Those few Arabs should have noticed, a long time ago, inconsistencies in the Syrian rhetoric.
When Cairo sponsored the renewal of a truce between Hamas and Israel, Syria did its best to undermine the truce.
When Arab capitals lined up to improve the Palestinian stance in peace talks with Israel, Damascus sneaked from behind to open back-door peace channels with Tel Aviv in Ankara.
Whenever Arab governments call for peace, the Assad regime, which has not fired a bullet to liberate its occupied Golan Heights since 1974, wages its fictional war on Israel through its state-owned media and its proteges in Lebanon, who accuse Arab governments of letting down the Palestinians by not marching to war with Israel.
But if these Syrian allies, such as the Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, believe that an all-out Arab war against Israel is inevitable, maybe Mr Nasrallah should have first persuaded President Assad to join it.
Perhaps it is the time now for the former strong man of Lebanon, the Syrian intelligence officer Rustom Ghazaleh, to use the “Rifle of Resistance” that Mr Nasrallah bestowed on him in 2005.
Alongside the Arabs deceived by Syria’s “heroic” war platform are the western capitals tricked into believing that Damascus holds the key to regional peace.
Damascus has so far double-crossed both Paris and London and is now set to lure Washington into its trap, a step that would have been inconceivable had it not been for the hubris of the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the ensuing shortsighted European diplomacy.
The three Western capitals have all cut off Damascus at different times in the past, but with every governmental change in the West the Assad regime regains its ability to manipulate the agenda.
In 2001, Tony Blair became the first British Prime Minister to visit Damascus – and the first one to be publicly humiliated by President Assad, who rebuffed British demands that Damascus stop its support of Hamas and Hizbollah.
In 2005, after the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, the United States and France – already in concert at the Security Council since 2004 to approve resolution 1559, which forced a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon – fought Damascus with international isolation. Washington went as far as recalling its ambassador to Syria, a position that remains vacant to this day.
The mounting international pressure on Damascus, at the time, aimed at changing the behaviour of the Syrian regime, without pushing it to collapse for fear that Iraqi-style, Islamist-incited chaos might be even worse than the Assad regime.
But Bashar Assad, walking in the footsteps of his father and predecessor Hafez, seems to have perfected playing on the edge.
Knowing that his regime had a western cover for survival, he did little to change. Instead, Mr Assad waited to see change come to western capitals.
Mr Sarkozy was elected president of France in May, 2007. His foreign policy endorsed an old motto: money talks. Realising that Libya was an untapped resource, Mr Sarkozy first rushed to Tripoli to resolve a long-standing dispute over Bulgarian nurses.
Qatar, which had been reportedly involved in settling the Libyan debacle, immediately comprehended Mr Sarkozy’s chequebook diplomacy. To France, Qatar brought with it its close ally, Syria, despite Syria’s worthless economic contribution.
Since the Qatari-sponsored French-Syrian rapprochement, French diplomats have gone out of their way to prove that Syria’s behaviour has actually changed, a fallacy aimed at covering France’s embarrassment over its uncalculated approach to Syria.
France, and probably Qatar, later brought Britain on board: the British Foreign Minister, David Miliband, made a stop in Damascus during his Middle Eastern tour in November.
For European capitals, now is the time to prove the worthiness of their engagement of Syria and call the Syrian bluffs: they should place Damascus firmly on the crossroads between war and peace, and demand that it choose.
If Damascus is sincere in its calls for the armed liberation of occupied Arab land, including its own, then it should wage war: any Syrian step short of direct war with Israel can only have the aim of undermining Syria’s regional opponents and rivals.
By the same token, any Syrian overture towards peace, outside of the comprehensive Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, can only have the aim of maneuvering the world into breaking the isolation imposed on Damascus.
Syria does not know how to make war, and for that matter, will never learn how to make peace. Damascus sells only the illusion of war and peace, behaviour characteristic of the Assad regime for the past few decades.
*Published in the UAE's NATIONAL on Dec.30. |
