MICHAEL B. OREN
In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama expressed his willingness to "extend a hand" to America's Middle East adversaries, and in a subsequent interview with Al-Arabiya television, reiterated, "[W]hat we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship." The gesture was aimed primarily at Iran, but so far the Syrians have been the principal recipients. American delegations have not yet departed for Teheran, but Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry has already made a high-profile visit to Damascus. The Syrian ambassador in Washington held talks with senior State Department officials and the post of U.S. ambassador to Syria, vacant since 2005, could soon be filled. "We never clenched our fists," Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad declared in a rare interview with the Western press. "There is no substitute for the United States.". America has much to gain from improved relations with Syria. In addition to enhancing Iraqi security, Syria can contribute to Washington's efforts to isolate and perhaps even palliate Iran, and could participate in a U.S.-brokered peace deal with Israel. Syria, too, can benefit, especially from the lifting of American sanctions and aid for its ailing economy. "Seventy percent of our interests are potentially shared and thirty percent are not," Mr. Assad told delegates from the congressionally supported U.S. Institute of Peace. Sen. Kerry agreed, telling reporters that "while we will disagree on some issues for sure, [there] is the possibility of real cooperation on a number of different issues beginning immediately."
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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, shakes hands with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in February 2007. Syria has been a stalwart Iranian ally.
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Still, reaching a consensus even on these mutually advantageous issues may prove difficult, if not elusive, for American policy-makers. The long, tangled history of Syria's relations with the U.S. and its Middle East neighbors makes it clear that engaging with Syria is a risky prospect. And there remains the 30% of interests that Syria does not share with America. More than peace, more than prosperity, preserving Syrian dominance over Lebanon is crucial for Mr. Assad, as is the perpetuation of his totalitarian, minority-rule regime.
In light of these differences, America's newfound openness to Syria raises some pressing concerns. What are the real chances for moderating Syrian behavior and what price is the U.S. willing to pay for that change? And what risks does Mr. Obama take in reaching out to Syria -- could his hand be sullied or slapped or worse?
Historically more of a geographical concept than a country, Syria is said to be the longest continuously settled area on the planet. The apogee of Syrian prominence came in the seventh century, when Damascus ruled much of the Mediterranean world, but Muslim power soon passed to Baghdad. Thereafter, Syria served as a battlefield for warring Mongols and Mamlukes, crusaders and Saracens, until it was reduced to an Ottoman backwater. Nevertheless, situated at a continental crossroads, Syria held the keys to controlling the Middle East.
Less than a month after Allied troops entered Damascus in 1918, the Turks sued for an armistice. By that time, the British and the French had secretly divided up the region and, after World War I, received League of Nations mandates to govern it. Syria went to France, which proceeded to provide it with semidemocratic institutions but also to partition it into another, largely Maronite country, called Lebanon.
Syria's relationship with the U.S. began in the 19th century, when American missionaries established schools throughout the area. In 1868, several Civil War veterans tried and failed to oust the Ottomans from Syria; 50 years later, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed his support for Syria's freedom. But it was not until 1946, when the French army bloodily suppressed a Syrian nationalist revolt, that the U.S. successfully intervened. President Harry Truman warned French leader Charles de Gaulle of severe repercussions if the assault persisted. Mr. de Gaulle backed down, and Syria gained its sovereignty.
Syria could not, however, maintain many of the institutions created by the French and, over the next 20 years, the country was convulsed by almost as many coups. The Cold War, meanwhile, came to the Middle East, and the U.S. -- through the Central Intelligence Agency -- backed pro-Western Syrian officers in their struggles with their Soviet-supported rivals. The entire region was fractured between Arab states aligned with Washington or Moscow, with Syria tottering in between. In Syria, the Soviets won. By 1958, Syria had joined Russia's ally Egypt in a United Arab Republic that threatened Western-leaning governments in the region. The U.S. responded by landing troops in Lebanon that same year, for the first time placing it on a collision course with Damascus.
Five years later, officers belonging to the radical socialist Baath (Renaissance) party seized power. Ideologically insecure and members of a minority despised by Syrian Sunnis, the Baathists girded their credibility by sponsoring terror attacks against their pro-Western neighbors. Some of those attacks helped ignite the 1967 Six-Day War. Many Arabs never forgave Syria for triggering that conflict and then sitting back while Egypt and Jordan suffered Israel's wrath. Indeed, Israeli troops only captured the Golan Heights from Syria as an afterthought. And though the U.S. was not closely allied with Israel, Syria reacted by severing diplomatic ties with Washington.
