Scenarios: One Outcome
By: Joseph Hitti
Boston, Massachusetts
October 20, 2004

In this phase of the evolving confrontation between Syria and its Lebanese lackeys on one hand and the international community on the other, the barricades are coming up in anticipation of an all-out war. As determined as the international community is in forcing Syria out of Lebanon, the Syrian regime has dug its heels in rejecting an international custody over Lebanon after the Syria-Arab custody of the past 30 years has failed.

In the US, Congress is preparing to enact more sanctions on Syria under the Syria Accountability and Lebanon Sovereignty Act, seize the assets of the wealthy Lebanese partners-collaborators of the Syrian regime such as Rafiq Hariri and Issam Fares, draft a new bill entitled Lebanon Accountability Act modeled on the preceding Syria Accountability Act, and proceed in partnership with Europe at the UN to pressure the Syrian regime into relinquishing its Lebanese hostage by internationalizing the Lebanese question. Messages and messengers keep pouring in to Damascus with repeated warnings that Syria's joy ride in Lebanon has ended.

In France, President Chirac's policy of critical engagement with Syria, adopted through the intercession of Syria's man in Beirut, Rafiq Hariri, has all but evaporated. From competing with each other for Syria's favors a couple of years ago, the US and France are today walking all over one another to prove their distance from Syria and re-calibrate their policies with a re-discovered concern for Lebanon's freedom, sovereignty and independence.

With Syria and Lebanon refusing to implement UNSCR 1559, Syrian president Bashar Assad has taken a path of confrontation, turning down all reasonable requests to submit a timetable for withdrawing his troops and security forces from Lebanon, recognize Lebanon's right to exist as a sovereign nation by establishing diplomatic relations between Damascus and Beirut, dismantle the terrorist organizations operating in Syria and Lebanon, refrain from supporting the Baath-Al Qaeda-Hezbollah allied insurgency in Iraq with men and weapons, cease his development of chemical and biological weapons, and engage the peace process in the Middle East in a serious and genuine manner. Last week, Bashar Assad made a speech that was nothing more than a stale diatribe in which he regurgitated the tenets of a defunct Baathist ideology: A rejection of Lebanon's right to be free and independent, issuing open threats to rekindle the flames of strife in Lebanon as a means to scare the West with “instability” (as his father did in the 1970s), refusing to engage the US seriously about shutting down Syria's borders to terrorist infiltrators into Iraq, and expressing no intent to make even the slightest reform in Syria's 30-year old political status quo, either internally or in regards to the Middle East in general. All of this couched in an illusory Arab nationalism that has defined itself only by its hatred of the world, its brutal repression of its own people and its inability to transcend the complex of the victimized and colonized. This was not a great leader's vision who chose to make a quantum leap for his country. This was a morbid realization that the present Syrian leadership, now mortally wounded by UNSCR 1559, is now faced with either death or inexorable political suicide no matter what it decides to do. Over the past seven decades, the Baath ideology has proved nothing but the absurdity of its theories, its impracticality on the ground, and its selfish determination to hold on to power at the horrendous cost of hundred of thousands of dead, thousands in prison, and lost generations raised on hatred.

In essence, the intransigence of the Syrian ruler has drawn a line in the sand and presages a more serious confrontation with the international community in the coming weeks or months. There are only two possible scenarios that are likely to obtain from the entrenchment of Syria behind its old ideas and policies on one hand, and the reluctance of the US and Europe to allow the status quo to continue on the other. But they both converge on the same outcome, irrespective of whether the Security Council issues letters, more resolutions, or more reports by Kofi Annan.

In the first scenario, the international community adopts a wait-and-see attitude that gives Syria and its Lebanese collaborators a grace period, all the while maintaining pressure with increasing sanctions and isolation. Both the Syrian and Lebanese economies have been on life support for some time now. Remember Paris I and Paris II? Even though Lebanon continues to hold positive economic potential that goes unrealized because of the Syrian hold, Syria itself is in a virtual economic meltdown. Only its parasitic grip on Lebanon, which allows it to siphon billions of dollars annually from the Lebanese economy, has given Syria a lease on life economically. If Lebanon itself becomes the target of economic sanctions, such as the ones considered by Congress, then both the parasite and its unwilling victim are likely to continue sliding down an economic abyss. A grace period would allow the rulers of both countries to re-assess this precarious situation and give them some time to make the right decision. But the problem is that this grace period may be very short indeed.

First, the stakes are enormous and the risks of an extended grace period are great. Iraq is on the boiler plate, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simmering, and the US cannot afford to nurture threats against its regional strategy for very long. Second, even if adopted, the grace period approach is merely coincidental with the current freeze imposed by the upcoming US elections and the upcoming Iraqi elections in January which the US want to see succeed. Because a new Bush administration is expected to be much more aggressive at enforcing the Bush doctrine, the present pace of pressures may not change before the US elections, but will dramatically rise before the Iraqi elections, especially if Syria continues its support of the Iraqi insurgency and its objective of derailing the January elections in Iraq.

