SeekerBlog

Regular Seeker Blog readers will have noted a conviction that everything Johns
Hopkins scholar Fouad Ajami writes deserves a careful reading. This
essay for Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005, is no exception. The
legacy media continues to assert that the dramatic changes afoot in Lebanon
and Syria have nothing to do with the hated Bush Doctrine, and certainly nothing
to do with the liberation of Iraq. The truth is otherwise, as Ajami makes abundantly
clear in this essay:

1. The fresh breeze of the "Arab spring" would
   not be blowing today absent the Bush initiatives.
2. The progress in
   Lebanon has been supported to some degree by France.
3. The Arab
   states will not be coming to Syria’s rescue.

If Ajami is correct, and I think he is, it is time buy Lebanon and
to sell Syria’s stock short:

Summary: If the assassins of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri
sought to make an example of him for his defiance of Syria, the aftermath
of the crime has mocked them. For a generation, Lebanon was an appendage
of Syrian power. But now the Lebanese people, in an "independence intifada," are
clamoring for a return to normalcy. The old Arab edifice of power has survived
many challenges in the past, but something is different this time: the United
States is now willing to gamble on freedom.

…

In 1990-91, in the context of a radically different international order, the
world averted its gaze as Syria destroyed the last vestiges of Lebanon’s independence.
That was the price willingly paid by President George H.W. Bush for enlisting
Damascus in the first campaign against Saddam. Those were good wages garnered
by the Syrians. Syria did little for the coalition but was accepted as the
gendarmerie of a volatile Lebanese polity. Then the outside world forgot about
Lebanon. The missionaries, businesspeople, writers, and spooks who had known
the country wandered away or aged. The dominant impression of Lebanon became
that of a country given to tribal atavisms and bottomless feuds.

But more than a decade later, U.S. power positioned itself in Iraq, directly
on Syria’s eastern border. Pax Americana’s tolerance for bargains with strongmen
had substantially eroded since the September 11 attacks. True, Syria had
not merited charter membership in President George W. Bush’s "axis of evil." The
Syrians warded off danger by "turning state’s evidence" — sharing
what intelligence they had about the countless jihadists who hailed from Syria.
But even as Syria tried to sit out the campaign in Iraq, it could not do so
entirely. The lucrative Syrian trade of reexporting Iraqi oil in violation
of international sanctions — bringing in a windfall of some $1 billion a year
— was one casualty of this war. The other was most of Syria’s leverage with
the United States. Damascus had no real claims on Washington’s loyalty and
indulgence. The sort of access to the Pax Americana enjoyed by Cairo and Riyadh
was not available to Syria’s rulers. In the run-up to the Iraq war, Damascus
had voted for a Security Council resolution authorizing Iraq’s disarmament.
But that could not buy Syria indefinite protection against the United States’
wrath. Indeed, Bashar al-Assad and his cronies could be forgiven their worries
that their regime could be the next target in U.S. cross hairs. The spectacle
of the Iraqi dictator chased into his "spider hole" provided a
cautionary tale. Hard as Damascus may have tried to maintain that Iraq was not its affair,
the toppling of the Baathist tyranny next door was a crystal ball in which
Syria’s rulers could glimpse intimations of their own demise.

No one in the Arab world would shed tears for Assad and his political dynasty,
and he and his men knew that. Theirs was a minority regime, the dominion of
the Alawis, a heterodox Muslim community from Syria’s northern mountains, over
a principally Sunni Muslim society. Hafiz al-Assad, who established the regime,
may have lacked Saddam’s megalomania, but at the heart of his government was
the cult of the ruler and his iron fist. In Syria as in Iraq, a generation
of peasant soldiers and merciless ideologues took the society apart and trumpeted
their pursuit of a new social order, only to create a system of political sterility
and economic plunder.

Although Assad’s regime had shut down its critics at home and had seemingly
subdued Lebanon, the new security doctrine of the United States held dangers
aplenty for it. Wars of pre-emption were now a distinct possibility. Washington
had its hands full in Iraq, but no one in Damascus
could be certain that the U.S. drive to finish off Arab dictators would come
to a halt in Iraq. And there were Washington’s "neocons" — a veritable obsession of the Arab
intellectual and political class, in Damascus and beyond. Who knew what they
had in mind? There was unsettling talk of "low-hanging fruit" and "phase
two" of the U.S. military effort. There was paranoia to spare in Arab
political circles about a new American imperial bid to remake the Arab world.

