Love of the Land: Back to an old game with Syria

Back to an old game with Syria

Michael Young
NOW Lebanon
02 April '10
Posted before Chag

By most accounts it was a confident Bashar al-Assad who received Walid Jumblatt in Damascus on Wednesday. When it comes to Damascus’ regional position, the Syrian president sees the stars aligned in his favor. Which means that, at worst, he can afford to do nothing at all, and, at best, negotiate to arrive at nothing at all.

John Kerry, the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, returned to the Middle East this week, visiting both Lebanon and Syria, and it’s not difficult to see what he had in mind. With the prospect that the Palestinian-Israeli track will remain stalled, ambitious foreign policy players in Washington are looking to the Syrian-Israeli track for a possible breakthrough. And these days when Americans propose openings toward Syria, they come to Beirut first, as did Kerry, to insist that “anything we do with respect to the peace process in this region will not come at the expense of Lebanon.”

That’s good to hear, but also irrelevant since the Syrians have already managed to largely reimpose their writ in Beirut. And this they’ve done because of many factors, Lebanese divisions chief among them, but also because people like John Kerry have spent years feeding Assad political oxygen by lauding the advantages of engaging Syria, even when Syria was destabilizing its neighbors.

Kerry’s trip will likely yield few tangible results. But the senator already knows that. His primary aim is to register his political stake in a Syrian-Israeli negotiation process, if one eventually resumes.

That may sound familiar. The Syrian regime spent the decade of the ‘90s receiving buoyant Americans in Damascus wanting to talk about peace with Israel. And while it’s true that the Syrians were prepared at one stage to conclude a final settlement, which was rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, it was always essential to their approach that peace should not undermine the Assad regime. Peace had to be on Syrian terms and defined in such a way that it would preserve Syria’s complex security scaffolding propping up the regime.

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Love of the Land: Back to an old game with Syria