The Hobbits of Brussels

               Four Middle Eastern Paradoxes

 Weekly Briefing on Israeli and Middle Eastern Affairs  December 22, 2002

Dr. Eran Lerman

Director, Israel/Middle East Office

From time to time, it falls to the British government to do the morally ugly stuff that Washington simply cannot get away with, but that the old pattern of European diplomacy can still sustain. Such was the case this week, as Syrian dictator Bashar Assad (with his pretty, London-bred wife, Asma Akhras) came to revisit the happy places where he lived when he was still an aspiring eye doctor, before his brother’s death, in a car accident, made him his father’s heir apparent. (Funny system for a “socialist republic,” but the North Korean succession was even funnier, if that is where your sense of humor takes you.)

Now president since June 2000—and so far, fairly successful in consolidating his power base and shutting up most of the democratic voices that emerged in the brief “Damascus spring” of 2001—Assad is a necessary interlocutor, if the war on Saddam’s regime is to be successful. He is also, however, fiercely anti-Semitic (remember his comments in Spain and the Vatican about the Jews who killed Jesus?), and a much more active supporter of terrorism (excuse me, “press officers” of the heroic Palestinian “Resistance”) than Saddam has dared to be, at least openly, in recent times. Just before he came to London, his man at the UN voted against (!) the condemnation of the terror attacks in Mombasa—an act that in itself should have tossed Syria out of the community of nations in any normal system (which the UN Security Council still is not, despite this welcome new departure from past patterns, in which all fourteen other members supported the draft).

What can be done? Tony Blair’s mission, as he sees it, is to engage young Assad in “much parlay”—to borrow a Churchillian phrase—and to ensure that he does not allow Hizballah (or even hotheads within the Syrian establishment) to disrupt the U.S.-British game plan in the region by dragging Israel into a two-front war with both the Palestinians and Iran’s proxies in Lebanon. We may be entitled to feel that kissing the Queen’s hand while hosting the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas butchers is taking these tactics a step too far. But at the same time, sober consideration should be given to the dangerous passage ahead—and to the day after.

At the moment, Hizballah is capable of launching a very extensive attack on large parts of Israel. There is no Lebanese governance, in effect, south of the Litani River. The full strategic cost of Israeli withdrawal in May 2000 is only now coming into focus—for the IDF and the intelligence community, if not for the public at large, the media, and the political circles, where some still speak of it as an act of statesmanship. Thousands of Katyusha rockets, Fajr 5 and 7, and Zilzal (earthquake) missiles, supplied by Iran in recent years, could rain down on civilian and military targets. Nothing short of a large-scale operation deep into Lebanon would put an end to it. This could happen—and not in the far distant future—unless Assad is persuaded not to let it happen.

Blair’s way is one side of the coin. Did it work? He certainly did not convert his guest. In a closed session with British parliamentarians (few showed up: a good omen) toward the end of his visit, Assad railed against Christianity as a “radical religion”—look at Bush!—repeated the blood libel about a “massacre’ in Jenin, and held on to his support for terrorism. It is to be hoped, however, that the British prime minister did use the one-on-one meetings to convey to the Syrian what will be the price for him and his dynasty if he allows these fine opinions to be translated into action at the wrong moment.

Here is the other side of the coin. In the real world—where diplomacy can, at best, assist in sending a message, but can rarely be the message itself—such restraint as can be imposed on Syrian behavior will rest only on a solid foundation of Israeli deterrence. Luckily, Assad can be under no illusion as to what will happen to his armed forces in the case of war. Indeed, he openly says that his support for suicide bombers (a “moral” position which he still feels free to take, but which should be made as universally repugnant as support for slavery or genocide) is a way of compensating for the Arabs’ weakness in any field of conventional warfare. It is precisely for this reason that Israeli capabilities—perhaps the only real guarantee against a descent into all-out political and moral disintegration in our part of the world –should be maintained and enhanced in the rough passage ahead. Unfortunately, the very same British government that indirectly relies on these capabilities is doing very little, if not less, to help sustain them; this is what the Americans are for, after all.

At the end of the day, the response to the Syrian challenge—as many other things in the Middle East today—is a matter of sequence. While we should never let down our wall of moral anger against all that young Assad stands for, the problem that he represents should be recognized for what it is: a reflection of the lingering power of totalitarian politics, in conjunction with terrorist practices, in large parts of the region. Syrian oil deals with Iraq, and the flow of Iranian arms to Hizballah, are key elements in the current balance. When the broader regional picture changes, the time will come for Assad to rethink his place in the world. Young leaders can still do u-turns—or else face the strategic, and moral, consequences of their present positions.