The attack on the American Embassy in Damascus has fixed the spotlight on the complicated relations between the two countries. The preeminent Arab rejectionist during decades of US-driven Middle East peacemaking, Syria has always benefited from one odd American ability: the juxtaposition of its antipathy for the Baathist regime with its eagerness to cultivate it as a serious partner.
American secretaries of state hardly complained when they were left waiting for hours in Damascus for an audience with the wily Hafez Al Assad. American presidents easily took time off in Vienna or Geneva from their extended global travels to meet the Syrian leader.
During the first Gulf War, Assad’s tacit support for the US-led campaign to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait played a major part in granting the mission the legitimacy of Arab support. There is reason to believe that a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty might have been pulled off had Assad lived a little longer.
Bashar Al Assad’s elevation to the presidency brought a whiff of optimism. The generational newness the new leader brought to his job could only benefit the relationship. Bashar Assad’s eye for the change sweeping the world around Syria could only precipitate those much needed reforms.
But Bashar not only retained the old guard his father carefully cultivated, he also shed few of the repressiveness of the regime. Still, many rosy-eyed analysts remained hopeful that the former ophthalmologist would come out with a modern vision for the region. There is considerable speculation that an initiative toward formal Syrian-Israeli peace may be in the works at this very moment.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised Syrian authorities for their handling of the embassy attack, and expressed her condolences for the death of the Syrian security officer. A press statement from the Syrian Embassy in Washington was hardly conciliatory. “It is regrettable that US policies in the Middle East have fueled extremism, terrorism and anti-US sentiment,” it said. That must have been posturing, given the kind of pressure Damascus is from Washington. US officials didn’t seem too bothered by Syria’s roughness either.
Listed by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism, Syria continues to figure high in the imperatives of Washington’s Mideast diplomacy. Unofficial sources suggest that Syria has dramatically expanded the extent of its cooperation with the US-led war on Al Qaida in recent years.
We are told this cooperation included the reported US submission of questions for an al-Qaida figure in Syrian custody in 2002; Syria’s 2003 arrest of Al Qaida couriers allegedly carrying $23.5 million; and Syrian support for Lebanese security activities against Al Qaida-linked groups in 2003 that prevented attacks on US interests and the US ambassador to Lebanon.
In public, the mood continues be one of defiance. The US withdrew its ambassador to Damascus following the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Al Hariri in February 2005. Early reports from a UN probe into the killing implicated top Syrian officials – perhaps even Bashar Assad – in the murder plot. Lebanese popular pressure forced Syria to pull its troops from its neighbor.
Syria, together with Iran, sprung back into action this year through its Hezbollah proxy. Syrian support for Hezbollah during the massive Israeli attacks may even have erased some of the Lebanese people’s hostility.
Doubtless, the US and Syria have a mutual interest in preventing the rise of militant Sunni Islam. Washington, on the other hand, would love to drive Damascus and Teheran wide apart in the larger regional scheme of things.
Although some American officials, in the afterglow of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, called for regime change in Syria, the US seems to have been chastened – and not just by the Iraq quagmire. Washington knows that sudden convulsion could create a political vacuum the Muslim Brotherhood could exploit. Thus the love-hate relationship continues.
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