Syria, Annapolis, and after

The winter weather is cold, bright, and beautiful here in
Damascus.  On Thursday night there was a huge public
firework display, launched from most of the length of the
restaurant-studded road that runs along near the top of the massive
mountain that shlters Damascus from the northwest, Jebel
Kassioun.  The fireworks were celebrating the beginning of the
year during
which Damascus has been designated– by the Arab League– to be the
“Arab Cultural Capital”.

The diplomatic arena that the government here is trying to navigate
is decidedly less sparkling. Back in late November President Bashar al-Asad made a
last-minute decision that
Syria (though not he personally) would participate in the Israeli-Arab
“summit” meeting that President Bush convened in
Annapolis.  That was not an easy decision, coming after many years
of
active US hostility to Syria and seven years of intentional US
stonewalling on Syria’s
repeated requests for the resumption of Syrian-Israeli peace
negotiations.  Indeed, on several occasions over recent years,
when
high-level figures in the Israeli government started discussing
the possibility of resuming the negotiations on this track, those
exploratory feelers were nipped smartly in the bud by the Bush
administration– particularly by Bush’s NSC person running Middle East
affairs, the notorious Elliott Abrams, and by people in VP Dick
Cheney’s office.

Syria’s decision to go to Annapolis was also a tough one because it was
strongly opposed by the Iranians, who have been key allies of Syria
ever since the 1978 Islamic Revolution in Iran. And it was politically
quite controversial at home in Syria, too, given the depth of
anti-American feeling here.

But Asad made the decision to take part, in line with his (and before
him, his father’s) longheld diplomatic position of strong commitment to
seeking a negotiated settlement to the 60-year state of war with
Israel, including crucially Israel’s complete withdrawal from the
portions of sovereign Syria that it has occupied since 1967.

In the 1990s, Syria was a full participant in the Arab-Israeli
peace conference that was convened by the US (and the Soviet Union–
remember them?) in Madrid, in late 1991.  And over the years that
followed, as negotiations continued on the Israeli-Palestinian track
and the Israeli-Jordanian track, so too they also continued on the
Israel-Syria track, where by March of 1996 the two countries had come
close to reaching a final peace agreement. 

At that point, though,
Israeli PM Shimon Peres abruptly withdrew his team from the
negotiations. Netanyahu,
who succeeded Peres in mid-1996 and remained in office till 1999, kept
the Syrian negotiating track nearly completely dead, with the
continuing tacit support of the Clinton administration. 
Negotiations were resumed briefly in 1999, after the arrival of Ehud
Barak as Israel’s new PM.  But Barak was disastrously hamfisted in
his conduct of both domestic and foreign policy.  Regarding Syria,
he tried to pull off a bit of last-minute sleight of hand by tempting
Asad Senior to go to a summit with Clinton in Geneva, spring 2000, who
then revealed only at the last minute that– ha,ha!– the Israelis were
not, after all, prepared to withdraw from the whole of the occupied
Golan, as had been promised within the context of a full-spectrum final
peace package since 1994.

Asad Senior died shortly thereafter, and was replaced by his son, the
present president.  Barak did not last much longer in power after
the Geneva debacle, either, since the ineptness of his domestic
policymaking led to the shredding of his governing coalition in almost
record time even for Israel’s notoriously fractious political
system.  He was replaced by Sharon, and then came Olmert. (Barak
is now back, as Olmert’s notably hawkish Defense Minister. Peres is
Israel’s President, a largely symbolic post.)  It
has been under Olmert, primarily, that ministers at various
times have suggested re-opening the Syrian track.  But Elliott
Abrams has quashed any such move.  He has reportedly argued that
since everyone understands that since any final peace agreement with
Syria will necessarily involve the return of the occupied Golan to
Syria, then “Golan should not be returned to the Asad regime, which
will see this as a huge benefit, but only to a fully democratic Syria.”

