The United States is preparing to engage Syria. According to the NY Times:
Middle East experts say they believe that conditions for an opening to Syria are ripe on both sides.
“We’ve got a Syrian government that wants to engage,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel and a peace negotiator in the Clinton administration. “We’re likely to get an Israeli government that will find it easier to engage with Syria than with the Palestinians.”
There are clear benefits to Israel from better relations with Syria: the government of President Bashar al-Assad is a sponsor of Hezbollah, a militant group based in Lebanon, and provides a sanctuary for Hamas’s leaders in Damascus, Syria’s capital.
Indyk gives no indication, how he knows that Syria wants to engage. And that last paragraph quoted is odd. So would a rapprochement between Israel and Syria mean that Syria will rein in Hamas and Hezbollah? One possible problem though is … Israel.
Nonetheless, Israeli public opinion polls show wide opposition to giving up the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 war. In his previous stint as prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu initiated peace talks with Syria, but they came to nothing.
On the other hand, left unmentioned is that Netanyahu’s successor, Ehud Barak had President Clinton travel to Geneva to offer nearly all of the Golan to Assad’s father nine years ago. The first President Assad rejected the Israeli offer.
The Washington Post mentions something interesting about one of the American envoys to Syria.
Feltman brings an unusual history to the diplomatic mission. As ambassador to Lebanon during the 2005 Cedar Revolution, his efforts to foster a government independent of Syrian influence so angered the Syrian government that at one point, State Department security officials were concerned that Damascus had ordered his assassination. Shortly before he returned to Washington, in January 2008, an embassy convoy was attacked in a car bombing that killed three Lebanese civilians and injured dozens of people; Feltman was traveling in another convoy and was not injured.
Is this a sign that the Obama administration will be tough with Damascus?
The Post explains the reason why the United States is looking for dialogue with Syria.
A rapprochement between the United States and Syria has the potential to reshape the Middle East if it results in Syria curtailing its ties to Iran and anti-Israeli militant groups in exchange for return of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In the past year, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has indicated he wants to end Syria’s diplomatic isolation, holding indirect talks with Israel and welcoming French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Damascus.
It does have that potential. But if Syria’s official SANA news service is to be believed, Syria isn’t much interested in detaching itself from Iran.
“Talks with Mr. Shara dealt with the message conveyed to President al-Assad from President Ahmadinejad… during the meeting, both sides underlined the need for boosting and consolidating cooperation between the two countries and the outcomes of the Syrian-Iranian Higher committee held lately in Tehran,” the Iranian Minister said in a statement to reporters following the meeting.
Finally there are two interesting paragraphs towards the end of the Post article. The reporter supports his premise that American engagement with Syria could change the Middle East by quoting a Syrian official. (Editors in Syria are not independent journalists.)
“It is obvious that this administration realizes that the deterioration of the relations between Syria and the U.S. was caused by the lack of dialogue, and it also realizes what such a dialogue could mean in terms of the stability and peace of the region,” said Elias Murad, editor in chief of al-Baath newspaper.
But at the end of the article we learn this:
Yigal Palmor, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, expressed some doubt about whether pursuing the Syrian track would bear fruit. He noted that the Turkish-sponsored talks were only to determine the conditions for beginning actual peace talks, and that Syrian officials refused to meet directly with Israeli envoys.
So if the United States will engage with Syria directly that could change the region, but Syria isn’t expected to engage Israel directly? That’s the imbalance that is inherent in dealing with Syria (or any other hostile Middle Eastern country). The country insists that America engage with it and engagement is characterized as the start of a thaw and a rejection of old outdated views. But then Syria doesn’t change and its obstinacy is treated as a matter of course, not as something that can or ought to change.
So Syria gets the engagement it wants and gives nothing in return. Assad needs Iran, he does not need the West, except for pressure on Israel. Or perhaps for immunity. The “openness” of Assad has a price, the United States would do well to consider if it’s worth paying.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
It’s a pity the civiliized countries of the world did not take the Hariri assassination as an excuse to knock off the Assad dynasty and its consigloieri. The Syrians would put in another dictator, most likely, but he would be one who would know he could be deposed, and would tread much more lightly. I thought at the time (and posted at various places) that a total blockade of Syria, land, sea, and air, enforced by the US and the surrounding countries, could have done the job on a coutnry so economically frgile as Syria. And no one with more than two brain cells to click together doubts that Syria was behind the killing.
Lost opportunities like that lead to worse problems and violence later. We ought to have learned that from the saga of Saddam Hussein, if not earlier, but evidently the lesson was lost on Washington’s conventional wisdom and similar klutzes around the diplomatic world. There is nothing so naive as a “realist” in international affairs. Look at James Baker. He could not even figure out that, having made an enemy of Saddam over Kuwait, we needed to overthrow him lest he make lots more trouble for us seeking revenge.