Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2003, pages 22-24

Two Views

 

Attacking Syria

 

The “Israelization” of The United States

 

By David Hirst

Few disputed at the time that Israel was a factor that pushed Bush to go to war on Iraq. Just how much weight it had among all the others was the only controversial question. But what is clear is that Israel has become a very important one indeed in the stumbling neo-imperial venture that is Iraq today.

This “Israelization” of U.S. policy crossed a new threshold with the two blows dealt Syria in recent days—President Bush’s endorsement of Israel’s air raid on its territory and the Syrian Accountability Act passed by the House of Representatives on Wednesday. A community of U.S.-Israeli purpose pushed to unprecedented lengths is now operational as well as ideological. For the U.S., the primary battlefield is Iraq, and any state which sponsors or encourages resistance to its occupation; for Israel it is occupied Palestine, its “terrorists” and their external backers. These common objectives converge on Syria.

Of course, with his raid, Sharon had his own specifically Israeli agenda, growing out of frustration at his failure to crush the intifada. Breaking the “rules” that have “contained” Israeli-Syrian armed conflict these past 30 years, he signaled his readiness to visit on Israel’s Arab neighbors the same punitive techniques he uses on the Palestinians. But whereas such an escalation might have had some deterrent logic when these neighbors truly did sponsor or harbor Palestinian resistance, it doesn’t now. An essential feature of the intifada is that, spontaneous and popular, it derives almost all its impetus from within; nothing illustrated that like Hanadi Jaradat, the young woman from Jenin whose very personal grief and vengeance prompted the atrocious, self-sacrificial deed which prompted the raid in its turn. So, other than brief emotional gratification to the Israeli public, it achieved nothing. But that will not deter Sharon. Having embarked on this course, he has little choice but to continue it; more importantly, violence has always been the indispensable means by which, in the guise of fighting terror, he pursues his real, long-term aims, the building of “Greater Israel” and crushing any opposition, Arab as well as Palestinian, to it.

But he is also, he believes, serving an American agenda. At least no one in Washington says he is not. There was a time, even under this most pro-Israeli administration ever, when the superpower would have strenuously distanced itself from such an act by its protégé; a time when, mindful of the intrinsic connection between the two great Middle East zones of crisis, it would have recognized that too close an identification with the aims and actions of Israel in Palestine and its environs would complicate its task in Iraq. No more, apparently. Now these aims and actions either matter little to America, or even, in Syria’s case, complement its own.

 

The deepening U.S.-Israeli alliance is all too liable to backfire.

True, constraints persist even now. Bush still balks at Israel’s projected “removal” of Yasser Arafat. On the other hand, he has effectively “disengaged” once more from peacemaking, endorsed the Israeli view that Arafat alone is responsible for its breakdown and left Sharon a freer hand than ever to conduct the Israeli share of their common “war on terror.”

It was partly because he couldn’t go after Arafat that Sharon turned on Syria instead. Again, Bush urged caution—but then called it legitimate “self-defense” of a kind America itself would have resorted to. It was Palestinian “terrorists” Israel struck, but, in American eyes, these are of a piece with those other “terrorists”—Arabs or Muslims—whose passage into Iraq Syria supposedly permits or does little to impede.

Bush’s endorsement of the raid—together with his signaled readiness to sign into law the Syrian Accountability Act against which he has long held out—means that, where Syria is concerned, he has now veered strongly in favor of the neoconservative wing of his administration. Its members are so closely linked, personally, ideologically and even institutionally, to the Israeli right wing that it is impossible to disentangle what is American in their thinking from what is Sharon and the Likud’s—and nowhere, Western diplomats in Damascus say, is this more obvious than it is with regard to Syria. The Accountability Act—which calls for sanctions against Syria until it stops supporting terrorism, withdraws its forces from Lebanon, ceases development of weapons of mass destruction and enters “serious, unconditional” peace negotiations with Israel—is something the neocons have been working for since the mid-1990s. That was when they first proposed their joint Israeli-American strategy for regime change in Syria as well as Iraq, to be accomplished by such means as attacks on Syria by “Israeli proxy forces” based in Lebanon, Israeli attacks on Syrian targets in Lebanon and“select” targets in Syria itself.

