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Enemy of our Enemy
Secular Syria's struggle with radical Islam should make it our ally, not our antagonist.
By Neil Clark
It's a middle eastern country where Christian celebrations are official state holidays and civil servants are allowed to take Sunday morning off to go to church, even though Sunday is a working day. A place where women can smoke and wear make-up and are active in public life. A country implacably opposed to Islamic fundamentalism and al-Qaeda and whose security forces helped foil a terrorist attack on the US embassy.
No, not Israel. Syria.
The list of the outgoing Bush administration's foreign-policy errors is long, but not least among them is the way in which it has treated Syria - in many ways a natural ally - as a pariah.
Despite having a secular government led by a London-trained ophthalmologist who has a British-born wife, Syria was added to the Axis of Evil by Undersecretary of State John Bolton in May 2002. In 2003, Washington passed the Syria Accountability Act, which imposed economic sanctions on Damascus. And according to President Bush, Syria poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy” of the United States.
Then to add injury – and death – to insult, in October American forces launched an attack from Iraq on the Syrian village of Al-Sukkiraya. Eight people were killed. The US claimed to have been targeting the network of al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq, but the Syrian government denounced the strike as “criminal and terrorist aggression.”
How can we account for the United States's extraordinary hostility to a country that has never threatened it? The answer is the baleful influence of our old friends the neocons.
Nothing better illustrates the fundamental deceit that underpins neoconservatism. If defeating radical Islam really were the name of the game, as Podhoretz, Feith, Wolfowitz, and company insist, then the US would surely have been building bridges with Damascus instead of treating it as an outcast. For Syria's problem with Islamic militancy predates America's.
Since the Ba'athist takeover in 1963, the Syrian regime has come under pressure from radical Islamists who dislike its socialistic, secularist policies, its empowerment of women, and the dominance of the Alawites, a group previously considered the underclass in the country. In 1973, there were violent demonstrations against planned changes in the constitution that proposed allowing non-Muslims to be head of state. Extremists assassinated prominent members of the regime and the Alawite sect.
Then in 1979 came the bloody massacre of 83 cadets at the military academy in Aleppo, followed by terrorist attacks in other Syrian cities. Three years later, there was a violent Islamic uprising in the town of Hama, in which Ba'athists were attacked and murdered. The government's response was brutal: up to 30,000 people were killed as the army, under President Hafez al-Assad's brother, attempted to restore order.
The threat that radical Islamists pose to the secular regime has receded since the early 1980s, but it has not gone away. The car bombing of a Shia shrine by jihadists in Damascus in September, which killed 17 people, was the third such attack this year.
I first visited Syria in 1999, during the last year of the 29-year rule of Assad pere. With its state-owned self-service cafeterias, socialist style public buildings, and East German-made trains, the country reminded me more of the communist states in Eastern Europle I had seen in the 1980s than a predominantly Islamic Middle Eastern state.
While the Syrians I met could not have been friendlier or more hospitable, there was no disguising the totalitarian nature of the regime. Pictures of Hafez al-Assad hung everywhere. An extraordinary number of people wore military uniforms, including in the universities I visited: a state of emergency has existed since the Ba'athists came to power.
If that all sounds pretty grim, there is, thankfully, another side to the story. The Ba'athists have undoubtedly brought stability to a country divided along religious and tribal lines, as well as considerable economic and social progress. In my travels in Syria, I did not see the abject poverty that exists in most other countries in the region. The government's secularism means that most members of religious minorities, such as the Alawites, Druze, Christians, and Isma'ilis, support the regime. “We supprt the government here because if it was toppled the Islamists would rule,” a young female academic at the University of Latakia told me. The parallels with neighboring Iraq – and the ethnic and religious strife that engulfed the country when the secular Ba'athist regime was toppled there – are all too obivous.
