Syria Stalls Iraqi Bid to Widen War

Every Iraqi Scud missile that crashes into Tel Aviv echoes politically here in Damascus, testing Syria’s determination to stand with the allied forces in the Persian Gulf War.

But President Hafez Assad’s regime calculates that it has nothing to gain--and plenty to lose--by getting dragged into an Arab-Israeli conflict engineered by Saddam Hussein. It’s furious at Hussein’s attempts to light the fuse and scrambling to stamp it out.

So far, while anticipating Israeli reprisal attacks against Baghdad, Assad has shown no sign of breaking with the American-dominated allied armies in Saudi Arabia.

Syria’s powerful defense minister, Mustafa Talas, said flatly that Syria would not be pulled into a war it opposes. “You are free to fight the whole world alone but not free to call on people to join you in this foolishness,” he declared in an open statement to Hussein early this week.

Assad has switched on a major campaign of propaganda and pronouncements to send its message abroad and into the streets of Damascus, a classic orchestration of mood control in a security-heavy state.

The government newspaper Tishrin blasted Iraq’s missile barrage at the Israeli metropolis as a “theatrical threat” to provoke retaliation. Already, it said, the barrage of Scuds has given Israel “all the justifications and excuses” it needed to demand more weapons from Washington.

The first shipment, more Patriot missiles, “it will one day use against the Arabs,” Tishrin warned.

The invasion of Kuwait--and Iraq’s attempt to draw Israel into the conflict--is the wrong war at the wrong time, Syrian officials have told Western diplomats, who were summoned to the Foreign Ministry for a series of meetings last weekend to hear the Syrian view.

The anticipated Israeli response to Iraqi missile attacks will be weighed by the Syrians in a balance that is oriented by that view.

“They expect a retaliation (by Israel),” said a European ambassador who attended one of the weekend meetings. “But they’re prepared to distinguish between war and clashes. The Scud attacks are clashes. The Syrians consider it (Iraqi) propaganda.

“The nature of the Israeli reprisal will determine whether it’s war. Assad will measure it carefully. He doesn’t want a wide-open war,” the diplomat said.

While refusing to take the Iraqi bait, however, the Syrians are not expected to use their 20,000 Saudi-based troops in offensive operations. “They signed up for Desert Shield,” the European said, “not for Desert Storm.”

The opinion on the streets of Damascus is not so sophisticated. When war broke out, foreign diplomats and ordinary Syrians said, the Damascenes were shocked and saddened. “The bombing of Baghdad hurt every Arab deep in his heart,” said a Syrian journalist.

When the first salvo of Scud missiles hit Tel Aviv and Haifa last week, there was a wave of elation, the diplomats said. And Assad’s propaganda organs went right to work on it.

“This is a man who controls public opinion,” a Western diplomat noted.

All three government newspapers this week--one in English and two in Arabic--began running full-page spreads of man-on-the-street reaction, complete with photographs of the respondents. Not surprisingly, they followed the propaganda line.

“By provoking war in the gulf, the Iraqi president has chosen the road to death freely by himself,” the English-language Syrian Times quoted Khaldoun Warraq, an engineer, as saying.

At midweek, Information Ministry officials called in the Syrian bureau chiefs of Western news agencies and warned them against transmitting stories exaggerating public dissent. “One interview with a pro-Saddam taxi driver does not represent public opinion,” an official said.

The government’s position on the fate of Hussein and the Gulf War are complex. “They don’t want Saddam to come out of this either as a martyr or a hero,” the Western diplomat explained. “He has to be perceived to have lost.” Achieving that requires a short, decisive war.

But Damascus does not want complete destruction of the Iraqi military machine, despite the longtime enmity between Assad and Hussein. The collapse of Iraq as a military power would only tilt the regional arms balance in Israel’s favor.

The Syrian approach was underlined in a salvo of pronouncements this week.

