The Next Hurrah : : Lebanese Government Resigns; Real Story is Syria
From the Next Hurrah's archives, a brief rundown of happenings in Damascus following the Hariri assassination:
It’s hard to imagine that the pro-Syrian government would step down from power without the assent of their Syrian backers. Syrian views Lebanon as a buffer between it and Israel, and they have been the biggest power brokers in internal Lebanese politics since they occupied large swaths of the country in 1976. Lacking the buffer of the Golan Heights, the ability to send troops from the north against an Israeli flank provides some of the deterrent Syria lost when it lost control of the Golan Heights in 1967 during the Six Day War. But control of Lebanon, once imposed by a force of over 40,000 troops, is coming at a greater cost to Syria, and it appears that Bashar Assad is calculating those costs as not in Syria’s self-interest. The real question may become whether Assad can maintain his hold on power, or whether other forces will rise up to determine a different set of priorities for Syria’s self-interest.
It’s hard to imagine that the pro-Syrian government would step down from power without the assent of their Syrian backers. Syrian views Lebanon as a buffer between it and Israel, and they have been the biggest power brokers in internal Lebanese politics since they occupied large swaths of the country in 1976. Lacking the buffer of the Golan Heights, the ability to send troops from the north against an Israeli flank provides some of the deterrent Syria lost when it lost control of the Golan Heights in 1967 during the Six Day War. But control of Lebanon, once imposed by a force of over 40,000 troops, is coming at a greater cost to Syria, and it appears that Bashar Assad is calculating those costs as not in Syria’s self-interest. The real question may become whether Assad can maintain his hold on power, or whether other forces will rise up to determine a different set of priorities for Syria’s self-interest.
posted by Management at 2:15 PM
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Lebanese Government Resigns; Real Story is Syria
By DHinMI
The news reports are already comparing today’s resignation amid street protests of Lebanon’s pro-Syrian Prime Minister with the Orange revolution that brought Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko into power. Undoubtedly the popular revulsion over the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri is a major factor in the decision of the ruling coalition to step down from power. But the real story in Lebanon today is Syria.
It’s hard to imagine that the pro-Syrian government would step down from power without the assent of their Syrian backers. Syrian views Lebanon as a buffer between it and Israel, and they have been the biggest power brokers in internal Lebanese politics since they occupied large swaths of the country in 1976. Lacking the buffer of the Golan Heights, the ability to send troops from the north against an Israeli flank provides some of the deterrent Syria lost when it lost control of the Golan Heights in 1967 during the Six Day War. But control of Lebanon, once imposed by a force of over 40,000 troops, is coming at a greater cost to Syria, and it appears that Bashar Assad is calculating those costs as not in Syria’s self-interest. The real question may become whether Assad can maintain his hold on power, or whether other forces will rise up to determine a different set of priorities for Syria’s self-interest.
Ever since the U.S.-led forces destroyed Saddam’s military and occupied all of Iraq, Syria has felt under threat from the U.S. But where the rhetoric of the Bush administration has gotten more and more bellicose, Assad has tended toward low-key responses or even quiet cooperation, even amid indications that Assad has trouble exercising tight control of his intelligence services, and possibly the military and control of his borders. We see that pattern playing out again in the last week.
Syria and it’s clients in Lebanon have been under relentless pressure. The U.S. is trying hard to get the Europeans to designate Hezbollah, which holds seats in the Lebanese Parliament, a terrorist organization. Part of the U.S. argument for designating Hezbollah a terrorist organization is to marginalize it so that it can’t disrupt diplomacy beyond the borders of Lebanon; Israeli and American officials claim that new Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas sees Hezbollah as an impediment to a peace agreement between the Palestinians and Israelis. (On a topic surely related, Hezbollah is rumored to be planning the assassination of Abbas.) Over the weekend a U.S. State Department official in Beirut called for the immediate withdrawal of all Syrian troops from Lebanon , not just to positions closer to the Border as Syria had announced on Thursday. Assad is reportedly in the doghouse of his European patron Jacques Chirac for failing to live up to his promises of reform in Lebanon and because of suspicions that Syria was involved in killing Chirac’s friend Hariri. The Syrian foreign minister traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he surely got an earful from the Saudis, as Hariri was a Saudi citizen with close ties to the Saudi royal family. And even U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan got into the act. In an interview with the Saudi satellite network Al Arabiya, he added his voice to those calling on Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.
The Syrian reaction to all these pressures was the typical indeterminate number of steps forward and backward. According to Al Arabiya, Syrian intelligence officials threatened their Beirut staff after the Annan interview was aired, and a Syrian Newspaper controlled by the government accused Al Arabiya of treason. But Syria also appears to have conducted the capture and back-door extradition of Saddam Hussein’s half-brother to the Iraqi government. Yesterday the Jerusalem Post reported that last week teams of negotiators from Syria, Jordan and Israel held secret peace talks in Jordan. And today, the Syrians and Jordanians signed a number of accords on trade, diplomatic cooperation, and most significantly, one resolving a long-standing border disagreement.
While he may not have a tight rein on his intelligence service or the traffic of his country’s border with Iraq, it seems clear that Assad knows enough to at least acknowledge that he’s being threatened by the U.S. and possibly Israel, and that he should at least indicate that he would like to see a more amicable resolution to the various conflicts Syria has with it’s neighbors and the United States. Last week he spoke about his country’s situation to an Italian newspaper:
The U.S. used Hariri’s assassination to put more pressures on Syria, and it warned to support imposing international sanctions on Damascus.
"Washington has imposed sanctions on us and isolated us in the past, but each time the circle hasn't closed around us," Assad said. "If, however, you ask me if I'm expecting an armed attack (from the United States), well I've seen it coming since the end of the war in Iraq. It's from then that tensions have been rising," he added.
Asked if a "settling of scores" was imminent, Assad said: "I don't think so, for now it's just skirmishing. True, the White House language, if looked at in detail, leads one to expect a campaign similar to the one that led up to attack on Iraq."
"Will we be the next target of Israel and the White House? All of this has been written for a long time. Iraq was the first phase, then it will be Iran's and Syria's turn. But it's not a given that things will go that way."[Emphasis added]
The difference between Assad’s rhetoric and that of Saddam Hussein in the months leading up to the Iraq war couldn’t be more stark. Saddam essentially said “bring it on,” even while he was generally cooperating with the international inspectors from the IAEA and UNSCOM. Saddam’s words were bellicose, but his actions were somewhat cooperative, as if he were banking on the U.S. to conclude that his bellicosity was for a domestic and Arab audience, and that allowing the inspectors in to look around would keep the U.S. from attacking him. In contrast, Assad seems to be trying to keep his words and his actions fairly consistent, and not directed toward confrontation with either the U.S. or Israel. Whether either party is inclined to conclude that he really doesn’t war is unknown, as is Assad’s ability to control his intelligence agencies or the groups he patronizes, such as Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.
But whatever happens next in Lebanon, it would be a mistake to view it only through the lens of some kind of Middle Eastern “people power,” a Cedar Revolution as soft and peaceful as the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 or the Orange Revolution of 2004. There may be revolutionary elements to what’s happening in Lebanon today, but as much as anything, what happened today was a signal that Syria plans to scale back it’s direct control over Lebanon, a possible precursor to a wider commitment to getting in on the peacemaking with Israel…before it’s too late.
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