Assad, the wily old “Lion of Damascus,” died in June 2000. Since then, under the leadership of his shy, soft-spoken son, Bashar, hundreds of political prisonders have been released and some media restrictions have been lifted. Syria may still be a long way from a model Jeffersonian democracy, but it's certainly less totalitarian society than it was a decade ago. Yet Washington's attutide toward the Arab republic has only hardened.
Syria was castigated for opposing the illegal invasion of Iraq, even though the war was opposed by almost all Syrians. Then when Saddam's WMD couldn't be found, neocons advanced the ludicrous fiction that Iraq's stockpile had been moved to Syria just prior to the invasion.
Syria's military presence in neighboring Lebanon came in for renewed attack when Lebanese President Rafik Hariri was assassinated in Beirut in February 2005. The neocons lost little time pointing the finger of blame at Damascus, even though the political upheaval caused by the killing was to Syria's great detriment.
The country's great crime in the neocons' eyes is not its poor human right record – human right in “friendly” countries such as Jordan and Egypt do not seem to concern them unduly – nor its involvement in Lebanon. No, they resent Syria for its refusal to accept US-Israeli hegemony in the region and for its support of the Palestinians.
When Washington's hawks accuse Syria of being a “destabilizing” force, they are referring to Syria's patronage of both Hamas, the winners of the 2006 elections in Palestine, and Hezbollah, the paramilitary organization formed to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1962. Both groups are regarded as terrorist organizations for their attacks on Israeli civilians and security forces, and their violent acts should be condemned. But the US makes a mistake when it conflates Damascus's support for groups it views as resisting a regional hegemon with the sponsorship of Islamic terrorism generally – much less Islamic terror directed against America.
Yet ironically, while neocons continue to foam at the mouth whenever Syria is mentioned, Israel – the country they most admire in the region – is itself adopting a more pragmatic approach to its neighbor. In May, it was announced that Israel and Syria were engaged in indirect negotiations, carried out through Turkish mediators, for a comprehensive peace treaty. Realists in Tel Aviv accept that there can be no lasting peace in the region without some arrangement with Syria – a peace deal that could involve Israel handing back the Golan Heights, which they have held since 1967, and making concessions on Palestine in return for Syrian recognition of Israel and a commitment to use their influence to rein in Hezbollah and Hamas.
And while Syria continues to be lambasted by laptop bombardiers in Washington, it's been receiving plaudits from those closer to the action. Late last year, then top American commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus praised Syria for taking steps to reduce the flow of foreign fighters through its borders with Iraq.
Moreover, neocon attempts to isolate Syria are proving increasingly unsuccessful. In July, President Assad made a high-profile visit to France, which in 2005 had cut off diplomatic relations with Syria. Six weeks later, Nicolas Sarkozy, the man whose elevation to the Champs-Elysees the neocons hoped would reposition French foreign policy to their liking, became the first Western head of state to visit Damascus in five years. And in October, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al-Muallen flew to London to meet in his British counterpart, David Millband, for talks.
It was during this visit that the US attack on Syria took place, leading some analysts to claim that the raid was designed to counter diplomatic moves to bring Syria in from the cold: “a final vengeful lunge against a country that others are now wooing but which still attracts profound hostility in Washington,” as the Guardian's Middle East editor, Ian Black, put it.
But while diplomatic approaches to Damascus are welcome, it is important that the West engages with Syria for the right reasons. Renewing relations merely to isolate Iran, its longstanding ally, would only make an attack on Tehran – and a potentially catastrophic Middle East conflict – more likely. It is in America's interest to build a new, positive relationship with Damascus for its own sake: Syria has done the US no harm and has the same desire to counter Islamic fundamentalism.
During the recent presidential elections we heard a lot from the Obama camp about the need for change. A visit from the new US president to Damascus and a return invitation to Bashar al-Assad to visit Washington, together with the repeal of the Syria Accountability Act and the adoption of a new, less aggressive tone toward Syria, would go some way to showing that the new administration really does want to make a clean break from the disastrous foreign policies of George W. Bush.
http://www.amconmag.com/pdfissue.htm...8dec01&page=20
Secular Syria's struggle with radical Islam should make it our ally, not our antagonist.
