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COMMENTARY
January 14, 2004
The splits
The Syrian president Bashir Assad may soon have a bigger problem with Hezbollah than Israel has. This is because after a generation of hosting the most psychopathic arm of Iran's psychopathic theocracy Mr. Assad no longer wants to know them. His minority Alawite Baathist dictatorship which Hezbollah has helped to sustain over the years suddenly finds itself in a position where it must make new friends. Specifically it is in urgent need of better relations with Turkey the United States and Israel; and Hezbollah is not popular with any of them. It isn't in the forefront of the news but the Syrian dictatorship is under huge and growing pressure from an increasingly impatient Bush administration to stop the terrorist insurgency into Iraq through Syria. The U.S. also wants Syria to open to Western inspection as Libya has just done the Assad regime's illicit weapons programmes and for them to surrender Saddamite agents and weapons that they are almost certainly hiding. This at a time when Syria has never been so isolated within the Arab world. It is now surrounded by American allies on all sides except for a small patch of oceanfront and the former state of Lebanon which it continues to occupy in defiance of all international law. And Damascus is the headquarters for about a dozen Jihadist organizations whose senior members are on almost everyone's most-wanted list. Imad Fayez Mughniyeh is among them -- Hezbollah's ingenious operations chief mastermind of innumerable very bloody incidents including the bombings of the U.S. embassy and marine barracks in Beirut back in 1983. The Americans want him very very badly. President Assad continued to offer lip service to the "Islamic revolution" months after that ceased to be fashionable with the fall of Baghdad. He briefly imagined himself filling the fallen Saddam Hussein's shoes as the rhetorical champion of the "oppressed Arabs". He did this I believe more out of stupidity than from any other motive. With the passage of months it became obvious to him and to his advisers that they were isolated abroad. Worse they became increasingly isolated at home where the televised sight of Iraqis celebrating the overthrow of Baathism in the streets of Baghdad was putting ideas into the streets of Damascus. The back-pedalling now is frenetic. Last week Mr. Assad went on an appeasement tour of Turkey the northern neighbour that almost invaded Syria in 1998 -- before his father and predecessor evicted the Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan and shopped his Damascus-based terror operations to the Turks. The Turks strongly advised as the Americans had been doing that it was time for Syria to make peace with Israel; and this week Mr. Assad is wrestling with his own past vows in order to make that possible. There were semi-secret Israeli-Syrian negotiations for the return of the Golan Heights in exchange for a Sadat-style recognition of Israel's legitimacy that ended in the year 2000. These should shortly resume. But not yet able to acknowledge domestically the evaporation of his negotiating position Mr. Assad cannot stop blustering. Yesterday he turned down publicly and rather contemptuously an invitation from Israel's president Moshe Katsav to visit Israel directly. He insists that the negotiations with Israel resume from where they left off rather than starting again from scratch. This latter position is pure buffoonery since the two sides would have to negotiate even to agree where the last negotiations left off. His justified fear of the U.S. has him making distance from Hezbollah's chief sponsor the ayatollahs' Iran and possibly shopping minor terror assets quietly. Iran's ayatollahs in turn are making their own cautious concessions to the U.S. in light of Iraq. Such splits are happening throughout the region as various regimes manoeuvre to assure their own survival in the face of a post-Saddam earthquake. Even Saudi Arabia is making discreet overtures to Israel about an eventual peace treaty that could leave the Palestinians as diplomatically isolated as the Assad regime now finds itself. But no such negotiations are easy given the past. There is too much rhetoric to climb down from quickly. One of the diplomatic difficulties for statesmen from democratic countries is the Arab leaders' unfamiliarity with the exigencies of electoral politics. I am not being sarcastic about this -- I've been told by people who have had firsthand experience that even so urbane a leader as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak genuinely fails to understand what it might be like to have an electorate. In the case of Bashir Assad who like his father before him compounds imaginative with other intellectual disabilities the problem is especially acute. He persists in making ludicrous demands for the sake of his public image. He does not understand for instance that no prime minister of Israel can give away the Golan Heights as a precondition for having a conversation with him. This is because a substantial majority of Israelis many of whom still remember that the Golan Heights were used prior to their conquest in 1967 as a platform from which to rain shells down upon lower-lying Israeli villages would rather keep the high ground. They might give it back but not for nothing. On the other hand Mr. Assad has a political problem that we fail to appreciate fully: that if he does make peace with Israel Hezbollah will skin him alive. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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