Damascus-Washington Honeymoon's Over: We'll Always Have Beirut
Dr. Joseph Hitti
November 02, 2008
The US embassy in Syria is closing, so are the American cultural centers in Damascus, this self-professed "Pulsating Capital of Arab Culture!" Washington, it seems, finally – after 40 years – wagged the stick at the Assad dynasty and the two honeymooners are close to a divorce following a US military attack that killed one Syrian terrorist-runner who specialized in dispatching foreign fighters across the border into Iraq. It seems that running terrorists from Syria into Iraq for about 4 years is a much graver sin in the eyes of Washington than Syria´s invading, occupying, massacring, shelling, killing and destroying Lebanon for about 40 years.
Anti-US demonstrations in downtown Damascus are too numerous to count, and so are the "Death to America" chants in "spontaneous" protests against the Sunday night raid against Boukamal, the Syrian village that served as the principal transit point into Iraq.
For people like me – Lebanese and Lebanese exiles - this is indeed good news, albeit tinged with a lot of bitterness. It's about time, we tell ourselves, since Kissinger cozied up to Hafez al-Assad in 1974 and gave him the green light to destabilize Lebanon that same year, leading to the Syrian-Palestinian onslaught on the Lebanese state in 1975. Since then and for all the decades that followed, and as Syria and its PLO, Saika, PFLP, Hezbollah, and many other proxies burned and slashed in Lebanon, the US maintained an incestuous honeymoon, a kind of Beauty and the Beast love affair with the Baathist regime in Damascus. While the US placed Syria on its list of state sponsors of terrorism, which remains the case today, the US also continued to exchange embassies with Damascus, American presidents met annually with the Syrian dictator (in Geneva and other European capitals), and gave Syria a stature and importance it, first, never deserved, and second, that was in striking conflict with listing Syria as a "terrorist" nation.
The only explanation for the durability of this conflicting and contradictory policy is that the "big" players in that part of the Middle East - Syria, the US and Israel - entertained for more than three decades a tacit agreement of assisting each other, albeit with red lines and green lights, towards their ultimate goal: Destroy Lebanon and turn it into a substitute homeland for the Palestinians so they no longer bother Israel. Syria's only concern in this bargain was to recover the Golan Heights, and as such the Assad dynasty has been the most faithful pro-Israeli agent in the Middle East. All three were willing and complicit players in a game whose rules they continued to fine-tune over the decades, but where Lebanon was the sole playing field. Never before did the US attack Syria because of the atrocities it committed in Lebanon. Never did Israel strike Syria for four decades, except occasionally in Lebanon, and only recently in 2007 and 2008 when it struck two ambiguous sites claimed to be a terrorist camp and a nuclear site, respectively. And, last but not least, never has Syria attacked Israel since signing the Kissinger-brokered ceasefire in 1974 on the Golan Heights and the Syrian regime never even allowed a grassroots Syrian "resistance" to emerge inside Syria against the Israeli occupation – worse, the annexation – of the Golan Heights. Yet, all three got down and dirty in Lebanon, and only the Lebanese paid the price.
The Lebanese understood this implicit, and sometime explicit, American-Syrian-Israeli game firsthand since they were the scapegoats and the sacrificial lambs in this diabolical conspiracy. The conspiracy was even more explicit in the fact that Israeli leaders often spoke of Syria as the only "guarantor of stability" in an otherwise "chaotic" Lebanon in a "blame the victim" mindset. Western leaders often spoke of Hafez Assad as a man "who keeps his word and his end of the [the shady] bargains" they struck with him. US policy makers continued to refer to the Syrian military occupation of Lebanon as a "presence" and a "factor of stability", changing this jargon only in March 2003 when Colin Powell was the first ever US policy maker to use the term "occupation". A good 30 years after the fact.
Sadly, the present rift in Syrian-US relations is too little too late a change in US policy for the Lebanese. Too little for the hundred of thousands of Lebanese who died at the hands of the Syrians and the Palestinians, and too late perhaps for many of the thousands of Lebanese who have died and/or are still held incommunicado in Syria´s prisons. For decades, many of us and many Lebanese leaders called that US policy misguided, twisted and ultimately very harmful to US interests because, if the US truly wanted peace in the Middle East, it would not have protected and supported the Syrian regime and its occupation for close to 40 years in Lebanon. Syria stood then, and still stands today, as the last and only obstacle to peace in the region. This cover that the US and Israel provided Syria allowed the latter to sustain and grow a myriad of rejectionist movements (Hamas and Hezbollah, to name only the more recent ones) that became incubators for radical pan-Arab and pan-Islamic radicalism, for which we are all today paying the price. If the Syrian threat had been dealt with early on, we may not have seen the rise of fundamentalism and radicalism in the Middle East.