The deepening U.S.-Israeli alliance is all too liable to backfire. What the U.S. is permitting Israel to do in Palestine and Syria will further inflame Arab and Muslim hostility to what it is doing in Iraq. The effects of that will be felt at the popular level; as despised Arab regimes look ever more incapable of fulfilling the fundamental duty of any government, defense against foreign attack and domination, the militants among their people—like Hanadi Jaradat in Palestine—assume that duty themselves; they become terrorists and suicide bombers wherever motive and opportunity for it most potently coincide. Iraq and Palestine are one and the same.

As for the regimes, Syria has so far opted for restraint. Aware that its only hope of securing its future in a general Middle East settlement is via the United States, it may become even more conciliatory than—by its own lights—it already is. But if Sharon keeps up his attacks, there will surely be a limit to such restraint, set by tactical necessity, domestic public opinion, and its own perception of itself as a last bastion of Arab steadfastness. It has intimated that, at some point, it will hit back—perhaps by really adopting the spoiler’s role in Iraq which the U.S. unconvincingly attributes to it already or, more likely, by activating Hezbollah against Israel. Of course that would be very risky, given Israel’s vast superiority over it in conventional military terms.But—it will no doubt calculate—can the U.S., floundering in Iraq, really afford another Middle East conflagration of its ally’s making?

The Israelization of America, as a key ingredient in the ever more noxious Middle East brew, is not an extravagant term for a relationship in which, typically, Sharon leads and Bush lamely follows. The pattern constantly repeats itself. Bush may have misgivings about what Sharon does—his military excesses, his relentless settlement drive, his “wall,” and now his attack on Syria—he may stammer out mild admonitions, but he always accommodates him in the end. And with Iraq itself eating away at his prospects of election for a second term, he will be more accommodating than ever, more deferential to all the “friends of Israel” in America from whom Sharon draws most of his power to lead—or mislead—him. With the next suicide bomber will Sharon reply against the offices of “terrorist” organizations in Damascus itself—as he has clearly intimated he might? One thing is sure: if, somewhere down such a road, lies an American disaster in Iraq, and a monumental scuttle, the Israeli partner in this most extraordinary and counterproductive of alliances will pay a higher price than America itself.

David Hirst, veteran foreign correspondent and author of the recently republished and up-dated The Gun and the Olive Branch, writes a regular commentary for Beirut’s The Daily Star. This column first appeared Oct. 22, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

 

 

Questions Abound Following Israeli Attack

 

By Sami Moubayed

When writing my first book, The Politics of Damascus 1920-1946, I documented the brutal 1945 French bombardment of Damascus that killed 660 civilians. This is one of the bloodiest chapters in the modern history of Syria, and Syrian citizens want by any means to avoid its repetition. Yet the Syrians’ horror of war has hardly been acknowledged since the Israeli bombardment of Syrian territory on Oct. 5, 2003. Nobody is mentioning the Syrian people in the latest showdown between Israel and its neighbor, and both the international media and world leaders alike seem to forget that it is the average Syrian who will suffer from any further Israeli bombing, and from the Syria Accountability Act.

In 1945, the Syrians, fighting for their independence, were willing to suffer bombardment by a foreign power. Today, if the Syrians are attacked, it is because they are being made to pay for the independence struggle of others. Syrian philosopher Michel Kilo recently wrote an article saying: “Don’t let Hamas lead to the loss of Syria!” This message is being echoed all over the country since Oct. 5.

The Israeli attack raised a million questions in Syria. Where is the country heading? How will President Bashar Al-Assad deal with the crisis? And, more importantly: what went wrong? This, after all, is the first attack on Syrian territory since the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. During the era of the late President Hafez Al-Assad, Syria maintained a “no war, no peace” policy with respect to Israel, especially after the October War. Instead, in the 1980s and ‘90s, the two countries clashed by proxy through opposing factions in Lebanon.

U.S. rhetoric against Syria began with the occupation of Iraq in April 2003 and has been mounting ever since, echoed by every White House official. The lobbying against Syria has become as strong as the pre-war anti-Iraq effort. American journalists, public activists, congressmen and White House officials repeatedly depict Damascus as a state-supporter of terrorism. The New York Times on Oct. 14 said Syria was “terror’s friend and the free world’s enemy.”