U.S.-Syrian relations continued to deteriorate as Damascus drew deeper into Moscow's sphere and became home to numerous terrorist cells -- Palestinian as well as German, Japanese, Pakistani, Kurdish and Tamil. Tellingly, Syria was the first country to be listed on the State Department's roster of terrorist-sponsoring states. The Syrian army, meanwhile, invaded Jordan in September 1970 and attacked Israel three years later. In spite of this aggression, the U.S. sought a means of reopening channels to Damascus. Following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shuttled repeatedly between Israel and Syria in an attempt to separate their forces. He succeeded, but subsequent efforts to progress toward a permanent peace arrangement were thwarted by Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad.
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EPA
Syria has been accused of planting the bomb that killed Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.
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Relations between the U.S. and Syria were evincing identifiable patterns. By seeking legitimacy through radical militarism and terror, Syrian leaders placed themselves at odds with the U.S. and its allies. Syria was willing to maintain ties with Washington and engage in lengthy talks, but not to disavow those policies deemed vital to the regime's survival. A no less persistent pattern would emerge in the mid-1970s, with Syria's occupation of Lebanon.
In fact, Syrians had never made peace with the partitioning of Lebanon. The Syrians saw control over Lebanon's lucrative resorts, its robust free markets and unlimited access to the West as the cure-all for their moribund socialist economy. Syria's chance to restore its integrity and solvency came with the Lebanese civil war in 1976. Determined never to allow one of the warring factions to dominate Lebanon, the Syrians interceded first against the prevailing Palestinian forces, crushing them, and then turned on the Christian militias when they became too powerful. Thereafter, Syria allied with various groups to keep out foreign invaders -- with the Palestinians against the Israelis in 1982, and with the Druze and the Shiites against the U.S. in 1983. The need to preserve their primacy in Lebanon led the Syrians to support a then little-known Shiite militia, Hezbollah. The secular Baathists' partnership with the Islamist Hezbollah was never purely ideological, but represented a practical means for maintaining Syria's Lebanese lifeline.
America's revulsion to Syria's support for terror and meddling in Lebanon was further compounded by Syria's abysmal human rights record. Under emergency regulations enacted in 1963, the Baathist regime banned all dissent in the country, severely restricted travel and imprisoned and tortured thousands. Organizations such as Freedom House, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International consistently list Syria among the world's most repressive societies. The most egregious of the government's crimes against its own people occurred in February 1982, when tanks opened fire on Muslim Brotherhood members in the western city of al-Hama, killing as many as 25,000 civilians.
Syria's policies did not deter the U.S. from seeking improved relations. Much like the imperial rulers of antiquity, American decision-makers acknowledged Syria's centrality to the Middle East and its prestige as a preeminent Arab power. Damascus became a perennial destination for U.S. Secretaries of State -- Warren Christopher stopped there more than 20 times -- who braved marathon discussions and multiple tea servings, without a bathroom break, with Mr. Assad. These demarches proved successful in persuading the Syrians to join the anti-Saddam coalition in 1991 and to send their foreign minister, Farouk al-Shara, to the subsequent peace conference in Madrid. But many hundreds of hours of deliberations could not move Mr. Assad to make genuine peace with Israel -- even in exchange for most of the Golan -- or to alter significantly any of his noxious policies.
Further vexing for Washington, Syria had begun to forge strategic ties with Tehran, based on common opposition to the West and its Arab allies. By the time of Mr. Assad's death in June 2000, and the anticipated ascent of his no-less truculent son, Basil, the U.S.-Syrian relationship had reached a seemingly irredeemable nadir.
Hopes were revived when Basil was killed in 1994, ostensibly in a car crash but quite possibly by assassination, and replaced by his younger brother, Bashar. A London-trained ophthalmologist and self-proclaimed aficionado of the Internet and the West, Bashar was heralded as the vanguard of Syrian modernization and of improved ties with the U.S. His rise was accompanied by a marked enhancement of civil rights in Syria and a sense of greater liberty for Lebanon. But the so-called Damascus Spring quickly gave way to a discontented winter. Political freedoms were again stripped and Lebanon restored to its subservience. The Jews, Mr. Assad told the Pope, "betrayed Jesus, and tortured him." Instead of abjuring terror, Mr. Assad embraced the Damascus headquarters of Hamas, responsible for dozens of suicide bombings in Israel and for undermining the American-backed Palestinian Authority. Instead of turning to the West, Mr. Assad fortified the alliance with Iran.