One wonders then about the motive, the rationale that has guided US policy on Syria throughout those decades. What benefit did the US and Israel see in Syria that could explain this support and this destructive policy? There are a number of theories on this subject ranging from holding out for a possible deal on the Golan that, in the opinion of those policymakers, could finally seal peace with Israel; or the fear of seeing a radical Islamic regime (the Muslim Brotherhood) take power in Damascus. What is clear, though, is that the US never really acted in the interest of real peace in Lebanon, which would have required it to take certain actions that would have shunted Lebanon out of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Thus, the US never really wanted peace, and neither did Israel for that matter, in Lebanon. It seems, in retrospect, that it was more beneficial for the US and Israel to maintain Lebanon as a crucible of violence, troubles and instability in such a physical proximity to Israel for a number of reasons and notwithstanding the concomitant risks. For one, a violent Lebanon where hordes of terrorist groups operated freely provided Israel with a constant source of pretexts and justifications to derail the so-called peace process and play the ultimate victim. This in turn ultimately serves as a platform for denying and aborting a genuinely fair solution to the Palestinian problem – Israel´s nightmare scenario – while delivering a dislocated and dismembered Lebanon to the vultures of the Baath regime in Damascus that had always claimed Lebanon to be a historic part of a mythical Syria that never really existed, and to the terrorists of the PLO who seriously contemplated taking Lebanon as a substitute for Palestine.
Today, for all the reasons one might invoke to explain the Lebanese War, the US-Syrian-Israeli honeymoon is over. The Americans and the Israelis have finally realized that they are not getting what they hoped for from the Assad regime. Instead, they have come to realize that they sacrificed a perfectly healthy and prosperous Lebanon only to inherit a Hezbollah-run Lebanon with all the threats it poses Israel. Suddenly, a radical Sunni regime in Damascus is, if not better, at least equally as abhorrent as a Shiite-dominated Lebanon with thousands of missiles pointed at Israel. Perhaps, as much as the Lebanese believe this is too little too late, this attack by the Bush administration against its long-standing friend – the Assad regime in Damascus – is a final salvo in an otherwise utterly incompetent prosecution of the war on terrorism by Bush. Either way, it does an exhausted Lebanon no good. The West continues to pressure Lebanon´s 3.5 million inhabitants into absorbing 0.5 million Palestinian refugees, to relieve Israel of the guilt and burden of the Right of Return, as if Israel´s superficial and very recent demographic balance between Arabs and Jews is much more "delicate" than Lebanon´s ancient demographic balance between 18 different religious and ethnic communities.
Even in its demise, Lebanon has defeated the Kissinger plan. The question now is what will the US do as it finally goes after the monster it itself created in Damascus?
Anti-US demonstrations in downtown Damascus are too numerous to count, and so are the "Death to America" chants in "spontaneous" protests against the Sunday night raid against Boukamal, the Syrian village that served as the principal transit point into Iraq.
For people like me – Lebanese and Lebanese exiles - this is indeed good news, albeit tinged with a lot of bitterness. It's about time, we tell ourselves, since Kissinger cozied up to Hafez al-Assad in 1974 and gave him the green light to destabilize Lebanon that same year, leading to the Syrian-Palestinian onslaught on the Lebanese state in 1975. Since then and for all the decades that followed, and as Syria and its PLO, Saika, PFLP, Hezbollah, and many other proxies burned and slashed in Lebanon, the US maintained an incestuous honeymoon, a kind of Beauty and the Beast love affair with the Baathist regime in Damascus. While the US placed Syria on its list of state sponsors of terrorism, which remains the case today, the US also continued to exchange embassies with Damascus, American presidents met annually with the Syrian dictator (in Geneva and other European capitals), and gave Syria a stature and importance it, first, never deserved, and second, that was in striking conflict with listing Syria as a "terrorist" nation.
The only explanation for the durability of this conflicting and contradictory policy is that the "big" players in that part of the Middle East - Syria, the US and Israel - entertained for more than three decades a tacit agreement of assisting each other, albeit with red lines and green lights, towards their ultimate goal: Destroy Lebanon and turn it into a substitute homeland for the Palestinians so they no longer bother Israel. Syria's only concern in this bargain was to recover the Golan Heights, and as such the Assad dynasty has been the most faithful pro-Israeli agent in the Middle East. All three were willing and complicit players in a game whose rules they continued to fine-tune over the decades, but where Lebanon was the sole playing field. Never before did the US attack Syria because of the atrocities it committed in Lebanon. Never did Israel strike Syria for four decades, except occasionally in Lebanon, and only recently in 2007 and 2008 when it struck two ambiguous sites claimed to be a terrorist camp and a nuclear site, respectively. And, last but not least, never has Syria attacked Israel since signing the Kissinger-brokered ceasefire in 1974 on the Golan Heights and the Syrian regime never even allowed a grassroots Syrian "resistance" to emerge inside Syria against the Israeli occupation – worse, the annexation – of the Golan Heights. Yet, all three got down and dirty in Lebanon, and only the Lebanese paid the price.