Slowly but surely, Washington is escalating its campaign to brainwash Americans that Syria presents as much of a threat to the world as did Saddam Hussain’s Iraq. When average Americans hear the same accusations day after day from government officials and an obediently fixated media, the unwitting citizens will start to believe what’s being drummed into their ears. One look at daily U.S. news reports shows how concentrated the accusations against Syria have become: it harbors officials from Saddam Hussain’s regime, it is safeguarding Saddam’s money in the Central Bank of Syria, it smuggled Saddam’s weapons out of Iraq to Lebanon, it is supporting the resistance in Iraq, south Lebanon, and Palestine. A similar look at the Syrian media, however, will show how poorly Damascus is responding to these accusations, if it responds at all.

Ever since the U.S.S.R. imploded in 1991, Syria has been trying to develop better ties with the U.S. The first step in this initiative occurred when the late President Hafez Al-Assad agreed to send troops to fight with the U.S. against Iraq in 1991’s Desert Storm. Syria spent that decade making nice with the U.S., especially with President Bill Clinton, who visited Damascus in 1994. President Bashar Al-Assad continued this rapprochement in 2001, when he showed solidarity with Americans after the 9/11 attacks and offered Syria’s assistance in the war on terrorism. Since it also had suffered from Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s, Syria helped the U.S. track down radical Muslims. It gave information to the CIA on Mohammad Atta, a 9/11 conspirator who had been to Aleppo; helped track down the Hamburg cell of al-Qaeda, run by Syrian members of the terrorist group; and provided 26,000 documents to the FBI from its files on known terrorist organizations.

Things fell apart, however, with the war on Iraq, which Syria opposed from the start. Washington wanted Damascus to help track down and crush the Iraqi resistance as it had done with its own Islamic fundamentalists, but Syria refused to oblige. A pro-American regime in Iraq means Syria then would be surrounded by pro-Western regimes in all of its neighboring countries: Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Israel. Once Syrian troops leave Lebanon, even that country will become a headache for Damascus, due to the anti-Syrian fervor among Lebanese Christians. Its only friendly neighbor would be the sea!

Washington, however, did not appreciate Syria’s diplomatic support for Baghdad, and Syria made no effort to defend itself against accusations of letting Arab volunteers go to war against Americans through the Syrian-Iraqi border. The U.S. repeatedly warned Syria to change course, but Damascus did not listen until Baghdad was occupied on April 19, 2003.

Whereupon the U.S. immediately began its litany of accusations against Syria. When Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Syria in May 2003, President Assad promised him to expel all Saddam supporters and former regime members, which he did, and to close down the Syrian offices of Palestinian resistance groups. The Bush administration believed him, and expressed its opposition to the Syrian Accountability Act that was making the rounds in Congress in the summer of 2003.

Syria re-calculated, however, and did not close down the offices, claiming they were media outlets for the resistance that in no way threatened the security of Israel, and instead sent some of their representatives to Lebanon and Qatar. President Assad, after all, did not wish to be perceived as another Yasser Arafat, who quickly complied with Washington’s demand that he shut down Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the occupied territories.

Defiantly, in the midst of the diplomatic war with Washington, Assad created a new government, giving a majority of posts to the Syrian Ba’ath Party—a clear signal that Assad would not go out of his way to please the U.S. Not only did the Ba’ath Party get a majority of cabinet positions, but Defense Minister Mustapha Tlas and Foreign Minister Farouk al-Charaa, two Syrian Ba’athists clearly opposed to U.S. policies in the Middle East, retained their posts. By retaining them, Assad sent Washington the message that Syria’s policies vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict, embodied in General Tlas, and toward Iraq, embodied in Charaa, had not changed.

The U.S. was not pleased—nor was Israel. When a female suicide bomber from Islamic Jihad blew herself up in Haifa on Oct. 4, killing 19 Israelis and Arabs, Israel accused Syria of harboring and training Islamic Jihad, and informed Washington of its desire to attack. When Washington did not object, four Israeli planes flew into Syrian air space on Oct. 5, firing four air-to-ground missiles on Ain al-Saheb, a village 14 miles from Damascus. Four other jets flew into Lebanese airspace, breaking the sound barrier over the capital, Beirut.

