascus will likely continue with that
policy for the foreseeable future.
In
fact, the sheer weight of the refugee issue, which
shows of no sign of easing despite Damascus's
embrace of some 1.5 million Iraqi refugees, will
push Damascus toward Saudi Arabia, whose
nationals-turned-jihadists have been using Syria's
entry points to Iraq for the past several years -
not to mention Syria's own and other Arab states'
"freedom fighters": according to the latest US
Army report, nearly 15% of foreign fighters in
Iraq come from Syria.
Damascus has also
warmed to Turkey, Israel's ally in the region, and
this is somewhat unsettling news for Tehran, which
looks to Syria as a counterbalance to the
Israel-Turkey nexus. France, under the new
pro-American President Nicolas Sarkozy, has wasted
little time before trying its hands at an active
Syria policy. From the vantage point of Tehran,
the net result of all the external influences on
Syria may indeed be a considerable mellowing or an
incremental "soft decoupling" of its relations
with Syria.
And then there is the Iranian
nuclear crisis, with some Iranian political
analysts pondering whether or not Israel's new
opening toward Syria is a part and parcel of an
Israeli offensive strategy against Iran. In other
words, does Israel have to make serious
concessions to Syria prior to any attacks on
Iran's nuclear facilities? "It appears that there
is a slow movement in the Syrian government not so
much to reconsider its relations with Iran so much
as to reconstruct them," a Tehran University
professor has told this author, wondering aloud
what the "parameters" of this reconstruction on
Damascus' part might look like.
Today
inside Iran, almost no one can rule out the
possibility of a US and or Israeli military strike
in the (near) future, which, in turn, aggravates
the country's need to bolster its regional
alliances and networks of solidarity. Israel's
"psychological warfare" against Iran has the
opposite, unintended, effect of causing a
redoubling of Iran's efforts to keep Syria within
a strategic partnership. But does that apply to
Syria with equal force or urgency? Probably not.
In his one-day trip to Damascus,
Ahmadinejad was accompanied by Foreign Minister
Manouchehr Mottaki and a housing official as part
of Iran's effort to aid Syria with its acute
housing shortage caused by the huge influx of
Iraqi refugees. In effect, Iran may be forced to
subsidize the Syrian government playing host to
the Iraqis fleeing their war-devastated country.
But Tehran has its own economic and financial
limitations and there is a limit to the incentives
it can provide for Damascus.
Should
Damascus tilt more and more in favor of dialogue
and reconciliation with Israel, then Iran will
have to make a drastic choice of either emulating
Syria and making similar adjustments in its own
foreign policy or risking a growing policy wedge
between Syria.
For the moment, this
question has been largely relegated to the future.
Israel's Olmert is under fire at home and somewhat
paralyzed; he is unlikely to have the political
will to initiate anything serious vis-a-vis Syria.
There is a lame duck president in the White House
mired in Iraq. And the fate of political dialogue
in Lebanon, where Syria, despite removing its
forces two years ago, still has considerable
influence and vested interests, is suspended under
a thick cloud of uncertainty.
Indeed, so
much uncertainty in Syria's vicinity lends itself
to the durability of its relations with Iran. By
making minor adjustments in its foreign policy
that are called for with periodic reviews of its
relations with Syria, Iran has in effect ensured
that continuity has the upper hand.
The
big question is, what happens if the previously
feeble attempts by the US and EU to jump-start the
peace process succeed? Will Iran accommodate this
process or play the spoiler role? If the latter,
will this spoil its sensitive relations with
Syria? This is perhaps the most important question
asked today in the capitals of both countries.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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