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Taking Syria seriously
FOUR years ago, American neoconservatives who dreamed of creating a "new Middle East" proclaimed that the road to Damascus ran through Baghdad. Now, as the US struggles to prevent the chaos in Iraq from engulfing the Middle East, it turns out that the hard road out of Baghdad runs through Damascus.
- PUBLISHED: Wed 27 Dec 2006, 8:05 AM UPDATED: Sat 4 Apr 2015, 5:40 PM
The Iraq Study Group is right to urge the White House to enlist Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's help in mitigating the disaster. The US and Syria share a common interest in containing Iraq's militant Sunnis. However, the potential value of dialogue with Damascus goes far beyond Iraq. Negotiations with Syria offer the US a chance not only to minimise the damage from its failure in Iraq, but also to achieve real successes elsewhere in the Middle East, perhaps even a start to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The US opportunity arises from the fact that the preeminent strategic goal of the Syrian regime is survival. For 40 years, the Sunni Muslims who compose 75 per cent of the Syrian population have been governed by an autocracy run by Syria's tiny minority of secular Alawis, considered apostates by most Muslims. Unsurprisingly, many Sunnis have violently rejected Alawite rule. Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president, battled serious revolts by the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, finally suppressing it in the 1982 battle for the conservative city of Hama that left tens of thousands dead. Largely dormant for the next two decades, Syrian Islamism has undergone a resurgence, and Islamist militants again have the Alawite regime in their sights. The Islamist wave sweeping through the Arab Middle East buffets Syria, and Bashar's foremost goal is to ride it out.
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The Syrian regime's long struggle with its own Sunni Islamists encouraged it to contain their brethren who now dominate much of central Iraq. Indeed, while Damascus has tried to ride popular sentiment by praising Iraqi resistance, it has zealously suppressed material aid to the Iraqi insurgency. Although the Iraq report urges Syria to “stem the flow of funding, insurgents, and terrorists in and out of Iraq,” veterans of the Iraqi insurgency report that Syria's ubiquitous security services have worked to arrest suspected guerrillas since 2004, generally succeeding in sealing the border with Iraq since 2005. Syrian leaders now fear the Sunni jihadists in Iraq more than they fear the US. Syria and the US thus have good reason to work together against those jihadists.
Indeed, while Syria may be unable to stem Iraq's slide into civil war, it has a powerful incentive to prevent that civil war from spreading. The sectarian fault lines that consume Iraq stretch into Syria, too, and Syria has good reason to prevent those fault lines from fracturing further.
While ruthless in stamping out internal Sunni sedition, the regime also staves off Islamist opponents with carrots. Damascus's ties to Islamist groups in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iran are designed to deflect potential support for Islamism at home. Political Islam has gained popularity elsewhere in the Arab world by opposing pro-US autocracies perceived to be selling out their nations' honor in exchange for Washington's favour.
Bashar's opportunistic alliances with foreign Islamists, however, do not grant him reliable long-term security against Islamists in Syria. Damascus's public support for foreign Islamists only strengthens political Islam in general, swelling the ranks of Syrian Islamists who will eventually turn their sights closer to home. Moreover, as Iraq's civil war throws the divide between Shia and Sunni Muslims into sharp and bloody relief, Syria's alliances with the Shias in Hezbollah and Iran are likely to become a liability rather than an asset.
In addition to bolstering Bashar's bold stand against the US, Iran helps stabilise Syrian society by strengthening the economy. Iranian investment and aid is sorely needed in a country deprived of its superpower patron 15 years ago and facing isolation from the West ever since. In the long run, however, Iran's economic support will likewise be insufficient to prop up Syria's Alawi regime. Grinding poverty leaves ordinary Syrians with good reason to dream of revolutionary social change, and an unemployment rate languishing near 20 per cent leaves plenty of free time to plot revolution.
In the long term, stability of the Bashar regime depends on its ability to win the negotiated return of the Golan Heights. The fate of that occupied Syrian territory, lost to Israel since 1967, rankles a proud Syrian public. Its return would show Syrians that Bashar is capable of achieving results far more impressive than mere Islamist rhetoric. Moreover, a comprehensive settlement with Israel and the US that included the Golan's return would pave the way for massive Western investment that could rescue the Syrian economy from stagnation.
The US and Israel have an opportunity to trade the Golan Heights in exchange for vital Syrian concessions in other, more important parts of the Middle East – namely, Lebanon and Iran. Syria has pursued its alliances with Hezbollah and Iran to ensure the survival of its Alawi regime; Damascus has little reason to maintain those alliances if they become an obstacle to the diplomatic settlement vital to that regime's ultimate survival. In exchange for the return of the Golan, the US and Israel could demand that Syria compel Hezbollah to forsake its militia in exchange for a peaceful power-sharing deal with Fouad Siniora's government, stabilising the crisis on Israel's northern border and forestalling another Lebanese civil war.
Negotiations over the Golan have failed before, of course, but conditions within Syria are more favourable to an agreement than they have been for some time. Bashar's successful stands against Israel in Lebanon and the US in Iraq have conferred on him enormous short-term prestige, allowing him to negotiate an Israeli-Syrian peace treaty that his domestic audience cannot mistake for Syrian surrender. In the same way that only Richard Nixon could go to China, Bashar can negotiate lasting peace only if his hard-line credentials are not in doubt. At the same time, the fundamental long-term weakness of his regime gives Bashar ample reason to conclude a deal over the Golan while he still can.
Barshar's shrewd handling of American failures in Iraq and Lebanon suggests skill that bodes well for his regime's longevity. Engaging that regime does not make the advent of Syrian democracy less likely; it simply recognises that such democracy is unlikely in the near future. Negotiations do, however, offer the US an opportunity to contain the damage from its unrealistic expectations of democracy elsewhere in the Middle East. With US power in the Middle East at a low point, Washington may yet salvage the fast deteriorating situation in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon – but only if it gives Syria a reason to help in doing so.
Matthew Lee is an ethics, politics, and economics major in Yale College. He spent the summer in Syria.