As Syria’s rulers hunkered down and waited to see the unfolding of the U.S.
project in Iraq, they did their best to aid and abet the anti-U.S. insurgency
there, while still maintaining the necessary fiction of their neutrality,
doing what they could to avoid open confrontation with Washington. It was
a game of cat and mouse: it was known that Arab jihadists from Yemen, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan traveled to Mosul and the Sunni Triangle from Syria.
There was irony here: an Alawite regime that was at odds with Sunni Islamists
at home was feeding a Sunni insurgency next door. The jihadists dreaded the
Syrian regime as a "godless tyranny" but took its favors. The 400-mile
border was porous, and the Syrians had no interest in securing it. There
were loyalists of the decapitated Iraqi regime with money to spare; they
were looking for sanctuary, and the Syrians would provide it.

It was important for Syria that this heady U.S. bid to
change the politics of the Arab states be thwarted. The more blood and treasure
the United States expended in Iraq, the safer it was for Damascus. The new U.S. reach into the
Arab world was a transient affair, the Syrians hoped. In time, Washington would
grow weary of its burdens and pack up the military gear, along with U.S. designs
for the region and its people. In the interim, Syria would punctuate its steady
undermining of the U.S. operation with small favors and concessions to the
U.S. military authorities. The Syrians could also plead that sealing the Syrian-Iraqi
border was beyond their power and that they lacked the means and technology
to monitor the age-old traffic on their frontier.

The Bush administration had announced nothing less than
the obsolescence of the Arab world’s old authoritarian order. The
brittle system in Damascus was in a fight to keep intact its old ways of
control. Gone was the steady hand of the old juggler, Hafiz al-Assad. Gone,
too, made obsolete by the rise of George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, was the tortured U.S. diplomacy, that fabled "peace process," that
had courted Damascus and catered to its sense of importance as a big player
in the Fertile Crescent. When he was Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Barak
had contemplated a deal with Damascus in preference to a settlement with
the Palestinians. The Syrians had held back and were left on the sidelines.
No one in Jerusalem or Washington was waiting on Syria any longer. An autocratic
regime had survived, but the confidence and the security it had once possessed
had cracked.

…

But even before Hariri’s tragic death reawakened interest in Lebanon’s fate,
Syria’s occupation was being called into question. In his State of the Union
address on February 2, 2005, President Bush announced a departure from the
old U.S. reticence: "Syria still allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon,
to be used by terrorists who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region.
You have passed, and we are applying, the Syrian Accountability Act, and we
expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror, and open the door
to freedom." The Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration
Act, a congressional initiative of 2003, had given the president broad authority
to impose a range of economic sanctions and restrictions on Syria. The White
House had initially treated the initiative with some reserve, and so its embrace
by Bush signaled a change in official policy.

In the aftermath of Hariri’s assassination, Bush upped
the ante: Syrian armed forces had to quit Lebanon and take with them their
intelligence operatives. There was no small irony in this twist of history: fifteen
years earlier, George H.W. Bush and Hafiz al-Assad had struck a deal that
liquidated Lebanon’s independence;
now their sons were bringing that deal to an end. It was fitting that the edifice
of Syrian control secured in the first campaign against Saddam was being undone
in the course of the second.

Syria never fully assimilated how different the world had become after September
11. In March 2001, Cardinal Sfeir had journeyed to the United States, where
he sought an audience with Bush — in vain. This was, after all, the time
of realism: no one wanted to offend Damascus or stir up the passions of Lebanese
nationalism. Four years later, however, a president who had "planted the
flag of liberty" in Arab lands had no choice but to take up the cause
of Lebanon’s independence. The war on terror came to Lebanon’s
rescue. If the Middle East was to be repaired, then the establishment of a
legitimate system of authority in Lebanon was of paramount concern. Damascus held effective power
but was not accountable; Beirut retained the trappings of sovereignty but could
not deliver public order or maintain peace in its territory.

On the Hezbollah threat:

A truly sovereign Lebanese government could have brought Hezbollah to heel.
But Syria’s writ made it impossible for the Lebanese army to deploy to the
south, the frontier with Israel; Hezbollah lived on the indulgence granted
by its status as an Islamic "resistance movement" and could ride
roughshod over the authority of any incumbent government.

In truth, however, the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon robbed the
militia of its raison d’être. True, a pretext was found for Hezbollah
to retain its weapons: in the aftermath of the withdrawal, the group made
a new claim on a small strip of land still in Israel’s possession called
Shebaa Farms. But the cause of Shebaa Farms is a sham, and everyone
apart from the most diehard of Hezbollah operatives knows it: the
underdeveloped land is actually subject to negotiations between Damascus and
Jerusalem, for Syrian forces had possession of it when it fell under Israel’s
control in 1967. No great emotions stir in Lebanon about that largely barren
territory.

