Syria unmasked
28/3/2000

Jerusalem Post:  Ever since Syrian-Israeli negotiations resumed late last year, the conventional wisdom had it that Syria had made a strategic decision to negotiate a peace agreement. A host of sensible reasons emerged in support of this conclusion: President Hafez Assad's deteriorating health, his desire to ease the transition to power for his son, and his desire to regain the Syrian territory lost when he was defense minister.
At the same time, a small group of contrarians - led by Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes - argued that Assad had come to no such conclusion, and was more interested in the peace process than in peace itself. The Geneva summit should shift the weight of the debate decisively in the contrarians' direction, and cause the policies of the United States and Israel to shift accordingly.
In his first public reaction to the breakup of the summit with no announcement of resumed Syrian-Israeli talks, Prime Minister Ehud Barak stated yesterday that "the masks have been removed." Barak is right. Now we know that even the most artful and flexible formulations devised by Israel and the United States are not enough for Syria. We know that Israel's swallowing its pride - in terms of eschewing the direct, top-level negotiations between leaders that preceded every Arab-Israeli agreement - was to no avail. We know that Syria, far from understanding that Israelis need to see the prospect of some concrete benefit in exchange for painful territorial concessions, has only slid backwards into the sewer of Holocaust denial and anti-Israel vitriol.
According to the Assad-has-made-a-strategic-choice theory, all this maneuvering was simply the standard tacking associated with a tough negotiating process. Former Syrian-track negotiator Prof. Itamar Rabinovich, for example, interpreted a post-Shepherdstown speech by Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara threatening to "restore Palestine in its entirety" as a "an attempt, albeit clumsy, to prepare the groundwork for a settlement with Israel." There comes a point when Occam's razor - the principle that simpler explanations should be preferred until new evidence proves otherwise - should be applied. Following the simplest interpretation of its behavior and interests, Syria is attempting to breath just enough life into the peace process to keep itself off the list of pariah states, but not so much life that a peace agreement must actually be concluded.
The wisdom of this strategy was amply demonstrated by the Geneva summit itself. What other leader of a nation on the State Department's infamous "state-supported terrorism" list warrants a special detour by the president of the United States for a private meeting? In terms of human rights, the totalitarian nature of the regime, its support for terrorism, and even aggression against and occupation of neighboring countries, the parallels between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Hafez Assad's Syria are compelling. Yet while Saddam is still attempting to wriggle out from under an unprecedentedly harsh sanctions regime almost a decade after having been ousted from Kuwait, Assad can subjugate Lebanon and wage a proxy war against Israel almost with impunity.
For Assad, a reasonable cost-benefit analysis seems to weigh heavily against concluding a peace agreement with Israel (as opposed to talking about one). Peace could jeopardize Syria's grip on Lebanon, a much more substantial and lucrative territory than the Golan Heights. Peace would inevitably kindle some process of modernization - with all its economic benefits and political risks. Finally, peace would deprive the minority Alawite regime of a great unifying force within heterogeneous Syrian society - enmity of Israel.
The choice between alternative theories of Syrian behavior is not just an academic exercise, but has far-reaching policy implications. If Syria has made the alleged strategic choice for peace, then all that is left is to go through the painstaking and nerve-wracking process of negotiations. If, however, a more reasonable hypothesis is that Syria is happiest dangling the prospect of peace without ever concluding a treaty, than a different set of policies is required.
For the United States, the realization that Syria is not serious about, and may in fact be avoiding peace, should dictate treating Damascus more in line with its actual behavior than with unsubstantiated expectations of future improvements. This means insisting that Syria is not exempt from international law, and can no longer treat Lebanon as an object for plunder and a launching pad for attacks against Israel, regardless of Israel's presence on the Golan Heights.
Israel, for its part, should move up the self-imposed deadline for withdrawal from Lebanon from July. This, coupled with a diplomatic effort to enlist the United Nations to facilitate an Israeli withdrawal through implementation of Security Council Resolution 425, is an appropriate response to the unmasking of Syrian intransigence in Geneva.
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