Re: Not Good News From Israel
Syria's Assad: Is he the cause or cure?
West struggles over whether to punish or coax Hezbollah ally
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0607230320jul23,1,7557289.story?page=1&ctrack=1&cset=true&coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
By Tom Hundley, Tribune foreign correspondent. Tribune foreign correspondents Christine Spolar in Tel Aviv, Joel Greenberg in Jerusalem and Liz Sly in Beirut contributed to this report. Rhonda Roumani
Published July 23, 2006
LONDON -- In recent months a new poster has appeared on the cobblestone streets of Damascus. It pictures a smiling Syrian President Bashar Assad flanked by Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
For the U.S. and its European allies, the key to resolving the dangerously escalating war between Israel and Hezbollah may be figuring out some way to separate the once-avowedly secular Assad from his two new fundamentalist friends.
Assad, 40, inherited the Syrian leadership from his father, Hafez, who died in 2000, leaving a legacy as one of the region's most ruthless survivors. An ophthalmologist by trade and retiring by nature, the younger, London-educated Assad initially portrayed himself as a reformer.
But lately he has reverted to family form, playing the role of intriguer and settling into a convenient alliance with Iran, its Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon and the Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in Iraq.
As the fighting in Lebanon worsens and threatens to transmute into a regional conflagration, the lanky, awkward Syrian leader has become the target of verbal missiles, repeatedly singled out by President Bush and Israeli officials as the chief mischief-enabler, the man who must be pressured into stopping Hezbollah's rocket attacks on Israel and eventually disarming the guerrillas.
But the predicament for the Bush administration is whether to punish Assad or attempt to coax him away from the new allies he sought out after an estrangement with the West following the Iraq invasion and the discovery of his regime's hand in the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
"Syria knows what it needs to do and Hezbollah is the source of the problem," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday as she prepared to travel to the Middle East on Sunday for a round of diplomacy.
Bush, overheard in a private conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair last week, cited the Syrian president directly. "I felt like telling [United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan] to call, get on the phone with Assad and make something happen," Bush said. "What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop."
Administration divided
How Washington approaches Damascus may be colored by internal disputes over how to deal with Assad. While more hawkish Bush administration officials have pushed for tough sanctions and trade limits, the State Department initially tried to have a dialogue with the Syrian government.
The European response to the most recent crisis has been equally muddled. Against the advice of his Foreign Office, Blair has backed Bush in refusing to call for a quick cease-fire.
France, the former colonial power in Lebanon, is pushing for immediate action by the UN Security Council to bring an end to the fighting, while Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero donned a kaffiyeh and appeared to be openly rooting for the Arab "resistance."
"For whatever reason, the Europeans don't want to make this the decisive battle. And the Bush administration is afraid of the ramifications of this battle with regard to its own battles in Iraq, its relationship with Europe and its issues with Iran right now," said Michael Oren, a military historian at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research institute.
If the Bush administration opts to do a deal with Assad, there are items on his wish list--such as reopening talks over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and reducing pressure from the West to democratize. But so far Assad has been typically silent, and if he has grown to be as crafty a negotiator as his father, his price will be high.
The key for the U.S. could be to rally Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and other moderate regimes behind a strategy to lure Assad back into the Sunni Arab pack, and persuade him to distance himself from his Shiite friends in Tehran and southern Lebanon.
It's no secret that non-Arab Iran, with grandiose regional ambitions, is Hezbollah's mentor and paymaster. The organization's spiritual leaders take their religious training in Iran, and their offices in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley are graced by portraits of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the Iranian Revolution. Meanwhile, the Fajr 3 rockets that Hezbollah guerillas are firing at Israel's northern cities come courtesy of Tehran.
Syria is the middleman. It provides the land bridge between Iran and southern Lebanon. It also provides a haven for Hamas and other Palestinian radicals who are battling Israel in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Israel holds Syria responsible for the present crisis, but it is unlikely to carry the fight to Damascus.
"Israel has said again and again that it does not want to act against Syria," said the Shalem Center's Oren.
Nor is Syria likely to do anything to directly provoke Israel. While the Iranian leadership's hatred of the Jewish state is open, crude and wrapped in religious fervor, Assad's feelings are more nuanced. His hostility toward his neighbor may be heartfelt, but his operating style is cautious, opportunistic and secretive. Above all, he does not want to take the kind of punishing hit that Israel is inflicting upon Lebanon.
"They [the Syrians] are sitting on the sidelines and supplying Hezbollah with arms," said Eyal Zisser, an expert on Syria at Tel Aviv University. "They have always been like that. The Syrians are cautious. They don't want to fight."
A `softer' target
For the U.S., that makes Syria a much "softer" target than Iran, militarily and diplomatically.
During the past three years, Syria has been faced with intense U.S. economic and political pressure as a result of its accommodating stance toward Iraq's insurgents and its heavy-handed presence in Lebanon.
Last year, the international community rallied around UN Resolution 1559, which helped force the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon after nearly 30 years, and also called for the dismantling of all Lebanese militias--an unspoken but clear reference to Hezbollah.
The screws were further tightened earlier this year when the ongoing UN investigation into the assassination of Hariri implicated several top Syrian officials--and it appears to be drawing ever closer to Assad's doorstep.
Assad's response has been to ditch all pretenses of reform and appeal directly to the Islamic "street" in Syria and the wider region. That's when the posters of Assad flanked by Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad became ubiquitous in Damascus.
This spring, when the Prophet Muhammad cartoon controversy turned ugly, Assad's security police stood by while a mob torched the Danish Embassy in Damascus. Also this year, for the first time in many years, Syrians were allowed to publicly celebrate the Prophet's birthday.
Last week, cars with pale yellow Hezbollah flags paraded through the streets of Damascus, and cheers erupted in many neighborhoods when TV broadcast the news that Hezbollah rockets had hit Israeli targets.
All of this has greatly boosted the prestige of Assad. The young president now portrays himself as the defiant defender of the "resistance," determined to confront the U.S. and Israel everywhere in the Middle East.
Analysts in Damascus believe the government is preparing for a long, drawn-out confrontation with the U.S. and Israel--"an erosive confrontation" is how Samir al-Taqi, an adviser to the Foreign Ministry and head of a newly opened think tank in Syria, put it.
And for now, the war has served Damascus' interests rather well, giving Syria the opportunity once again to behave as Lebanon's benevolent patriarch, opening its gates to the flood of refugees and offering assistance to those in need, said Syrian TV commentator Nabil Samman.
"Syria's standing looks good because it's giving food and medical supplies while Israel is killing civilians and George Bush refuses to call for a cease-fire," Samman said.
Oren, the military historian, said he believes the Israeli army campaign is "misguided" and may be rallying the Lebanese and other Arabs around Hezbollah. The solution, he said, is not risking operations that harm populations but dealing directly with individual leaders.
"We should be taking on the state sponsors of Hamas and Hezbollah . . . and I would take on Syria first," he said. "Start with Syria. Start where you can."
As an aside, this last weekend commemorates the 20th anniversary of the French terrorist attack on the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour 1986. Many of us who remember this despicable act can see why the French get on so well with terrorist organisations.
