Michael also writes for Reason.
Syria may be closing its Arab door
By Michael Young
Lebanon Daily Star staff
No sooner had Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa announced on Monday afternoon that Syrian President Bashar Assad agreed to withdraw his army from Lebanon, than the Syrians issued a clarifying statement. Moussa had misunderstood; Syria had only meant a redeployment inside Lebanon, not a withdrawal.
On a day when U.S. President George W. Bush demanded that Syria "end its occupation of Lebanon"; that Bush and French President Jacques Chirac issued the same instructions, and set a May deadline for the pullout; that Moussa traveled to Damascus to effectively save the Syrian regime from itself by offering a negotiated way out of its Lebanese impasse; and that tens of thousands of people marched in the streets of Beirut demanding that Syrian forces leave their country; on that day, Assad chose to again embrace the politics of the ostrich by sticking his head in a hole and discounting the world around him.
Truly, the Syrian regime, in particular the two families running much of its affairs, see their army's presence in Lebanon as an existential necessity. "Out of Lebanon, out of power," might be Assad's motto, as he contemplates the wreckage of a policy born of contempt for his rebellious Lebanese possession. The irony, of course, is that if Assad, in order to hold on to Lebanon, further coalesces the world against Syria, his regime might conceivably be challenged from within by those who have much to lose and no desire to be buried in the collapsing edifice of Assad's rule.
It is probable that the Bush administration has taken out an option on regime change in Syria. However, unlike Iraq, this will not involve dispatching American soldiers. Instead, it may be fairly close to what the Syrians advised Washington to do against the former regime of Saddam Hussein in 2002, namely operate through the United Nations, build up an international consensus, and use diplomacy and other peaceful means rather than force. This strategy could open the door to potentially crushing economic sanctions, but also military pressure along the Iraqi border or in Lebanon, which Syria has few means of fighting against.
Assad might also do well to look at his dubious Arab brethren. One of the more revealing statements lately came from Jordan's King Abdullah, who told the Spanish daily El Pais last week that the bomb that killed Rafik Hariri was too sophisticated to have been set by a terrorist group. This not only undermined the halting official Lebanese accounts of the attack, it expressed suspicion of state involvement, implicitly pointing a finger at the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services.
Ultimately, is King Abdullah's skepticism so difficult to understand? Having publicly expressed last December his fear of a "Shiite crescent" stretching from Iran to Lebanon, passing through Iraq, the monarch has little incentive to confront that reality with an anemic, minority-ruled pariah as neighbor. Indeed, Syrian weakness poses a long-term threat to two other Sunni-majority Arab states besides Jordan, namely Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Each, in its own way, has deep problems with Damascus.
The Saudis, in this sense much like the Egyptians, are under too much duress from Washington to democratize to provoke the Bush administration's ire by cajoling Syria. Indeed, there are reports that Syrian and Saudi officials are no longer on easy speaking terms in Arab forums, despite Moussa's claims to the contrary in an interview broadcast Monday evening. Hariri's assassination will have certainly added a layer of frost to the relationship, even if Saudi officials have cautioned against blaming the Syrians. Saudi Arabia's eloquent silence on, even public unconcern for, growing American and French hostility to Syria says a great deal.
What of the "great nation" of Egypt? As President Hosni Mubarak prepares to ensure, for a fifth time, that he will die on his throne, Syria is proving irritating. A few months ago, the Egyptian president reportedly tried to persuade Assad that it would be best for Syria to remove itself from Lebanon on its own terms. Mubarak promised to mediate in that regard, and Moussa's visit this week was probably a continuation of that policy. But Egypt also knows that if Assad were to disappear in a detonation of incompetence, this would harm his own interests. It would show up his autocratic regime as an increasingly rare anomaly in the Middle East, but also, perhaps, induce Washington to turn up the heat and demand quicker Egyptian reform. With leverage measured in the billions of dollars, the U.S. would have to be listened to.
This should make for an interesting Arab League summit in Algiers in the third week of March. While it's too early to determine what will be on the agenda, it would be a sign of catalepsy if the Arab states were to ignore Lebanon. Syria and the Lebanese government, in turn, will resist this if they feel the debate may harm their interests. The Arab League is a resilient bastion of state sovereignty, as becomes a confederacy of thugs. But Egypt and Saudi Arabia might be tempted to address the Lebanese issue so as not to be circumvented by the UN, the U.S. and France. And, to be effective, they will have to move beyond discussion of Taif, with its intimation of a Syrian redeployment, to include the full withdrawal demand of Resolution 1559.
A speared beast makes for an unbecoming sight. The Syrian regime is still dangerous, very much so, but its futility is more apparent by the day. It offers no real explanation for why it is in Lebanon, nor bothers to; it has failed to reform much if anything in Syria, despite many promises; it has become dead weight regionally, reminiscent of that grim ghost over which the West and the Arab world fought during the 1950s; and it has become an international anachronism, still personifying a time happily gone by when regimes were propped up by a blend of disdain and bayonets.
The Syrian regime has done something quite remarkable, if the benchmark is bankruptcy: It has created a system that makes even the most overbearing of other Arab governments wince.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR
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