The Amorality of Mutual Interest : Bush’s meeting with Assad is best understood as a necessary evil

Political expediency often forces governments, the U.S. among them, to extend the hand of cooperation to some of the world’s most unpleasant regimes and leaders. One of the bloodiest hands that Washington has felt compelled to grasp as part of its efforts to build an anti-Iraq coalition belongs to Syria’s President Hafez Assad.

In Geneva on Friday President Bush met with the longtime dictator, a man whose sordid record of ruthlessness and support for global terrorism easily compares with Saddam Hussein’s. The meeting, which unavoidably helped give Assad some of the international recognition he craves, can probably be justified on the Realpolitik grounds that it’s important to have Arab states like Syria enlisted in the anti-Iraq cause, if only to undercut Baghdad’s propaganda that its fight is with U.S. imperialism alone. It would be a great mistake, however, for the Bush Administration to try to carry its ties with Syria beyond that point by pretending that Assad has become a reformed character deserving of U.S. friendship or support.

Washington has wandered down that self-deluding route before, to its great embarrassment and cost. In 1982 the Reagan Administration, fearful of the regional political consequences that could follow a victory by Iran in its conflict with Iraq, abandoned its announced neutrality to tilt toward Baghdad.

The tilt took the concrete form of providing Iraq with U.S. satellite intelligence about Iranian troops dispositions. Politically, Washington signaled its new coziness with Saddam Hussein by dropping Iraq from the State Department’s list of countries that engage in international terrorism. Among other things, that allowed Iraq to qualify for extensive U.S. trade credits. In a coda to that story, the General Accounting Office reported this week that the government now stands to lose $2 billion for backing loans that Iraq is welshing on. In any event, Iraq’s supposed divorce from terrorism predictably proved to be short-lived.

Let’s not see a repeat of this tawdry business. Mutual interest has temporarily brought Washington and Damascus a bit closer politically. That doesn’t erase or disguise Syria’s record on terrorism.

Damascus has been strongly implicated, directly or indirectly, in the bombing of the Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, two years ago. It is implicated, through its powerful on-the-ground presence in Lebanon, in the holding of Western hostages and the training of terrorists in the Bekaa Valley. The whole bill of indictment against Assad runs much longer. The point is that Syria’s military contribution in Saudi Arabia must not be allowed to obscure its deep involvement with terrorism. There’s no reason to think that involvement isn’t continuing, or that Americans and U.S. interests won’t remain among its chief targets.