Now that the dust has settled in the Middle East after the killing of Hariri, analysts like Rami Khouri understand that the Bush team is not really serious about democracy—but is serious about change. Khouri recognizes Bush’s artiface for what it is, and offers Syria’s Assad a path to survival through reform.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Syria is being driven, and is driving itself , into a very difficult corner, with fewer and fewer realistic policy options as time passes. The status of Syria is all the more urgent and relevant in view of its pullout from Lebanon under intense Lebanese and international pressure. Syria cannot leave Lebanon—as it has confirmed to the UN it will do by the end of this month—and simply watch the process and its aftermath on CNN and Al Jazeera. Pressures will increase against Damascus, which must respond in a more constructive and productive way than it has dealt with its predicament in the past few years.
The strong emotional tensions and resentments that now cloud Lebanese-Syrian relations will dissipate in time, and a healthier, normal bilateral relationship will reassert itself. But the world will not care or pay attention, because bilateral Syrian-Lebanese ties are not the issue, and never were. The United States, France, the United Nations, Israel, all the Arabs and the Federated States of Micronesia collectively and consistently accepted Syria's dominant role in Lebanon since the mid-1970s, and never raised the matter of the quality of Lebanon's democracy.
Today, though, Paris and Washington ring the bell of Lebanese liberty three times a week, and five times a week during religious holidays and election seasons. Most Lebanese are pleased, to be sure. But many are also concerned that the United States is only using Lebanon as a means to pressure Syria, and will forget about democracy in Beirut and Baalbek once America gets what it wants from Syria.
The American ultimate aim in pressuring Syria, though, is also unclear to many. Is it to change the Assad/Baathist regime in Damascus? Change the regime's policies only? Use Syria as a surrogate to break up contacts among Iran, Syria and Hezbollah? Use Syria as a lesson for all those who dare to oppose, resist or defy American goals, or, in some cases, congruent American and Israeli goals?
It seems clear that pressure on Syria will intensify, not abate, next month after it withdraws from Lebanon, and probably from several quarters simultaneously. The triumphalist neoconservative-driven American administration will keep hitting Damascus on the several issues and accusations already on the table; these include leaving Lebanon to its own destiny, disarming or marginalizing Hezbollah, cutting off support for rejectionist Palestinian groups, cooperating on improving security in Iraq, renouncing plans to acquire weapons of mass destruction and not supporting "terrorist" groups.
Europe will continue using the promise of its Association Agreement with Syria as leverage to extract concessions. Internal demands on the Syrian government will also accelerate, once its exit from Lebanon shows it to be susceptible to pressure. The United Nations will also keep monitoring the Syrian government's behavior.
Parallel to this is the chilling reality of Syria's reduced political assets, regionally and globally. Its linkages with and impact on key regional issues has been drastically reduced or totally eliminated in recent years—including Lebanon, Hezbollah, Israel, Iran, the Palestinians, the United States, France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the European Union, to mention only the most obvious. Its domestic economic capacity to sustain itself is also running out of time, as Syrian officials themselves now admit, refreshingly. Syria is targeted, pressured, threatened and weakened diplomatically. Its current strategy of piecemeal compliance with international demands, combined with vocal defiance of the Americans (and Israelis), seems to be running out of time and relevance. This is not 1995, and we are not in the Barcelona Process happy hour conversation. This is 2005, the American and Israeli armed forces are next door, active and planning, the United Nations demands and gets regular reports on Damascus' conduct, and most Arab countries have made it clear they will not support Syria.
What should the Damascus regime do in this situation? It has few palatable choices, and probably only one realistic one. It must essentially choose from among the fates of three regimes whose leaders' recent history should ring instructive wake-up bells in Damascus—Mikhael Gorbachev, Moammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein.
The Saddam Hussein option of blind defiance is suicidal and not recommended. A more realistic—and probably the only remaining—option for Damascus would be to forge a policy combining the Gorbachev and Gaddafi ways. From Gorbachev, the Syrian leadership should borrow the realism of adapting to the facts of a changed world, and respond by initiating radical economic and political reforms from the top. Gorbachev used the Communist Party Congress in 1986 to launch extensive reforms that opened up the political system and restructured it economically (perestroika and glasnost ). Syrian President Bashar Assad should consider mobilizing the Baath Party Congress scheduled for May or June to do something equally radical in Syria.
As Gorbachev coupled radical domestic reform with a Soviet military withdrawal from Afghanistan starting in early 1988, Assad similarly should consider following the withdrawal from Lebanon with his own radical transformation plan for Syria. He would want obviously to avoid Gorbachev's fate of having to resign as Soviet Union president in December 1991, six years after his election.
He could do this by adopting some of the Gaddafi approach to continued incumbency in the face of Western pressure. Gaddafi renounced his plans to develop WMDs and paid compensation to international victims of terror attacks blamed on Libya. One suspects he remains in power, with no serious pressures on him to make any domestic changes, because the United States and the West do not care about the quality of life of Libyan citizens, or their democratic qualities, any more than they really care about democracy in Lebanon. The parallels and contrasts between the West's focus on democracy in Lebanon and its total oblivion on democracy in Libya is shockingly instructive, but that's another story for another day.
The lessons for Syria should be obvious. Syria should not have any problem complying with the demands from legitimate quarters such as the U.N. Security Council, as it has done, and explicitly acknowledged, with Resolution 1559. It can use such compliance with legitimate demands as leverage to generate a renewed effort for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace accord. Withdrawal from Lebanon, compliance with U.N. demands, comprehensive peace with Israel, and a radical reform program at home would bring Damascus several things that it badly needs and that it could use to spark a real renaissance at home: a robust, mobilized domestic citizenry-constituency for modernity, democracy and dignified prosperity, good amounts of foreign aid, important open access to U.S. and EU trade markets, significant repatriation of Syrian expatriate funds and managerial and technical know-how, and—intangibly but crucially—renewed respect in the region and the world.
Somewhere between the Gorbachev and Gaddafi experiences is a realistic route for a Syrian renaissance, continued regime incumbency, better policies for Syrians as a whole, and affirmation of legitimate international legal standards and principles.
