Syria's reformists may detest the US, but they see the pressure being exerted by it on their country as one way of achieving the reforms they seek, writes David Hirst.
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, seedbed of the guerrilla movement that aimed to liberate the Palestinian land lost in 1948.
Syria's Ba'athist regime was then its militant Arab backer. But now he could not even receive me in his office, coming instead to my hotel. For the PFLP-GC is one of four Palestinian "terrorist" organisations whose Damascus branch the US has called on Syria to shut down.
In the case of the inactive PFLP-GC, Syrian acquiescence seems to have been cosmetic, though more substantive in the case of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose alleged training camp - actually, it seems, a disused PFLP-GC camp near the village of Ain al-Saheb, where some Palestinians may live - Israel claimed to have struck yesterday.
Unlike Jibril, Syria quietly asked Ramadan Shallah, the Islamic Jihad leader, to leave the country. "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 Syria, which because of its support for Saddam during the Iraq war most feared that it, too, was about to be attacked, now believes the US is sinking into an Iraqi "quagmire". And the relief in Damascus is palpable. "Who is more comfortable now," asked deputy foreign minister Mr Walid Muallim, "Syria or the US?"
Yet, despite what Syrian officials see as their country's excess of postwar caution, the Bush administration continues to single it out for hostile attention and to persist in demanding far more than it feels able to give: not just the curbing of the likes of Hamas, but the dismantling of the military wing of Lebanon's Hizbollah. After President Bush recently accused Syria of "continuing to assist terrorists", the Syrian foreign minister, Mr Farouk Sharaa, blew his top; the Bush administration surpassed all others in "foolishness and proneness to violence"; its "hawks want the sword to remain over Syria's head".
Such rhetoric is seen here as a symptom of the antipathy between two adversaries: the neo-conservatives who have shaped Bush's neo-imperial Middle East strategies, and the Syrian old guard, that deeply entrenched power structure put in place by the late Hafez Assad.
For the neo-conservatives, no Arab country, after Iraq, represents such an obstacle to all they are trying to achieve, and in no other Arab country would American-engineered "regime change" and "democracy" have a more beneficial effect. They make little secret of that, or of the fact that Syria is a battleground in their Middle East policy conflicts. Mr John Bolton, the hawkish US under-secretary of state for arms control, says Syria's development of weapons of mass destruction constitutes a threat to the whole region.
What the neo-conservatives, as pro-Israeli ideologues, abhor is precisely what Syria's old guard ostensibly stands for. This is the proposition that Syria is - as Bashar's spokeswoman Buthaina 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 antithesis of Zionism's drive to fragment the Arab "nation". Its destiny is to stand most firmly for pan-Arab causes - which now means Iraq, in addition to Palestine.
That is the theory. In practice, Syria has always been frustratingly weak on the role it aspires to. Under Ba'athist management, it has gradually become yet weaker, losing card after strategic card - with Hizbollah, a few now ineffectual Palestinian factions and a much-reduced military presence in Lebanon being just about the last.
Rarely has the regime felt more besieged - and rarely has external siege had such potential domestic ramifications. For in addition to the traditional Zionist enemy - which has just launched its first air strike on Palestinian positions in Syrian territory since the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war - on one flank, and a pro-Israel United States occupying a key Arab neighbour on the other, it faces what Riad Turk, the 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 that the old guard invokes, they may revile America, but the increasingly vocal reformists among them have a dilemma. For the old guard is the embodiment of all that they yearn to be rid of. They know that the striking of nationalist poses is mainly a means of embarrassing all opposition, of justifying the perpetuation of repressive "emergency" laws in place since 1963, and is all the more phony in that this old guard has done so much to incapacitate the country for a nationalist struggle of any kind.
"We know that America's call for democracy is just a cover for its strategic and economic interests," said Mr Anwar Bunni, a human rights activist, "but some of us say that it is only because of what America did in Iraq, the fright it gave our rulers, that we reformers stand a chance here".
The old guard is just playing the waiting game, which has for years been the only one it can play: waiting for America to sink 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 Shaaban, referring to the key role Syria did play in driving Israeli and US troops out of that country in the 1980s.
"For the Americans to worry about Syrian interference there is to underestimate the Iraqis."
It is always possible that the neo-conservatives will still win the argument, that, exasperated by problems in Iraq, Bush will turn to Syria as an explanation for them and attack it as a solution. But the calculation in Damascus is clearly that, as former information minister Adnan Omran put it, "Bush will realise that the neo-conservatives are leading him to his own perdition" and that the traditional, pragmatic strain in US Middle East diplomacy will reassert itself: the one that sees Syria as a vital interlocutor in the quest for a general settlement.
A neo-conservative defeat might not be such an unmixed blessing for the Syrian people, some of whom fear that, with the American ogre in retreat, the regime would have no inclination for reform. And that would be a pity, Arab reformists everywhere say, because home-grown reform would have a far wider impact than any imposed by the Americans in Iraq.
David Hirst reported from the Middle East for the Guardian from 1963-2001. An updated edition of his book, The Gun and the Olive Branch, is published by Faber and Faber.