Syria’s plan

In an interview with the Emirate daily Al-Khaleej last week, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad once again revealed his intention to dominate Lebanon. Assad made a number of thinly-veiled threats against the country, saying it would “pay the price” with a “return to instability” should the recently-established Special Tribunal for Lebanon hand down what he termed “politicized” indictments, and should his Lebanese allies not be afforded veto power in a post-election cabinet.

Coming at the start of the United States’ engagement of Syria, Assad’s comments highlighted the main impediment to a rapprochement between Damascus and Washington: the lack of meaningful common ground. This raises questions for the Obama administration, whose opening is presumably guided by the principle articulated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that the US is not talking for the sake of talking, but to advance its interests. Yet, the administration’s diplomacy faces potential traps allowing Syria to undermine or manipulate American interests.

The State Department has articulated four points of contention with Syria governing the engagement process: Syrian support for terrorism, its clandestine nuclear program, its interference in Lebanon, and its domestic human rights situation. Assad’s remarks on Lebanon signaled he has no intention of ending Syrian efforts to undercut its neighbor’s sovereignty. Regime spokesmen have also advised US diplomats “not to waste their time” by raising the issue of Syrian support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Moreover, Syria, which has attracted outside attention for developing an apparent clandestine nuclear program, has rejected any further inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Instead of being open to discussing issues of concern to the US, the Assad regime has made “offers” that amount to expired goods, or that will push the Americans to undercut their own interests. For instance, the Syrians are now floating cooperation and intelligence-sharing on Iraqi border control. Not only is this years too late, but as a senior US official recently told the Abu Dhabi daily The National, “Syria is trying to sell us the water to extinguish fires that it has lit but that we already put down.”

Furthermore, intelligence sharing has long been a device intended to allow Syria to justify its renewed intervention in Lebanon under the guise of fighting “Sunni jihadists” (even as Syria’s role in helping create groups like Fatah al-Islam is ignored). Syria also seeks to use intelligence cooperation to define what constitutes terrorism, and to demand that it be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, even as it continues to support militant Islamist groups that the US labels terrorist.

Another bit of snake oil that Syria is trying to hawk is its support for “reconciliation” talks between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, in order to form a Palestinian national-unity government. Syria’s declared aim, in fact, is to restructure the Palestinian Liberation Organization to include Hamas and other Damascus-based Palestinian factions. Given the American position on Hamas, this hardly qualifies as “helpful,” and in fact damages Washington’s interests and those of its ally, Egypt.

Syria’s Palestinian trap should serve as a warning. It is imperative that the Obama administration not allow various “processes” – the tentative bilateral US-Syria engagement and any future Syria-Israel peace track – to derail its bottom-line objectives. The Syrians have long used the peace process to deflect demands that they change their behavior, and have recently hinted of their intention to use negotiations to get a “deal” that would derail the Hariri tribunal. As one Syrian journalist who often channels regime talking has pointed out, peace talks with Israel will “consign the Hariri tribunal to history.” Shameful comments by former US officials involved in the peace process during the 1990s and essentially saying the same thing encourage this Syrian line of thinking.

The Obama administration has smartly chosen to task engagement with Syria to Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman and National Security Council official Daniel Shapiro. It was they, and not peace envoy George Mitchell, who undertook the first visit to Damascus. The Syrians dislike Feltman and have even physically threatened him in the past. They will seek to use their talks with Israel to avoid any compromises involving their ties to Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran (ironically, even as peace process enthusiasts harbor a now-discredited view that the talks would “wean them away” from these long-term allies).

The same applies to the offer of military cooperation on Iraq. Syria will attempt to diversify its channels with as many American interlocutors as possible to play them off against each other. The Obama administration would do well to restrict the number of cooks in the Syria kitchen.

The Syrian aim is to drag out the engagement process without making major concessions of its own, while extracting unilateral US concessions under the pretext of “confidence building.” In other words, they will try to go back to the 1990s, when they had their cake and ate it too.

The US has so far indicated that this framework is obsolete. If so, then the moment of truth should not be far off. The US administration’s recognition of these realities and how it responds will determine whether the experiment in engagement is a success or a crashing failure.

Tony Badran is a research fellow with the Center for Terrorism Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The views of the author do not necessarily reflect those of NOW Lebanon.