On Tuesday, Al Baath, the ruling party’s newspaper, declared, “Iraq is being destroyed, its people slaughtered because of its ruler who pushed Iraq and the Iraqis to suicide.”

As Assad did last week, Al Baath called on Hussein to “be brave” and withdraw his forces from Kuwait, adding: “If you are not capable of taking such a decision, then take a manly stand and step down. If you can’t save Iraq, then let someone else make that decision.”

Earlier, Damascus had played a political card by hosting a conference of Iraqi dissidents.

Assad’s policy on the Gulf War and the anticipated Israeli reprisals, according to diplomats and Syrian officials, is based on hard geopolitical reasoning. They say:

* Assad does not want the Iraqi leader to choose the time and place of another full-scale Arab military engagement with Israel. If that decision is made, Syria insists it should be produced through inter-Arab consultations.

The current position of Damascus favors an international conference to deal with the fundamental issue of the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian question, and Assad’s regime has been encouraged by European and American endorsement of a conference, once Kuwait is freed.

The invasion of Kuwait has undermined the primary diplomatic principle of the Arab stand against Israeli territorial gains in the 1967 war--the inadmissibility of taking another government’s land. In the Six-Day War, Israel occupied the Jordanian-controlled West Bank of the Jordan River and Egyptian Gaza, occupied and later annexed Syria’s Golan Heights and occupied and then returned--as a reward for peace--Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Longstanding U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 endorse the principle of return of Arab territory in exchange for peace between Israel and its Arab enemies, including Syria.

Iraqi provocations against Israel threaten to “reshuffle the cards,” in the words of Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh, just as Damascus has climbed out of diplomatic isolation in the Arab world.

In recent years, Syria has been the odd man out. The Persian Gulf countries had formed an alliance around Saudi Arabia. Hussein had engineered an Arab quartet in the heart of the Middle East--Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen. The Arab nations of North Africa had formed a loose alliance.

None of the Arab unions was reaching out to Damascus, and Assad was not interested in joining an alliance. In his long years as the “Mr. No” of Middle East diplomacy, Assad had made Syria the No. 1 confrontational state with Israel, an isolated rejectionist.

But a year ago, Assad opened up, resuming diplomatic relations with Egypt, once a pariah in Syrian eyes for having made separate peace with the Jerusalem government. Damascus capped its emergence from isolation by joining the anti-Hussein coalition with Cairo and Riyadh.

Syria has felt the effects of collapsing Soviet power and the end of the Cold War more than any of Moscow’s other clients in the Middle East. Syria’s relations with the Soviet Union remain close, and Moscow is still its chief arms supplier. But the Soviets now demand cash and Syria does not have it, despite the estimated $2 billion that Damascus has received from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates in compensation for its military deployment in the gulf.

“They (the Syrians) realize that any side in a Mideast war needs a superpower behind it,” explained a regional diplomat. “And they know there’s only one superpower left in the game. It’s not the Soviet Union.”

Deprived of the full force of Soviet support that it received in its wars against Israel over a period of more than four decades, the Damascus regime is now playing in the political arena to maintain its position in the Arab world and internationally. “Assad is a canny geopolitician,” observed the Western diplomat.

Beyond sending troops to Saudi Arabia to underline his opposition to the Kuwait invasion, the Syrian strongman has continued to nurture his relationship with Iran. At midweek he dispatched a high-level delegation--Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam and Foreign Minister Shareh--to Tehran.

Amid rising fears of terrorism spinning off the Gulf War, he has also tightened security around Palestinian camps and military establishments in Syria, according to diplomats here. Syria remains on Washington’s trade-restrictive list of nations harboring terrorists, a major impediment to improved U.S.-Syrian relations.

And in coordination with the U.N. Disaster Relief Organization and other international agencies, Syrian authorities have begun clearing camps for a possible refugee flow from embattled Iraq, although foreign relief officials said Thursday in Damascus that none had reached the border so far.