NEWS ANALYSIS : After 13 Years in Lebanon, Syria Will Not Budge

As Syrian troops and Muslim militias drew a circle of fire around the main Christian forces in Lebanon early last week, international demands for restraint fell on deaf ears in this capital city.

The U.S. State Department branded as an “irresponsible escalation” last weekend’s Syrian-supported assault on Christian positions at strategic Souq el Gharb, the first ground attack in the ruinous, five-month-old artillery war over Beirut.

Pope John Paul II directly addressed Syrian President Hafez Assad, appealing to him not to “assume the behavior of Cain, who made himself responsible for the death of his brother.” The French sent emissaries here and ordered an aircraft carrier and a frigate to the waters off Lebanon.

Assad said nothing.

His troops have been in Lebanon for 13 years, and the consensus is that they are unlikely to leave.

They were invited initially as peacekeepers, and they now constitute a force of 40,000, pledged to remain until Syria’s Lebanese “brothers” adopt equitable political reforms. The Syrian president has weathered previous pressures to withdraw, including the 1982 Israeli invasion, and his army remains in place, reinforced.

“He has nerves of steel,” said a Western diplomatic observer here.

Criticism of the Syrian role in Lebanon is officially and constantly deflected. “We were not there,” one Syrian official said of the fighting at Souq el Gharb.

The battle against the Christian forces of Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun is a Lebanese matter, Syrian spokesmen and the government-controlled press repeat again and again. The role of the Syrians, whose guns have turned Christian-populated East Beirut to rubble, is rarely described as more than “supporting.”

The shelling continued Saturday, with heavy fire reported along the Green Line dividing Muslim West from Christian East Beirut. But the intensity has diminished since Tuesday’s call by the U.N. Security Council for a cease-fire. Neither side appears prepared to unconditionally accept a truce.

As the pressure built during the week, a Kuwaiti newspaper quoted Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Talas in as candid an appraisal as will come from a top official of the tight-lipped Damascus government. “Under no circumstances will we permit the defeat of the Lebanese patriotic forces,” Gen. Talas told the daily Al Anba. “Their defeat would mean a defeat for the Syrian army, and their victory would be our victory.”

Can’t Afford to Lose

The defense minister’s unusual comment matches the appraisal of diplomats and other analysts here in Damascus, less than 100 miles by road from bloodied Beirut: Syria cannot afford to lose the battle of Beirut, and won’t.

Of a welter of motivations for Syria’s presence and intentions in Lebanon, these stand out:

-- Security is the key factor, Damascus-based diplomats and some Syrian analysts said in interviews here last week. “What Syria wants is to secure its Western border,” the Western diplomatic observer explained, pointing out that Syrian policy has failed in part in this concern.

While the Israelis have presented a threat to Damascus in the west and south since the establishment of the Jewish state 40 years ago, now, he noted, “Syria’s most serious rival (in the Arab world) . . . is conceived to be a major player in Lebanon.” That rival, Iraq, which forced a truce in its 8-year war with Iran a year ago, turned its attention to beleaguered Lebanon. There, by supporting the Christian side, the Baghdad government has taken revenge for Syrian support of Iran during the war.

Israel, however, remains the greatest concern. “It is inconceivable for the Syrians, who after all were invited to Lebanon, to withdraw if the Israelis stay” in their security zone north of their border with Lebanon, said a European diplomat. “Damascus is not overly concerned with the domestic policy of any Lebanese government. It’s the foreign policy that matters, particularly as it might affect Syria.”

-- Though he has not directly shown it, the unshakable Assad has been affronted and taken aback by the gall of Aoun to declare a “war of liberation” against what he calls Syrian occupation of Lebanon. According to one Western diplomat, Syria, which failed to force its own candidate into the Lebanese presidency last summer, was not opposed last February when Aoun closed down illegal port operations by Christian militiamen and even when he first moved against the Muslim militia ports. If Aoun’s strategy had worked, it could have encouraged more stability in Lebanon, riven by militia rivalries, and stability in Lebanon lessens Syrian security concerns.

“But when Aoun declared this was a war of liberation, he went too far for Damascus,” the diplomat said. The Syrian propaganda machine began to suggest that the diminutive Christian general was mentally unbalanced, and a gag nickname was encouraged in Beirut: “Napol-Aoun.”

The Western observer suggested that the Souq el Gharb assault was designed in part “to cut Aoun down to size” and said that the Christian leader himself was contemplating the first ground attack of the war.

-- Historical and geopolitical factors continue to play a large role in Syrian thinking about Lebanon. “All over the world, you have these relationships between big countries and their little neighbors,” explained the European envoy. “In the Middle East, you cannot daily insult someone who has the power,” which in this case, he said, is Syria.

He thinks that Aoun has gone too far and that the Syrian pressure is bound to mount.

First, he pointed out, the Arab League, after two separate initiatives to make peace, has withdrawn in failure. “The league has washed its hands of this matter,” he said, and the options are now military. Second, “the population of Beirut has thinned out. It will be easier to carry out a war, going street to street, without so many casualties.”

Lebanon was part of Syria until the French carved it out as a separate state under a post-World War I mandate. In the mind of many Syrians, it’s still one country and one people. Some Syrian analysts last week talked in terms of Syrian “obligations” in Lebanon. And of the French initiative, with its military overtones? The European envoy commented: “Well, this is no longer the time of the Crusaders.”

-- Lastly, in terms of Arab politics, the Syrian role in Lebanon can be expected to be both circumspect and forceful, the Western diplomat noted.

Israeli intervention is unlikely, he said, recalling the unpopularity on the Israeli home front of the 1982 invasion. So, the envoy suggested, the Syrians have the option of “keeping out of mischief with the Israelis and just concentrating on Beirut and the Christian hinterland. Then if the situation gets complex, if Israel does something, the Arab world will be fully behind the Syrians.”

The other option is to use all-out force, which military analysts agree would be sufficient to crush the Christian side. “There is that choice,” the envoy said. “When the stakes are high, there are no rules.

“Or, as some people are saying, there are only the Hama rules.” The Syrian city of Hama was the site of a 1982 rebellion by fundamentalist Muslims against Assad’s regime. It was put down without remorse and with the cost of thousands of lives.

Williams, based in Nicosia, Cyprus, was recently on assignment in Damascus.