By Neil Clark
It's a middle eastern country where Christian celebrations are official state holidays and civil servants are allowed to take Sunday morning off to go to church, even though Sunday is a working day. A place where women can smoke and wear make-up and are active in public life. A country implacably opposed to Islamic fundamentalism and al-Qaeda and whose security forces helped foil a terrorist attack on the US embassy.
No, not Israel. Syria.
The list of the outgoing Bush administration's foreign-policy errors is long, but not least among them is the way in which it has treated Syria - in many ways a natural ally - as a pariah.
Despite having a secular government led by a London-trained ophthalmologist who has a British-born wife, Syria was added to the Axis of Evil by Undersecretary of State John Bolton in May 2002. In 2003, Washington passed the Syria Accountability Act, which imposed economic sanctions on Damascus. And according to President Bush, Syria poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy” of the United States.
Then to add injury – and death – to insult, in October American forces launched an attack from Iraq on the Syrian village of Al-Sukkiraya. Eight people were killed. The US claimed to have been targeting the network of al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq, but the Syrian government denounced the strike as “criminal and terrorist aggression.”
How can we account for the United States's extraordinary hostility to a country that has never threatened it? The answer is the baleful influence of our old friends the neocons.
Nothing better illustrates the fundamental deceit that underpins neoconservatism. If defeating radical Islam really were the name of the game, as Podhoretz, Feith, Wolfowitz, and company insist, then the US would surely have been building bridges with Damascus instead of treating it as an outcast. For Syria's problem with Islamic militancy predates America's.
Since the Ba'athist takeover in 1963, the Syrian regime has come under pressure from radical Islamists who dislike its socialistic, secularist policies, its empowerment of women, and the dominance of the Alawites, a group previously considered the underclass in the country. In 1973, there were violent demonstrations against planned changes in the constitution that proposed allowing non-Muslims to be head of state. Extremists assassinated prominent members of the regime and the Alawite sect.
Then in 1979 came the bloody massacre of 83 cadets at the military academy in Aleppo, followed by terrorist attacks in other Syrian cities. Three years later, there was a violent Islamic uprising in the town of Hama, in which Ba'athists were attacked and murdered. The government's response was brutal: up to 30,000 people were killed as the army, under President Hafez al-Assad's brother, attempted to restore order.
The threat that radical Islamists pose to the secular regime has receded since the early 1980s, but it has not gone away. The car bombing of a Shia shrine by jihadists in Damascus in September, which killed 17 people, was the third such attack this year.
I first visited Syria in 1999, during the last year of the 29-year rule of Assad pere. With its state-owned self-service cafeterias, socialist style public buildings, and East German-made trains, the country reminded me more of the communist states in Eastern Europle I had seen in the 1980s than a predominantly Islamic Middle Eastern state.
While the Syrians I met could not have been friendlier or more hospitable, there was no disguising the totalitarian nature of the regime. Pictures of Hafez al-Assad hung everywhere. An extraordinary number of people wore military uniforms, including in the universities I visited: a state of emergency has existed since the Ba'athists came to power.
If that all sounds pretty grim, there is, thankfully, another side to the story. The Ba'athists have undoubtedly brought stability to a country divided along religious and tribal lines, as well as considerable economic and social progress. In my travels in Syria, I did not see the abject poverty that exists in most other countries in the region. The government's secularism means that most members of religious minorities, such as the Alawites, Druze, Christians, and Isma'ilis, support the regime. “We supprt the government here because if it was toppled the Islamists would rule,” a young female academic at the University of Latakia told me. The parallels with neighboring Iraq – and the ethnic and religious strife that engulfed the country when the secular Ba'athist regime was toppled there – are all too obivous.
