Syria, Not Libya, Is the One to Watch

The American focus on Libya after the Rome and Vienna airport massacres is wrong. Libya was perhaps most responsible for those outrageous incidents, but not the only country involved, and not the only one to gain by them. Syria is far more important than Libya in the Middle East, and not only in its support of Palestinian guerrilla factions. President Hafez Assad can make the difference between war and peace; Col. Moammar Kadafi, for all his posturing, cannot.

While U.S. attention centers on Libya, the line of confrontation between Israel and Syria--a line that runs through Lebanon--has been heating up. In late November Israel downed two Syrian MIGs; Syria moved SAM anti-aircraft missiles across its border into Lebanon, and has been shuttling them back and forth ever since. Most recently, the shelling of Israel’s northern villages has begun again.

Israel sees the Syrian missiles as a threat because they limit its ability to monitor developments in Lebanon and retaliate against attacks. In fact, rocket attacks on northern Israel were the ostensible cause for the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which also aimed at removing Syrian missiles from Lebanon.

It might seem that Israel’s downing of the Syrian planes in November precipitated the new tensions. But that mistakes cause for effect. The current escalation is a Syrian initiative, even if the proximate cause might appear to be an Israeli action.

Just two hours before the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting, Syrian MIGs, which had previously observed Israeli reconnaissance flights over Lebanon from a distance, approached the Israeli jets and were shot down--the first Syrian planes lost to Israel in more than two years. It is nearly impossible that the Syrian pilots acted without instructions from the highest authorities in Damascus. The question is, why did Syria time its move to coincide with the summit?

Superpower diplomacy has major consequences for the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hafez Assad finds himself in a position similar to that of Anwar Sadat in 1972. Then, Sadat watched the Nixon-Brezhnev summit and concluded that the Soviets would not jeopardize their relations with the United States to help Egypt recover the territories that it had lost in 1967. Sadat began dramatic action to avert a superpower-imposed stalemate. His carrot, the expulsion of Soviet advisers from Egypt, failed to shake the United States from its complacent belief in the viability of a stalemate; his stick, the resort to war the next year, did.

Now Assad suspects that the Soviets may make a deal at his expense for the sake of better relations with the United States. The Soviets have reason to be dissatisfied with the return on their investment in the Arab confrontation states. Ongoing discussions on the restoration of relations with Israel suggest that the new regime in Moscow is exploring alternatives to its present position--locked into the losing side in a conflict that looks to go on indefinitely. In any case, the Soviet-Israeli talks are not good news to Damascus.

If Syria today resembles Egypt more than a decade ago, mistrustful of the Soviets and fearful of being sold out for detente, it is different in one key respect: It is clear, at least in retrospect, that Sadat was bent on ending the confrontation. One year after taking office, he said that he was ready to conclude a peace agreement with Israel.

But Syria’s position today is not clear. Damascus says that there can be no negotiations until it has achieved “strategic parity” with Israel. Nor will it let any other Arab party negotiate, lest its own bargaining position be compromised. The demand for parity effectively blocks any efforts to resolve the conflict in the near term. And as parity is indistinguishable from the ability to fight a war successfully, Syrian aims over the long term are just as ambiguous.

Syria is determined to demonstrate that it is an independent party in the Middle East equation whose concerns must be taken into account. At the very least, Assad will not be prodded into negotiations until he can bargain from a position of strength. It can be expected that as (or if) a new round of superpower detente begins,Syria’s interest will be in stirring regional tensions, particularly those that pit Washington against Moscow, to prevent any Soviet-American understanding that would limit Assad’s options.

Moscow surely wants to avoid the pitfalls of the early ‘70s, when it was maneuvered out of Egypt by the U.S.-dominated peace process. Syria is now Moscow’s most important friend in the Arab world, and would find others, like Libya, ready to help undermine any incipient detente by raising regional tensions and imposing divisions on the superpowers from below.

In such a broad arena of potential conflict, Libya’s machinations are secondary. The escalation of Syrian-Israeli tensions, triggered by the prospect of a Soviet-American rapprochement, is the bigger picture and involves the bigger stakes.