The Lebanese understood this implicit, and sometime explicit, American-Syrian-Israeli game firsthand since they were the scapegoats and the sacrificial lambs in this diabolical conspiracy. The conspiracy was even more explicit in the fact that Israeli leaders often spoke of Syria as the only "guarantor of stability" in an otherwise "chaotic" Lebanon in a "blame the victim" mindset. Western leaders often spoke of Hafez Assad as a man "who keeps his word and his end of the [the shady] bargains" they struck with him. US policy makers continued to refer to the Syrian military occupation of Lebanon as a "presence" and a "factor of stability", changing this jargon only in March 2003 when Colin Powell was the first ever US policy maker to use the term "occupation". A good 30 years after the fact.
Sadly, the present rift in Syrian-US relations is too little too late a change in US policy for the Lebanese. Too little for the hundred of thousands of Lebanese who died at the hands of the Syrians and the Palestinians, and too late perhaps for many of the thousands of Lebanese who have died and/or are still held incommunicado in Syria´s prisons. For decades, many of us and many Lebanese leaders called that US policy misguided, twisted and ultimately very harmful to US interests because, if the US truly wanted peace in the Middle East, it would not have protected and supported the Syrian regime and its occupation for close to 40 years in Lebanon. Syria stood then, and still stands today, as the last and only obstacle to peace in the region. This cover that the US and Israel provided Syria allowed the latter to sustain and grow a myriad of rejectionist movements (Hamas and Hezbollah, to name only the more recent ones) that became incubators for radical pan-Arab and pan-Islamic radicalism, for which we are all today paying the price. If the Syrian threat had been dealt with early on, we may not have seen the rise of fundamentalism and radicalism in the Middle East.
One wonders then about the motive, the rationale that has guided US policy on Syria throughout those decades. What benefit did the US and Israel see in Syria that could explain this support and this destructive policy? There are a number of theories on this subject ranging from holding out for a possible deal on the Golan that, in the opinion of those policymakers, could finally seal peace with Israel; or the fear of seeing a radical Islamic regime (the Muslim Brotherhood) take power in Damascus. What is clear, though, is that the US never really acted in the interest of real peace in Lebanon, which would have required it to take certain actions that would have shunted Lebanon out of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Thus, the US never really wanted peace, and neither did Israel for that matter, in Lebanon. It seems, in retrospect, that it was more beneficial for the US and Israel to maintain Lebanon as a crucible of violence, troubles and instability in such a physical proximity to Israel for a number of reasons and notwithstanding the concomitant risks. For one, a violent Lebanon where hordes of terrorist groups operated freely provided Israel with a constant source of pretexts and justifications to derail the so-called peace process and play the ultimate victim. This in turn ultimately serves as a platform for denying and aborting a genuinely fair solution to the Palestinian problem – Israel´s nightmare scenario – while delivering a dislocated and dismembered Lebanon to the vultures of the Baath regime in Damascus that had always claimed Lebanon to be a historic part of a mythical Syria that never really existed, and to the terrorists of the PLO who seriously contemplated taking Lebanon as a substitute for Palestine.
Today, for all the reasons one might invoke to explain the Lebanese War, the US-Syrian-Israeli honeymoon is over. The Americans and the Israelis have finally realized that they are not getting what they hoped for from the Assad regime. Instead, they have come to realize that they sacrificed a perfectly healthy and prosperous Lebanon only to inherit a Hezbollah-run Lebanon with all the threats it poses Israel. Suddenly, a radical Sunni regime in Damascus is, if not better, at least equally as abhorrent as a Shiite-dominated Lebanon with thousands of missiles pointed at Israel. Perhaps, as much as the Lebanese believe this is too little too late, this attack by the Bush administration against its long-standing friend – the Assad regime in Damascus – is a final salvo in an otherwise utterly incompetent prosecution of the war on terrorism by Bush. Either way, it does an exhausted Lebanon no good. The West continues to pressure Lebanon´s 3.5 million inhabitants into absorbing 0.5 million Palestinian refugees, to relieve Israel of the guilt and burden of the Right of Return, as if Israel´s superficial and very recent demographic balance between Arabs and Jews is much more "delicate" than Lebanon´s ancient demographic balance between 18 different religious and ethnic communities.
Even in its demise, Lebanon has defeated the Kissinger plan. The question now is what will the US do as it finally goes after the monster it itself created in Damascus?
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