Assad, the wily old “Lion of Damascus,” died in June 2000. Since then, under the leadership of his shy, soft-spoken son, Bashar, hundreds of political prisonders have been released and some media restrictions have been lifted. Syria may still be a long way from a model Jeffersonian democracy, but it's certainly less totalitarian society than it was a decade ago. Yet Washington's attutide toward the Arab republic has only hardened.
Syria was castigated for opposing the illegal invasion of Iraq, even though the war was opposed by almost all Syrians. Then when Saddam's WMD couldn't be found, neocons advanced the ludicrous fiction that Iraq's stockpile had been moved to Syria just prior to the invasion.
Syria's military presence in neighboring Lebanon came in for renewed attack when Lebanese President Rafik Hariri was assassinated in Beirut in February 2005. The neocons lost little time pointing the finger of blame at Damascus, even though the political upheaval caused by the killing was to Syria's great detriment.
The country's great crime in the neocons' eyes is not its poor human right record – human right in “friendly” countries such as Jordan and Egypt do not seem to concern them unduly – nor its involvement in Lebanon. No, they resent Syria for its refusal to accept US-Israeli hegemony in the region and for its support of the Palestinians.
When Washington's hawks accuse Syria of being a “destabilizing” force, they are referring to Syria's patronage of both Hamas, the winners of the 2006 elections in Palestine, and Hezbollah, the paramilitary organization formed to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1962. Both groups are regarded as terrorist organizations for their attacks on Israeli civilians and security forces, and their violent acts should be condemned. But the US makes a mistake when it conflates Damascus's support for groups it views as resisting a regional hegemon with the sponsorship of Islamic terrorism generally – much less Islamic terror directed against America.
Yet ironically, while neocons continue to foam at the mouth whenever Syria is mentioned, Israel – the country they most admire in the region – is itself adopting a more pragmatic approach to its neighbor. In May, it was announced that Israel and Syria were engaged in indirect negotiations, carried out through Turkish mediators, for a comprehensive peace treaty. Realists in Tel Aviv accept that there can be no lasting peace in the region without some arrangement with Syria – a peace deal that could involve Israel handing back the Golan Heights, which they have held since 1967, and making concessions on Palestine in return for Syrian recognition of Israel and a commitment to use their influence to rein in Hezbollah and Hamas.
And while Syria continues to be lambasted by laptop bombardiers in Washington, it's been receiving plaudits from those closer to the action. Late last year, then top American commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus praised Syria for taking steps to reduce the flow of foreign fighters through its borders with Iraq.
Moreover, neocon attempts to isolate Syria are proving increasingly unsuccessful. In July, President Assad made a high-profile visit to France, which in 2005 had cut off diplomatic relations with Syria. Six weeks later, Nicolas Sarkozy, the man whose elevation to the Champs-Elysees the neocons hoped would reposition French foreign policy to their liking, became the first Western head of state to visit Damascus in five years. And in October, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al-Muallen flew to London to meet in his British counterpart, David Millband, for talks.
It was during this visit that the US attack on Syria took place, leading some analysts to claim that the raid was designed to counter diplomatic moves to bring Syria in from the cold: “a final vengeful lunge against a country that others are now wooing but which still attracts profound hostility in Washington,” as the Guardian's Middle East editor, Ian Black, put it.
But while diplomatic approaches to Damascus are welcome, it is important that the West engages with Syria for the right reasons. Renewing relations merely to isolate Iran, its longstanding ally, would only make an attack on Tehran – and a potentially catastrophic Middle East conflict – more likely. It is in America's interest to build a new, positive relationship with Damascus for its own sake: Syria has done the US no harm and has the same desire to counter Islamic fundamentalism.
During the recent presidential elections we heard a lot from the Obama camp about the need for change. A visit from the new US president to Damascus and a return invitation to Bashar al-Assad to visit Washington, together with the repeal of the Syria Accountability Act and the adoption of a new, less aggressive tone toward Syria, would go some way to showing that the new administration really does want to make a clean break from the disastrous foreign policies of George W. Bush.
http://www.amconmag.com/pdfissue.htm...8dec01&page=20