The situation could have scarcely worsened when, in March 2003, America invaded Iraq. Though Syria displayed magnanimity in sheltering more than one million Iraqi refugees, its border remained porous to anti-coalition insurgents. Syrian-U.S. relations appeared to go into a freefall. Syria was widely accused of planting the one-ton bomb that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 21 others in February 2005, an attack that remains the subject of a massive U.N. investigation. Mr. Assad went on to back the Hezbollah ambush that ignited the Lebanon War of July 2006. He supported Hamas's bloody overthrow of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza the following June and the firing of thousands of Qassam rockets into Israel that culminated in the most recent Gaza crisis.
Of all these actions, none was more destabilizing -- and potentially cataclysmic -- than Syria's attempt, aided by North Korea but ultimately foiled by Israel, to secretly attain nuclear capabilities. Throughout, Syria has remained a stalwart Iranian ally, resisting inter-Arab efforts to formulate united platforms on regional issues. The U.S., for its part, withdrew its ambassador from Damascus and imposed sanctions against Syrian individuals and companies suspected of abetting insurgents.
This is the legacy of radicalism, subversion and ruthlessness with which President Obama must grapple as he sets out to place America's relations with Syria on fresh footing. Not all the auguries bode ill. Syria has recently taken measures to reduce the number of armed infiltrators crossing its border into Iraq and Mr. Assad, after meeting with a congressional delegation, called for a "constructive dialogue between Syria and [the] United States based on mutual respect and common interest." Damascus has for the first time established a diplomatic presence in Beirut.
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Associated Press
An Israeli tank in Golan Heights, 1970. Israel captured the area from Syria.
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Most encouraging, perhaps, are reports about strains in the Syrian-Iranian alignment. The same Syria that crushed the Palestinian and Christian forces that once threatened its Lebanese hegemony can hardly tolerate the Hezbollah takeover of Lebanon achieved with Iranian support. There may be leeway for Syrian-American cooperation in combating the Iranian-Hezbollah front. In addition, the recent rapprochement between Syria and Turkey, and the willingness of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to mediate between Syria and Israel, may presage a new, northern-looking orientation in Syrian foreign policy.
Such positive signs, though undoubtedly welcome, should not cloud the question of whether American-Syrian relations can truly improve. Though Syria has indeed worked to supervise its border with Iraq, the U.S. Army felt compelled to strike an insurgents' base four miles inside Syria as recently as last October. The Assad regime has repeatedly refused to sever its ties with Hamas and other Damascus-based terrorists and has erected missile batteries on the site of the nuclear facility bombed by Israel. In addition, Syria suspended talks with Israel following the Gaza crisis and seems in no rush to renew them. Syria opened an embassy in Beirut, but it also continues to impede the investigation into Mr. Hariri's murder. And whatever tensions Hezbollah's success may have brought to the Syrian-Iranian alliance, they have yet to be publicly displayed.
Based on Syria's past and its recent behavior, there seem scant grounds for optimism regarding a breakthrough. Even if such conditions existed, the question would remain whether America should pay the price. Clearly, reconciliation with Syria is incompatible with a free and independent Lebanon and with a Damascus that still hosts Hamas's headquarters. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive how the U.S. might simultaneously restore its relations with Syria before reconciling with Iran. Though administration officials have indicated an interest in mollifying Syria as a means of isolating Iran, the Iranians are unlikely to sit passively while the U.S. tries to deprive them of their greatest Arab asset -- Syria -- and to foster peace between it and Israel. Rather than submit to such seclusion, Iran could activate Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel or arrange an "accident" for Bashar al-Assad similar to the one that killed his brother.
Such obstacles should not, however, deter the Obama administration from negotiating with Damascus and seeking to achieve a workable partnership. If for no other reason than to exhaust all possible diplomatic options, the U.S. should try its utmost to avoid confrontation and promote dialogue. Every effort should be made to pry Syria from Iran's grasp. At the same time, however, the U.S. should be cognizant that these overtures carry risks. The Syrians should be offered carrots -- economic aid, the lifting of sanctions, even-handed mediation for peace -- but also shown the sticks. The same hand that America extends in friendship should be ready to recoil, parry a blow or return one.
—Simone Gold, Seth Robinson and Alissa Gordon contributed to the research for this article.
Michael B. Oren, a professor at Georgetown University and a distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is the author of "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present."
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