Spies Like Us
blissstreetjournal.blogspot.com
By Unfrozen Caveman Linguist
The U.S. and the United Nations have cautioned Syria against leaving behind so-called "undeclared forces" in Lebanon after the full withdrawal of the Syrian military-intelligence security apparatus, an-Nahar reports. Running parallel with this story is the simultaneous pressure exerted by the U.N. and U.S. on Syria to exchange embassies with Lebanon and establish normal diplomatic relations.
Without putting too fine a point on it, the most fundamental message from the U.S. to Syria seems to be this: if you want to spy on your neighbor, you have to do it the same way that we do it – by setting up, staffing, maintaining, and holding cocktail parties in – that's right – an embassy. It's a tried and true arrangement, not to mention predictable and quite easy for which to facilitate countermeasures; and the so-called Hama rules that have been getting so much press lately can start to dissolve on the pages of Tom Friedman's books. You see, the act of espionage at least implicitly acknowledges the sovereignty of the nation against which it occurs by the very nature of the fact that information must be "stolen" or "coerced" from the state rather than simply bilked from it by way of a corrupt and fraudulent rule of law. The former at least respects the difficulties involved in acquiring the mechanisms of state-over-state domination; the latter merely makes a mockery of a smaller state's desire for autonomy. The reality of Syria's and Assad's geopolitical situations is that neither can survive without heavy involvement in Lebanon, but yet Syria will never respect Lebanon until it can find a way to meet it on the same playing field. The embassy option may be the only one available under these circumstances.
Regarding the issue of "left-behind" intelligence forces, Yugoslavian security forces allegedly tried a similar stalling tactic following the withdrawal of the Yugoslav People's Army after NATO bombardments in 1999, supposedly leaving behind members of the interior ministry police in strategic locations. However, the Milosevic government derived little or no actual benefit from this arrangement, and the deed may well have served to aggravate the majority Kosovar Albanian population even more than had been done with administrative discrimination and ethnic cleansing for more than a decade prior. Sure enough, the Milosevic government consolidated no gains from this plan, nor were they able to translate this resistance into any kind of hegemony-based continuation of the status quo. If anything, Yugoslavia's intransigence on the issue of its full and unconditional withdrawal may have actually contributed to the untimely deaths of numerous Kosovar Serbs at the hands of Kosovar Albanians (not to mention at the hands of the notorious Kosovo Liberation Army – the KLA) still bent on revenge, not fully convinced that the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government would ever leave them alone. As it stands now, the situation speaks for itself – Kosovo remains firmly in the hands of NATO and the United Nations, and Yugoslavia struggles perennially to emerge from its status as a pariah state. Value judgments and geopolitical hair-splitting aside, the available lessons in this scenario should be quite clear |
