Syria’s Place in the Equation

The easy part of the war that the Bush administration is prosecuting against terror is almost over. The next chapter in this unfolding campaign promises to be far more equivocal.

Take Syria. While the president didn’t mention it as an imminent target, Syria did make the U.S. list of states supporting terror. Currently, Syria is estimated to be making upwards of half a billion dollars annually importing oil from Iraq in violation of resolutions adopted by the United Nations Security Council, to which Syria was recently elected as a nonpermanent member.

As recently as last summer, U.S. relations with Syria seemed, if not warm, at least progressing. In August, David Satterfield, a former U.S. ambassador in Beirut who is now deputy assistant secretary for Near East affairs, described his talks with Syrian foreign minister Farouk Shareh as “excellent.” Satterfield promised “maximum” U.S. effort to “stop the terrible suffering” in Israel and the Palestinian territories and reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to the principle of “land for peace” on the Syria-Israel front.

Since Sept. 11, however, no one is describing relations between the Bush administration and Damascus in such glowing terms. In October, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage suggested that Damascus would be included on Washington’s short list of military targets if it did not accede to U.S. demands. But there has also been quiet, practical and unprecedented cooperation between Syrian and U.S. intelligence agencies. This odd blend of antagonism and cooperation has relevance far beyond the axis between Damascus and Washington: It offers insight into the difficulties of meshing the U.S. campaign to defeat “terror with a global reach” with the internal politics of countries like Syria, where this policy carries both dangers and rewards.

In the days and weeks following the Al Qaeda attacks on U.S. targets, the dangerous implications of U.S. policy for the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad were readily apparent. Syria was willing to condemn Osama bin Laden. But it coupled that willingness with an insistence that a distinction be made between terrorist acts and struggles for national liberation. It has continued to host many Palestinian rejectionist groups, and its refusal to disavow Lebanon’s Hezbollah was evidence of the deep divide that, in U.S. eyes, threatens to define relations between the two countries. Armitage warned that U.S. policy toward Syria “will be according to what the coalition [against terror] will find proper, ranging from isolation, to economic investigation, even to military actions.”

Shortly thereafter President Bush himself declared that Washington was evaluating Syrian promises to assist in the global effort lead by Washington. “We take [the Syrian declarations] seriously,” he said, “and intend to give them a chance to prove [them].”

In the months since October, a wary equilibrium has been established between the U.S. and Syria. The Assad regime has accommodated Washington’s immediate objectives, which center on destroying Al Qaeda’s international operations and keeping the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah on ice. But Washington has yet to translate its broader objectives into new and more emphatic policy demands for an end to Syrian support for groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, nor has it placed these concerns in the context of specific inducements for or threats to countries like Syria that comply with or defy Washington’s directives.

“As long as the West does not insist on Syria punishing Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad, the Syrians will help” the U.S. in its pursuit of Bin Laden, one frequent visitor to Syria notes. In fact, he says, Damascus is working closely with U.S., British and Canadian intelligence agencies. “The FBI and CIA are there long-term.”

Syria has reason to support this effort, says a State Department official. “The Al Qaeda people, after all, are related to the people at Hama,” he said, a reference to the Syrian government’s bloody assault in 1982 on the town of Hama, a stronghold of anti-regime Islamic fundamentalists, in which an estimated 10,000 to 25,000 people were killed, most of them civilians. “They don’t need our encouragement.”

Indeed, eager to trumpet Syria’s membership in the fight against terror, Bashar Assad has taken to championing his father’s assault on Hama to the many American visitors who have recently toured the Syrian capital. In Syrian eyes, Washington’s assault on Afghanistan places their destruction of the city of Hama in a new, more internationally acceptable light. “He is very proud of it,” observed one recent visitor.

Syria assumes it has nothing to fear from the Bush White House, believing that once Al Qaeda is defeated, Washington will return to business as usual. But while Bush’s State of the Union did not mention Syria specifically, it did make clear his determination to target not just states that actively promote terrorism, but also those that are “timid in the face of terror” and offer support and refuge to terrorist groups.

Syria offers a “target rich” mark for such an effort. It is enjoying an explosion in unmonitored, sanctions-busting trade with Iraq, fueled by an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 barrels of Iraqi oil per day. The country offers refuge and support to numerous Palestinian rejectionist and Islamist groups. Syria may have prevailed upon Hezbollah to maintain relative quiet on Israel’s northern border, but it shows no interest in conforming to Washington’s long-standing requests to force the organization to abandon the military dimension of its activities, which Syria sees as a liberation struggle. Nor does it evidence any interest in making life difficult for the Palestinians conducting business in Damascus.

On these issues, acknowledges a U.S. State Department official, “we might as well be talking to a wall. We are always looking for levers to make our requests more effective. There are constant [internal] debates on what penalties should be exacted.”

Short of “sending in the Blackhawks,” as one official put it--an option that, so far, has not made it to Bush’s priority list--the U.S. has yet to discover a set of instruments that will compel the Assad regime to act according to an American script. In Washington, the fight against terror may seem self-evident. But in Damascus, as elsewhere, cooperation with the U.S. agenda--against Palestinians or Lebanese Islamists or Iraqi President Saddam Hussein--carries a price: an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Recent suggestions that Assad might be interested in negotiating with Israel to make a deal are consistent with this view.

As the Syria example makes clear, when Washington sets its sights beyond Bin Laden, it will be crucial to factor the Arab-Israeli dimension of contemporary politics in the Middle East into its policy equation.

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Geoffrey Aronson is director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace in Washington.