Strictly speaking, Hezbollah does not need the "holy war" and is
already participating in the confessional politics of Lebanon, on behalf of
the poorer Shiites. The Party of God fields candidates for Lebanon’s parliament,
runs a television station, and funds a whole host of economic endeavors. Hitherto,
U.S. diplomacy has paid Hezbollah only fitful attention. U.S. officials could
turn up in Damascus, but no satisfaction could be had there. In the words of
the articulate Lebanese publisher Gebran Tuéni, the Syrians ruled Lebanon
by "remote control" and would never own up to their power over
Hezbollah’s operatives. Why would Syria clip Hezbollah’s wings? The organization
was Syria’s trump card in Lebanon and on the border with Israel. Iran provides Hezbollah
with money; Syria’s gift has been protection. But the logic of the Bush administration’s
war on terror is one of pre-emption, of refusing to wait on gathering dangers,
so Hezbollah has long been destined to be a legitimate U.S. concern.

Hezbollah’s independent power should not be overestimated.
A Lebanese army free to assert its authority would easily subdue it. That army would have on
its side the bulk of a Shia community averse to hurling itself and its villages
into another destructive war on the Lebanese-Israeli border. A viable political
center revolves around the authority of the Maronite patriarch, the prestige
and power of the Druze leader Jumblat, and the technocrats who were associated
with Hariri, mainly Sunni Muslims who have shed their acquiescence to join
the anti-Syrian coalition. The Shiites have appeared uncertain in the midst
of this tumult, but they are nationalists and will not want to be left out
of the making of a new political order. They will not want to end up on the
side of a despised Syrian regime.

On the probability of rescue by the Arab powers:

In the Arab world, there is now in the air the same reading
of Syria that came to surround Saddam’s regime on the eve of its destruction
by the United States: a recognition that the Syrians have overplayed their
hand and are now on their own. No science can predict when old ways will suddenly lose their
legitimacy, and when patience with them will snap. There has been much bloodshed
in Arab life, everyone knows all too well. But the Hariri murder, in full public
view at midday in West Beirut, claimed the Syrian power structure as its collateral
damage. Assad’s move to replace the head of military intelligence with his
brother-in-law only days after Hariri’s murder was a clumsy response to the
suspicions swirling around Syria.

The claims of an Iranian-Syrian accord should also not
be given much credence. Iran’s horizons are wider, and Iran’s interests differ radically from those
of Syria. For all their strident revolutionary poses, the Iranians are shrewd,
unsentimental practitioners of realpolitik. Iran’s pursuit of its nuclear ambitions
(or the barter of these ambitions for economic and political concessions from
Europe and the United States) overwhelms the concerns of Syria, with its extortion
rackets in the Bekaa Valley and Tripoli. Tehran will not ride to the rescue
of Damascus.

On the significance of the Bush Doctrine and a free, democratic Iraq:

Deep down the Syrians no doubt once believed that a Pax Americana pressed
in Iraq could be made to strike a bargain: Iraq for Lebanon. The Syrians would
provide their own version of cooperation on the Syrian-Iraqi border in return
for the old acceptance of their dominion in Lebanon. This sort of bargain has
had its advocates in Washington. But it now lies in shambles. For one, the
Syrians have not made good on their promises of cooperation. Then, too, the
prospect of a functioning Iraqi government that would tend to its own affairs
with Syria and hold it responsible for its deeds suddenly seems within reach.
This was the outcome of Iraq’s elections. And there has been that discernible
change in Washington that makes tolerance for Syria harder to live with: the
new emphasis on freedom, the assertion by President Bush that the old bargain
with Arab autocracies has been an incubator for terror.

The entrenched systems of control in the Arab world are beginning to give
way. It is a terrible storm, but the perfect antidote to a foul sky. The old
Arab edifice of power, it is true, has had a way of surviving many storms.
It has outwitted and outlived many predictions of its imminent demise.

But suddenly it seems like the autumn of the dictators. Something different
has been injected into this fight. The United States –
a great foreign power that once upheld the Arab autocrats, fearing what mass
politics would bring — now braves the storm. It has signaled its willingness
to gamble on the young, the new, and the unknown. Autocracy was once deemed tolerable, but terrorists,
nurtured in the shadow of such rule, attacked the United States on September
11, 2001. Now the Arabs, grasping for a new world, and the Americans, who have
helped usher in this unprecedented moment, together ride this storm wave of
freedom.