'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Bush escalating against Syria

I was going to write a post here noting that the Bushies have taken a serious step toward escalating their battle against Bashar al-Asad's regime in Syria.

That link there goes to a report by Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler of the WaPo, that on Thursday the State Dept's new "democracy czar" Elizabeth Cheney hosted a meeting that included "senior administration officials from Vice President Cheney's office, the National Security Council and the Pentagon and about a dozen prominent Syrian Americans, including political activists, community leaders, academics and an opposition group."

The opposition group in question is the Syria Reform Party, which Kessler and Wright say is "often compared to the Iraqi National Congress led by former exile Ahmed Chalabi." The SRP-- or rather, as it calls itself, the RPS-- is headed by Farid Ghadry, a 50-year-old Syrian-American who left his homeland when he was ten years old...

Well, I was going to post about that, but then I found this great post on Josh Landis's blog.

Josh is a good, serious US scholar of Syrian affairs who knows Syria fairly well and is currently in Damascus on a Fulbright scholarship. (He speaks and reads good Arabic and is married to a Syrian, all of which attributes certainly strengthen the authority with which he writes.)

One key passage of what he writes there is this:

Reformers here believe that Syria’s only winning strategy is to get out of Lebanon as quickly as possible, thereby reversing the increasing momentum of anti-Syrian sentiment in Lebanon and the international community.

Most importantly, they argue, Bashar must jump start internal reform by calling the Baath Party Congress as soon as possible and insisting on real changes to each element of the party slogan – “Unity, Socialism, Freedom.” He can still exploit the crisis to his end, they suggest, if he openly appeals to the nation in this moment of challenge with a clear vision of reform and forward movement. The people will rally around him and a reform vision, many believe, because Syrians are extremely worried about their country’s present isolation. They feel unjustly attacked by the West. They blame the West and not Bashar for Syria’s present predicament. They are ready to sacrifice if they believe the president has a plan to see them through this onslaught. [This emphasis here is by HC]

Only by changing course can the present regime save itself, reformers argue. If Bashar continues to present himself as the anti-Bush, he will be isolated and eventually squashed. Four years is a long time, they insist, and Bashar will not be able to retrench and delay until the end of the second Bush term. Anyway, they ask, “will the next US president really be different?”

What are the chances of Bashar changing course and throwing his weight behind reform?

They don’t look good...

Politics inside Syria is, actually, a far more complex business than most people in the US--and certainly, most people in the Bush administration!-- have ever realized.

Josh notes that, "The president is now resurrecting the old guard"-- that is, members of the group of veteran-Baathist "Uncles" who ran the various security services under Hafez al-Asad and who were the forum that annointed Bashar as the successor back when his Daddy died in 2000.

(As I argued back in numerous places back then, the fact that Bashar was still so beholden to the Uncles made all the frothy speculation in the west based on the fact that simply because he was young he would be a fearless reformer completely unrealistic... In fact he was always much more beholden to the Uncles than his father was.)

But anyway, another important thing that Josh writes in his post is this:

When President [Bashar] al-Asad moved to extend the presidency of Emile Lahoud five months ago, he effectively shoved aside the old guard (see earlier post), who counseled against the move. It was a way for Bashar to consolidate his authority around his family members and his new group of foreign policy advisors. As I argued at the time, this was a mistake. [Indeed it was, as I too have argued! ~HC]

But that is really interesting, if it was the Uncles who had counseled against Lahoud's extension... They are not stupid people, at all... Unlike, apparently, some of the people whose advice Bashar took last summer, instead.

In the immediately preceding post Josh had on this same topic, he made these two notable observations:

(1) Murhaf Jouejati is right to say [of the RPS], "It's almost unheard-of in Syria."

(2) Clearly France and Washington will turn up the heat. Washington knows very little about the internal workings of Syria, however.... The suggestion that the Syrian regime is about to collapse or Chirac's statement "that the Damascus government was unlikely to survive the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon," are either spin or pure ignorance. Probably the former.

I can't, obviously, give any of my own personal impressions of how opinion may have swayed inside Syria in the period since the Feb 14 killing of Rafiq Hariri. (That's why I'm really glad to have access to Josh Landis's cool and well-informed eye on the situation there.)

But I will, quickly, share two of the most notable things I heard from Syrian friends when I was in Damascus in early December:

(1) From a participant in the reform movement: That there had been real ferment and a lot of renewed hope inside the reform movement in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq... That the reformers felt that the US action had "strengthened their negotiating hand" vis-a-vis the government... But that those hopes died down again as people looked at the actual outcome, for Iraqis, of the US action in Iraq.

My query now would be, have the refomists' hopes undergone a similar cycle of rising and falling subsequent to the election in Iraq, and then the increasing realization that this does not look as though it has actually improved things there at all, to say the least?

(2) From a good, close observer of the country's political system: That the level of repression was continuing more or less the same as it had been for decades... But that this was, in this person's view, "largely unnecessary, since the Syrian regime is actually much more closely attuned to the sentiments and desires of the citizenry than just about any other Arab regime."

This is not, obviously, what most people in the Bush administration would like to hear. However, it does accord fairly closely with my own reading of the situation inside the country.

So anyway: Syria. How extremely depressing that the Bush administration now seems dedicated to pushing forward a Chalabi-like agenda there...

Didn't the idea of relying on very poorly connected, longtime expats get discredited after their experience with Mr. C? No, I guess it didn't. I guess they're more or less happy with the way things have turned out in Iraq so far (which I'll have to write more about here, very soon; meantime, just check the alarming upward creep of my "Democracy denied in Iraq" counter".)

How on earth the Bushies think they can somehow spin or "sell" to actual Mideast audiences the idea that an Iraq-style outcome is a worthwhile goal totally beats me.

But in the interview that Condi Rice gave to a group of WaPo journalists yesterday, she reveals a totally cavalier attitude to the whole, non-trivial concept of social-political stability in Middle Eastern countries... So it looks as though "Arc of Instability" may now actually be the goal of US policy in the Middle East, rather than its diagnosis of an existing problem.