SYRIA: With Syria still very much at the heart of the Arab world, the post-Iraq Bush administration wants it under its heel, writes David Hirst in Damascus
Fadil Shururu, chief political officer of Ahmad Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, has come a long way since I first met him 35 years ago in Jordan's Ghor Valley. This was the seed-bed of the new-born guerilla movement that was to liberate the whole of the Palestinian homeland lost to Israel in 1948; the Syrian Ba'athist regime, also in its fire-breathing youth, was its militant Arab backer. He could not even receive me in his own office; he came to my hotel instead. For the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is now one of four Palestinian "terrorist" organisations whose Damascus-based branch the US has called on Syria to shut down completely. In the case of the militarily inactive PFLP, Syrian acquiescence seems to have been cosmetic at most, more substantive in the case of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. "But mark my words," said Shururu, "the time is coming when George Bush will need Bashar Assad more than Bashar needs him." What is not in doubt is that the Arab government - which in the aftermath of its open support for Saddam during the Iraq war, most feared that it, too, was about to be attacked - believes that the US is now sinking inexorably into an Iraqi "quagmire". And the relief in Damascus is palpable.
"Who is more comfortable now", asked Deputy Foreign Minister Walid Muallim, "Syria or the US?" Despite what Syrian officials see as their country's almost cheek-turning excess of post-war caution, the Bush administration continues to single it out for special, hostile attention, and to persist in demanding from it far more than it feels able to give. This includes the dismantling of the military wing of Lebanon's Hizbullah. After President Bush, for no reason Syrian officials or Western diplomats could discern, accused Syria of "continuing to assist and harbour terrorists", Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa blew his top. The Bush administration, he said, surpassed all others in "foolishness and proneness to violence"; its "hawks want the sword to remain hanging over Syria's head".
Such outbreaks of ferocious rhetoric are seen here as symptoms of the deep-seated antipathy between two adversaries: the neo-conservatives who have shaped the Bush administration's grandiose, neo-imperial, Middle-East strategies; and the Syrian "old guard", that deeply entrenched power structure put in place by the late Hafiz Assad which continues to dominate the policies of his son, Bashar, a would-be modernizer apparently struggling to extricate himself from its sclerotic clutches.
For the neo-conservatives, no Arab country, after Iraq, represents such an obstacle to all they are trying to achieve, none where American-engineered "regime change" and "democracy" could have a more beneficial effect throughout the region.
What, at bottom, the neo-conservatives, as pro-Israeli idealogues, are deemed to abhor is precisely what the "old guard" ostensibly stands for.
This is the proposition that, strategically and emotionally, Syria is - as Bashar's spokesman Butheina Shaaban put it - "the pulse and identity of the Arab world", that the pan-Arab nationalism to which, of all Arab countries, it most ardently subscribes, is the natural antithesis of Zionism and its inherent drive to keep the Arab "nation" fragmented. Its destiny is to stand most firmly for pan-Arab causes - which now means Iraq in addition to the perennial one of Palestine.
That is the theory. In practice, for all its centrality in Arab politics and psyche, Syria, the modern state, has always been frustratingly weak in relation to the role it aspires to. Under Ba'athist management, it has gradually become yet weaker, losing "card" after strategic "card" - with Hizbullah, a few now-ineffectual Palestinian factions, and a much-reduced militarily presence in Lebanon just about the last of the ever-diminishing pack. Rarely has the regime felt more besieged than it is today - and rarely has external siege had such potential domestic ramifications. For, with the traditional, Zionist enemy on one flank, and the new, unprecedentedly pro-Israeli America in direct occupation of a key Arab neighbour on the other, it faces what Riad Turk, much-imprisoned doyen of Syrian dissidents, calls the "third force in this equation": the Syrian people.
The Syrian people may well resonate to the pan-Arab nationalism which the "old guard" invokes. They may revile America, but they, or rather the increasingly vocal reformists among them, have a dilemma. For the "old guard" is the very embodiment of all that they yearn to be rid of; they know that, for it, the striking of nationalist poses - on Iraq, Palestine or the US - is mainly a means of embarrassing all opposition, of justifying the perpetuation of repressive "emergency" laws in place since 1963, and all the more phony in that this "old guard" itself, with its longevity and misrule, has done so much, just like Saddam, to incapacitate the country for a nationalist struggle of any kind. "It makes us schizophrenic," said Anwar Bunni, a leading human rights activist, "we know that America's call for democracy is just a cover for its strategic and economic interests; but some of us say that it is only because of what America did in Iraq, the fright it gave our own rulers, that we reformers stand a chance here." Caught between the involuntary complicity of two such improbable bed-fellows - pro-Israeli zealots in Washington, anti-American reformists in Syria - the "old guard" is just playing the waiting game which, in its weakness, has for years been the only one that it can play.
It is waiting, now, for America to sink deeper into the Iraqi mire. "Put crudely," said a Western diplomat, "the body count of US soldiers is the most accurate barometer of Syria's morale." It will do nothing to hurry the process along.
Why should it, anyway? "Iraq is not Lebanon", said Butheina Shaaban, referring to the key role Syria did play in driving Israeli and American troops out of that country in the eighties. "For the Americans to worry about Syrian interference there is to under-estimate the Iraqis themselves." It is always possible that, despite this studied passivity, the neo-conservatives will still win the argument in Washington over what to do about Syria, that, exasperated by growing problems in Iraq, Bush will turn to Syria (and Iran too) as an explanation for them - then attack it as a solution. But the calculation in Damascus is clearly that, as Information Minister Adnan Omran put it, "Bush will realize that the neo-conservatives are leading him to his own perdition", that he will retreat, not escalate, and that the traditional, pragmatic strain in American Middle East diplomacy will reassert itself, the one which sees Syria as a vital interlocutor in the quest for a general Middle East settlement. A relief to the "old guard", such a defeat for the neo-conservatives might not be such an unmixed blessing for the Syrian people, some of whom fear that if the regime ever had any inclination to heed their demands for democratic reform, with the American ogre in retreat it would have none. And that would be a pity, Arab reformists everywhere say, because, given Syria's traditional vanguard role in the development of Arab political consciousness, authentic, home-grown reform there would have a far wider and deeper impact than any American-imposed ones in Iraq.