Being Hafiz al-Assad: Syria's Chilly but Consistent Peace Strategy
Unleashing Hezbollah, stalling talks, and having the state-run media spew anti-Israel vitriol hardly seem pacific, but Syria's dictator has a consistent if chilly peace strategy.
Henry Siegman is Senior Fellow and Director of the U.S./Middle East Project at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Siegman's postscript to his May/June 2000 essay "Being Hafiz al-Assad: Syria's Chilly but Consistent Peace Strategy."
ReadHafiz al-Assad's on-again, off-again approach to the Middle East peace process frequently drives U.S. and Israeli policymakers to distraction. Both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton have argued that Syria's president has made a "strategic decision" to resolve his differences with Israel peacefully. But some wonder if Syria has really resigned itself to peace. Assad's refusal to return to the table after January's Israeli-Syrian peace talks in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, a subsequent wave of deadly violence in southern Lebanon, and a frosty March summit in Geneva with Clinton hardly seemed evidence of pacific intentions.
Is the Syrian leader temperamental and unpredictable? Have Clinton and Barak been gulled by the mistaken view -- first advanced by Henry Kissinger after the 1973 Yom Kippur War and now accepted as conventional wisdom in foreign ministries worldwide -- that Assad, a maddeningly clever negotiator, is entirely trustworthy once he has given his word? In light of Assad's enigmatic behavior, should Israel and the United States not forgo the notion that only procedure, not substance, stands in the way of an Israel-Syria agreement?
Many pundits in Israel and the United States have answered yes to all these important questions. A pall of skepticism enveloped the Syrian track, especially after attacks on Israeli troops by Hezbollah, the radical Shiite militia that operates with Assad's blessing in southern Lebanon. Indeed, for some observers, Syria's behavior showed that Assad is not resigned to Israel's existence and is interested not in peace but in process -- in stringing out the negotiations to preserve Syria's regional position rather than cutting a deal.
But this is a serious misreading of Assad, one that could easily lead policymakers to miss a rare opportunity to achieve a larger Middle East peace. In fact, Assad's behavior has been anything but erratic: it has been consistent and predictable. To understand that consistency, one must understand the man known as the sphinx of Damascus and the world in which he lives.
HOW THE SPHINX THINKS
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American peacekeeping turned into American bloodletting in 1983. More than any event since the war and oil embargo almost exactly ten years earlier, the October 23 suicide bombing of Marine headquarters in Beirut brought the Middle East conflict home directly to vast numbers of Americans stunned by the carnage that eventually claimed 241 lives--more casualties than in any other single incident since the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam.
In the Shia vision of history, born of centuries of oppression and marginality, a time comes when the mighty are humbled; the lowly who kept the faith rise up and inherit the earth free from oppressors. From this vision has come consolation. It sustained an embattled minority faith through the eras of worldly and political dispossession.
If the assassins of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri sought to make an example of him for his defiance of Syria, the aftermath of the crime has mocked them. For a generation, Lebanon was an appendage of Syrian power. But now the Lebanese people, in an "independence intifada," are clamoring for a return to normalcy. The old Arab edifice of power has survived many challenges in the past, but something is different this time: the United States is now willing to gamble on freedom.

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