CSM column on post-Hariri Lebanon

Today’s CSM has my column on post-Hariri Lebanon. It’s titled: Can real peace take root in Lebanon?
Let’s hope so! There have been some encouraging signs, as noted in the column.
Today, I see that Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Walid Muallem made a statement to reporters promising further “withdrawals” of Syrian forces from central and western Lebanon, back to the eastern part of the country bordering Syria (and very close indeed to downtown Damascus).
In that story I linked to there, by AP’s Albert Aji, the reporter noted that Muallem’s statement use of the term “withdrawal” was the first time that term– rather than “redeployment” has been used by Syria regarding troop movements in Lebanon.
Aji noted, however, that the promised withdrawal would not be complete; and also that Muallem did not specify a timetable for it.
I was somewhat reassured, back at the end of last year, when Syria’s President Asad put Muallem, a wise veteran diplomat, onto the Lebanese “case”. Muallem was Syria’s key diplomatic point-person throughout most of the Israeli-Syrian peace diplomacy that occurred 1991-1996.
Those negotiations were always overshadowed in the media by the much “flashier” (and ultimately also unsuccessful) negotiations on the Israeli-Palestinian track. But everyone in the west who is nowadays so eager to jump on a mindlessly ideological anti-Syrian bandwagon seems to have forgotten that throughout that five-year period in the mid-1990s– and later, right up to Asad Pere’s fated encounter with Prez Clinton, in Geneva, in May 2000– Syria and Israel came literally within a whisker of concluding a final peace accord.
Essentially, the nature of that deal was “full peace and normalization” for “full withdrawal” of Israel’s occupation forces and settlers from the Golan. Rabin and Peres were both prepared to do that. (Read all about the negotiations in my 2000 book on the topic from the U.S. Institute of Peace Press.) But when the swaggeringly over-confident Ehud Barak thought he could get the first half of the “grand bargain” for something significantly less than full withdrawal, the whole deal fell apart.
Syria participated creatively, flexibly, and in good faith in those negotiations (which was more than you could say of Israel under, for example, Netanyahu or Sharon.) And Syria has always, since 2000, expressed its readiness to resume the final-status talks with Israel… Walid Muallem has meanwhile been a quiet, steady voice in the Syrian elite arguing as to why those negotiations have been in the country’s best longterm interest.
… So I was cautiously optimistic when Walid was given (an undefined amount of) responsibility for Syria’s “Lebanon file”, back in November or so. The Syrians had previously made a really disastrous mistake in Lebanon by needlessly ramming the extension of President Lahoud’s term through the Lebanese parliament.
I hope Damascus has figured out how to pursue a wiser course now. Let’s watch and see.