This period of increasing pressures without a direct confrontation may also be used to drive a wedge within the ranks of the ruling Baath party in Syria and cause an implosion within Syria itself, which would avoid the risks associated with a direct intervention. There already exists a hypothetical split within the ranks of the Syrian Baath party between, on the one hand, the so-called old guard - the inner circle of the late Hafez Assad's partners in crime - which has benefited the most financially from the occupation of Lebanon and the status quo of corruption and cronyism, and on the other hand a presumed reformist wing that has yet to show the signs of life that were announced with the accession of Bashar Assad to power. Unfortunately, the young Syrian president has not delivered on his promises, and whether by choice or by duress, not only has he failed to stem the power of the old guard, but he seems to have become one of them, lacking either the spine or the vision to bring about any change. Having completely surrendered to his father's cronies, he presents himself more like a dummy in their hands, adopting their rhetoric and obediently implementing their dictates. Gone are the speculations about the young “doctor” who studied in England and who was going to modernize and liberalize Syria.

The second scenario consists of a more immediate and direct confrontation, including a military component, to force Syria to kneel and submit to the will of the international community. Israeli threats of retaliating against Syria after the latest suicide attacks, rising tensions along the Lebanese-Israeli border, targeted assassinations of Hezbollah and Palestinian figures in the hearts of Damascus and Beirut (bearing all the hallmarks of undercover operations), constant reports of infiltrations of anti-US insurgents across the Syrian border, and last week's report of shelling of US troops from the Syrian side of the border with Iraq, all are destined at maintaining the military threat at least as viable as those of political pressure or economic sanctions. The option of a confrontation will remain viable as long as Europe and the US find common ground, and that is likely to be the case on the short term. The sudden turnabout of the US and Europe vis-a-vis Syria stems more from the realization that Syria, having held so many cards with which to blackmail or entice the West, had really nothing of a positive substance to offer other.
However, there remain serious differences between the Europeans and the Americans on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on their respective geostrategic interests in the region.

If the stalemate with Syria is allowed to last, then the risks of a US-French fracture could jeopardize the gains scored today, and these differences could come back to haunt today's consensus with serious dangers. On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, differences exist on the definition of a future Palestinian state, with the US taking the Israeli side and Europe generally expressing greater sympathy for the Palestinian side. As to the strategic conflict, the accession of Turkey into the European Union, expected within the next decade, will give the EU contiguous borders with both Syrian and Iraq. Any American military presence and political influence in Iraq (with ramifications in Syria and Lebanon) does not sit well with the Europeans who consider the Middle East as their backyard.

But for now, there is an understanding between Europe and the US that the Syrian-Lebanese component of the Middle East conflict has for the past two decades added more complexity to the conflict and instead of helping out, as was originally assumed, Syria's influence over the Palestinians and the Lebanese, as well as its open alliance with Iran, have exacerbated the problem by granting Syria (through its dominion over Lebanon, the Palestinian organizations and Hezbollah) the ability to derail at will any progress on the peace track. As a result, there is now an unprecedented consensus to close the Syrian-Lebanese chapter and permanently divorce it from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which would then become more amenable to a solution. This is a reductionist approach to resolving the Middle East problem that contrasts significantly from the synthetic approach of the last 30 years in which all other regional problems – political, social, developmental, etc. - were placed on the back burner pending a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Lebanese War is no more than a symptom of that approach, and Lebanon has been the ultimate victim because its internal issues, which are relatively local and simple, were shelved “as is” until the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is resolved.

In biological natural selection, the survival of the species depends on the flexibility of the species to adjust to a sudden change in the environment. That flexibility is provided by a diversity in the gene pool, which is itself the product of how much the species and the environment tolerate genetic differences among its individual members. The “Arab World” has been in a state of social and political inbreeding for a very long time, tacitly encouraged into an artificial stability by an outside world interested in oil, and tolerating no change or experimentation to develop that diversity and flexibility. The catastrophic environmental change caused by the fall of the Soviet Union and September 11, 2001 is now forcing change. In Syria for example, the status quo of a State of Emergency in place for the past 40 years has virtually arrested Syrian society and political culture in a deep freeze that has stunted the growth and development of its people. Much as the dinosaurs vanished suddenly from the surface of the Earth because of catastrophic climatic change to which they could not adapt, so will the Baathists and other anachronistic regimes in the “Arab World” who have rejected change, openness, diversity and tolerance of differences. The Baathist system in place in Syria is therefore doomed to extinction and neither of the two alternatives available to Bashar Assad and his henchmen will suffice to rescue them. By grace or by force, the Syrian regime will, sooner rather than later, have to comply with a world that has changed.