The attack alerted Syrians that the wolf was at the door and that Ariel Sharon was becoming a direct threat to them. In a smart move, President Assad took the matter to the U.N., ordering his ambassador Faysal Miqdad to call for an extraordinary session and denounce Israel’s violation of international law. Washington and London passively responded that Israel’s attack was legitimate, and that the Jewish state was entitled to defend itself. Support from the Arabs was surprisingly weak, with Arab leaders voicing only mild condemnations. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, for example, did not contact President Assad until Oct. 7, 48-hours after the attack. Yasser Arafat did not contact Syria at all, nor did Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi. It looked like the Arab world was turning a blind eye to the attack to avoid embarrassing itself with the White House.

 

Syrians’ horror of war has hardly been acknowledged since the Israeli bombardment on Oct. 5, 2003.

Lessons from history were too recent to have been forgotten by Washington: the PLO and Jordan had not supported the U.S. in the 1991 Gulf war, and Syria had opposed this year’s invasion of Iraq. All three have suffered as a consequence. With no regional backers and no one in the international community listening except France, Syria was waging a lonely battle.

On Oct. 1, Congress passed the Syrian Accountability Act, increasing pressure on Damascus. The U.S. then delivered a second blow, announcing that several of the recently arrested al-Qaeda suspects, including journalist Tayseer Alouni of al-Jazeera TV, were Syrian citizens. The Israelis joined in, claiming in Haaretz that Syrian businessman Firas Tlas, son of the defense minister, had smuggled weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) out of Iraq, through Syria, to Lebanon, where they were buried in the Beqaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold.

Time magazine claimed that Saddam Hussain’s billions had been deposited in the Central Bank of Syria before the war ended, and on Oct. 10, CNN alleged that Syria was already rebuilding the “training camp” attacked by Israel on Oct. 5. Neocon “Prince of Darkness” Richard Perle perpetuated the lies, stating on Oct. 14 that he was “happy to see that Israel has now taken a similar step in responding to acts of terror” as the ones taken by the U.S. after 9/11. When asked whether getting Syria to stop its support for so-called “terrorists” meant U.S. military action, Perle replied: “Everything is possible.”

President Assad now faces a tough situation. Syria is hardly likely to go to war in a futile confrontation with the Israeli army and its arsenal of American weapons. Damascus does have the power and clout to destabilize the Middle East, however, and this is a winning card that the Syrian president still holds. The resistance in the occupied territories needs little urging from Damascus—Israel has ensured that—and already has promised to respond violently to any attack on Syria. Meanwhile, the resistance in Iraq, unable to strike at Israel, gladly will strike against U.S. forces in Baghdad and elsewhere. Syria can also, if it so wishes, unleash hell on Israel from south Lebanon through Hezbollah.

All told, this would open a multi-front war against the American-Israeli alliance in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Given the steadily rising death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq and the failure to justify the Anglo-American casus belli of WMDs, Washington cannot allow the situation to explode. It already has enough on its hands with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Liberia, North Korea, and al-Qaeda. The Bush administration cannot afford chaos—especially with U.S. presidential elections just around the corner.

In Israel at the moment, Prime Minister Sharon does not have enough support to dismantle settlements, end the occupation and make peace with the Palestinians. He does, however, have overwhelming Israeli support to strike at Syria, which, after so many years of negative propaganda, is seen by the Israeli public as a major part of their security problems. As with the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel also is overextended trying to control the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and won’t be able to control Syria. It will try, however, to get Syria to change course. The most the Israeli-American alliance can do against Damascus is to encourage violence at the border, increase Israeli air strikes on Syrian targets, and isolate the country from the international community.

Some in Israel are calling for an all-out offensive against Syria, aimed at ending once and for all the 1974 disengagement treaty between Damascus and Tel Aviv. Then the Syrian army was relatively much stronger, and closer to the might of Israel. These Israelis are pushing for occupation of more Syrian lands, so Sharon can negotiate peace with Syria from a stronger Israeli position. Why, they ask, should he negotiate from the 1974 lines when Israel can realize a stronger position by using its might today? Syria, Sharon believes, would then be forced to accept terms that it refused at Shepherdstown in 1999 and Geneva in 2000.

On the other hand, the Israeli prime minister knows that when he tried to end the Palestinian resistance in 1982 by creating more violence and invading Lebanon, he only made things worse for Israel. Hezbollah and other Lebanese militias became more committed to fighting Tel Aviv, and Israel found itself mired in a costly and needless occupation of south Lebanon that ended with a humiliating withdrawal in May 2000. Syria is not 1982 Lebanon—Sharon cannot afford to pay the price of an Israeli occupation of Syria.

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.

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