International law of course says nothing about the internal governance
mechanisms of participants in international diplomacy, seeing that as a
matter of sovereignty for the countries themselves to determine.
Parties to negotiations can voluntarily make undertakings in this
realm, if they choose, which is what happened with the Helsinki
Agreement of 1974. But to imagine that the character of a regime should
be a precondition to
any negotiations is ludicrous.  That would
paralyze the whole venture of diplomacy,  including the ability to
conclude such important agreements as the arms control agreements
between the US and the Soviets during the Cold War, the agreement
between Britain and China over the peaceful transfer of Hong Kong, etc,
etc.

And since when did Elliott Abrams– of all people!– care about
international law or the
integrity or success of freely negotiated international agreements,
anyway?

… So there we were, at the point when the present Pres. Asad made
the  very sensible decision to have Syria participate  in
last
November’s Arab-Israeli “peace” conference in Annapolis.  Syria’s
delegate there was Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad.

At Madrid, Syria had been represented by the then Foreign Minister,
Farouk Sharaa.  Was the decision to send only Mikdad this time a
bit of a signal that Syria was not quite as deeply committed this time
around?  I don’t know.

But what does seem clearer is that the dominant forces in the Bush
administration did not
really want Syria to be there at all.


The Syrians had agreed to go to Annapolis after being assured by the
Saudis, Egyptians, and others that the Golan issue would be fully on
the agenda.  It was not.  Instead, they were “allowed” by
their hosts to raise it at a sort of “open mic” session held after the
main session at which the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were fully
discussed.

Unlike in Madrid, there was no attempt by the US hosts to prepare
either the terms of Syria’s participation at the conference, or any
follow-up diplomacy.  Instead, all that US officials said at the
time– I think this was Condi– was some thing like “We won’t prevent
the Syrians from raising any issue they want during the
conference.  We won’t be turning the microphones off.”  To
me, that seemed like an offhand or even
downright disrespectful response to the Syrians’ request that the Golan
issue be fully on the agenda.

Nevertheless, the Syrians did go, and by some accounts they were
pleased by some of the small diplomatic grace-notes they encountered
while there.  For a couple of weeks afterwards, Syria’s government
seemed to some observers to be cautiously warming up to US
representatives in the region, and in the same period Gen. David
Petraeus and others made some cautiously appreciative comments about
the contribution Syria was making to trying to stabilize the situation
in Iraq.

But then something happened, and it interesting to speculate what this
might be…  One possibility could, paradoxically enough, have
been the December 3 publication by U.S. Director of National
Intelligence Mike McConell of the very notable recent National
Intelligence Estimate on Iran that stated “:with high confidence”
that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in fall 2003.

The publication of the NIE almost completely wiped away the ability of
the Bush administration to launch a military strike against Iran on the
pretext that this was necessary to abort an Iranian nuclear program.

For several months prior to December 3– and also, though in a slightly
different way, since then– the Bushites had been assiduously preparing
the diplomatic ground for an attack on Iran… Including by trying to
build up an anti-Iranian “coalition” among the Sunni-dominated Arab
countries.  At the time of the preparations for Annapolis, many US
commentators argued it would be good to include Syria in the conference
there, because this would peel Syria away from its longstanding
alliance with Iran.  (Or “flip” Syria, as the rather childish
saying in Washington went.)

But if suddenly there wasn’t any realistic prospect of launching an
attack on Iran, then why– acording to the “flip Syria” thinking–
should Washington bother to make nice to Syria any more?

My view is that this could certainly have been part of the  reason
for the re-emergence of some fairly hard-line rhetoric against Syria in
the utterances of leading administration members including, as I
recall, the President himself.

Another reason, not mutually exclusive from the first, may have been
that, while Elliott Abrams and his allies maintained or stepped up
their harsh opposition to any rapprochement with Asad’s Syria after
Annapolis, Condi seemingly did not want to challenge them on
that.  She seems to have some degree of commitment to making (her
unrealistic version of) the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations move
forward.  But honestly I have seen not a single sign of any real
interest from her or the President in making progress on the
Syrian-Israeli track.  Including, in the design of the agenda at
Annapolis…  And so, the Abrams steamroller just rolled right
forward there..

(Well, there’s a lot more to write from  Syria, but this is all I
have time for now… More later… )