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U.S. military action on Syria will backfire

Jonathan Steele

America wants to change the Damascus regime's foreign policy.

BY STRANGE chance the American embassy in Damascus almost faces Iraq's. As American forces roared up the Euphrates valley to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003, the contrast between the two buildings was stark. A forbidding fortress that few people wanted to visit stood on one side of the road, ringed by concrete bollards, bullet-proof screens, and high walls. Nearby, a bustle of eager volunteers — Palestinians, Algerians, Syrians, and Saudis — milled around excitedly or queued for Iraqi visas so they could join the struggle to defend Arab land.

Perhaps inspired by this outpouring of grassroots pan-Arab solidarity, at that stage nationalist rather than jihadi, President Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to the Syrian press in which he expressed the hope that the Americans would lose the war. It was a unique utterance. No other Arab leader dared say the same thing. When Syria was in the dock at the U.N. Security Council this week, I could not help remembering this tale of two embassies. The catalogue of American complaints against Syria contains numerous issues, among which Mr. Assad's wish for a U.S. defeat in 2003 is never publicly listed. Yet it is hard not to feel that those remarks — brave certainly, unwise probably — do not still rankle with Washington.

In some sense they were a turning point. Until then Syria had been courted by Western governments. After 9/11, its chief of military intelligence, Asef Shawkat, who is Mr. Assad's brother-in-law and a key suspect in the death of the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, worked closely with U.S. counter-terror agencies. Syria's support for Hamas and Hizbullah, which has now become a major cause for complaint, was tolerated. Syria held a seat in the Security Council and, to the delight of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, backed the resolution to send weapons inspectors to Baghdad in the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003.

The Iraq war changed things. When the Americans won the first phase, Mr. Assad saw little incentive in helping them. He expected to be punished. Washington's neocons added Syria to their list of "bad guys," seeing it as a softer target than Iran.

The murder of Rafik Hariri has to be seen against this background. If the Mehlis report's presumptions of Syrian guilt are correct, then Damascus did not just make a criminal mistake. It committed an international blunder. It opened the way for the U.S. to turn a bilateral dispute into a battle between Syria and the rest of the world, with the Assad regime in the dock at the Security Council while other Arab nations keep silent or desperately urge it to cooperate.

In spite of Syria's isolation, some analysts think Mr. Assad can yet escape. They argue that he can string the international investigators along, haggling over the terms under which he would comply and what sort of court any suspects in the case should be tried by. The threat of sanctions is hollow, they claim, since few countries want them.

Others say the pressure on Syria is enormous, and that Mr. Assad has no choice but to cooperate with the U.N. by sacrificing his most trusted colleagues and thereby risk his own survival if they mount a coup against him. The men hinted at in the Mehlis report are not the "old guard," who were close to Mr. Assad's father, the founder of the current regime, and became estranged from his son; the evidence suggests they wanted to reduce Syria's exposure in Lebanon. The key suspects are part of the "new guard" — though it is not clear whether they kept their young boss informed.

The unknown factor is the effect of the latest crisis on Syria's internal politics. Will it hasten or delay reform? For all its talk of democratisation in the Middle East, Washington's demands on Syria mainly relate to foreign policy. Mr. Assad has already shown he is willing to scale back his role in Lebanon, having withdrawn all Syrian forces this spring.

If he were to do more to try to block the flow of Arab volunteers going to join the Iraqi insurgency, or expel the representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad from Damascus, would the U.S. be satisfied? When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the U.S. wants "behaviour change" not "regime change," she means Syria's behaviour on the international stage.

Mr. Assad knows this, which is why he always plays the Islamist card by warning that worse will follow in Syria if he goes. The Bush administration half believes this scare, just as it does over Palestine, where Hamas looks like it will do well in elections in January, and in Egypt, where Muslim Brotherhood candidates could win dozens of parliamentary seats this month. If it cannot have both, Washington usually prefers docile regimes to democratic ones.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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