Alienating
The Beating Heart
Of Middle East
By Nicola Nasser
28 July, 2006
Countercurrents.org
The United States is seeking
a “new Middle East” by alienating the Syrian beating heart
of the strategic region. Washington wants Syria to cooperate as near
as in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon and as far as in Iran but is sending
her messages and messengers all around the region except to Damascus.
This Wednesday the U.S. sponsored in Rome an international conference
on Syria’s next door war-ravaged Lebanese neighbour to which were
invited regional countries that have no common borders with Lebanon
and nations as far as Russia, but not Syria the most burnt and threatened
by the Lebanese raging fire.
While confirming this week that the “time has come for the new
Middle East,” the United States seemed to shoot herself in the
legs when it bypassed Damascus as the right address to any credible
approach to the Syrian heartland of the region, leaving observers with
the conclusion that Syria is not cooperating and accordingly it has
to be forced into cooperation.
And while carrying this mission herself in the eastern Iraqi front,
the U.S. delegated the job in the western front to her Israeli regional
proxy, which occupies a strategic part of Syria.
True the war decision-making is made in Israel, but Syria holds the
key to the regional peace-making as well as to any sustainable regional
re-mapping in the immediate vicinity of major U.S. strategic concerns,
namely the security of oil and Israel.
The relative stability the region enjoyed during the past three decades
and the twin Jordanian and Egyptian peace treaties with Israel were
only made possible thanks to the Saudi-Egyptian-Syrian troika of which
Syria constituted a cornerstone.
Several factors, mostly U.S.-linked, have placed this Syrian cornerstone
in jeopardy. The most decisive factor was and is the U.S. determined
campaign to change the regional political regimes, starting from the
immediate neighbours of Syria in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, explicitly
indicating that the end target is changing the Syrian regime itself,
as a prerequisite for heralding the “New Middle East.’
President George W. Bush has sent his invading troops into Iraq, gave
a green light for the Israeli war machine to bombard the Gaza Strip
and Lebanon, spearheaded a regional propaganda campaign to adopt the
Iraqi-model of the U.S.-sponsored democracy towards Syria, and put his
Secretary of State on a shuttle plane to send a message to Damascus:
Make the choice and subscribe to our “New Middle East.”
But why didn’t Bush send his message and messengers direct to
the Syrian capital? Is Bush naïve not to? Absolutely he is not.
Bush is very well aware that Syria had received the U.S. message early
and long enough to loose trust in it and to conclude from a bitter experience
that Washington was not serious to be even-handed and remained biased
in the Arab – Israeli conflict, that its promises to bring about
peace were phoney and hollow, and that it was only interested in reinforcing
the U.S. – Israeli hegemony in the region.
The U.S. message was sent to Damascus thirty-six years ago, received
positively, led to a lengthy honey moon in the bilateral ties, and could
have lasted longer had not Washington had second thoughts when it led
the invasion of Iraq early in March 2002, sowing deeper doubts in the
U.S. real intentions and complicating further an already complicated
regional situation.
Unleashing the regional Israeli war machine against democratically elected
grassroots anti-occupation movements in Palestine and Lebanon, the geopolitical
allies of Syria, confirmed the Syrian doubts about the U.S. regional
plans.
The US-led invasion of Iraq, the Israeli US-backed periodical invasions
of Lebanon and the Israeli 39-year old occupation of the Syrian Golan
Heights have all focused Syria in the eye of the Middle East storm and
are stretching Syrian strict adherence to the peace option, international
law, United Nations legitimacy and diplomatic norms to a breaking point.
However the United States and Israel are unmercifully and persistently
mounting pressure on the country in a deliberate effort to break it
down and up, unless Damascus completely and unconditionally subscribes
to their re-mapping of the Middle East, following the “good example”
of Libya.
“We are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back
to the old one (and) the Syrians have to make a choice … Are they
going to be a part of what is clearly a consensus of the major Arab
states in the region?” Secretary Condoleezza Rice said on Friday.
Syria did make the “choice” when late President Hafez Assad
assumed power in 1970-71, joined the “Arab consensus,” subscribed
to peace as a strategic option and officially adopted the U.N. Security
Council resolutions 242 and 338, risking internal rift in the ruling
Baath party.
Assad’s strategic choice led Syria into Lebanon backed by the
Arab consensus, the U.S. backing and a grudgingly Israeli green light,
which positioned him into a bloody collision course with the Lebanese
pan-Arab and leftist allies of the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO), which was then condemned by the U.S. and Israel as “the”
international “terrorist” organization, at a time when Osama
bin Laden was a U.S. ally and Hizbollah and Hamas were not yet born.
Assad’s choice also indulged Syria into a diplomatic honey moon
with the U.S. at a time of a bipolar world system, when the former Soviet
Union (USSR) was at the helm of the other side of the cold war divide,
paved the way for Syrian – Israeli peace talks, and even led Syria
to join the U.S.-led military coalition that drove the Iraqis out of
Kuwait in 1991, where Syrian and U.S. soldiers fought shoulder-to-shoulder.
However it was a one way U.S. ticket that brought Syria neither closer
to peace nor security. More than thirty years were lost for nothing
on betting on the U.S. “good will” and “good offices”
that were not forthcoming.
The Syrian Golan Heights remained occupied by Israel. The Syrian regime
remained targeted for change by U.S. ruling neoconservatives. Syria
remained sanctioned as a state sponsoring “terrorism.” U.S.
remained weighing in heavily on Syria to succumb to the dictates of
the Israeli occupying power for peace as well as the U.S.-Israeli re-mapping
plans for the Middle East.
That is the “status quo ante” that Secretary Condoleezza
Rice failed to grasp when she refused to “freeze” the status
quo ante on the Israeli-Lebanese border.
Syria also has repeatedly warned against preserving the status quo ante.
How could any Syrian leadership sit idle watching the geo-military and
geo-political bases of its national security undermined to bring the
Israeli hostile occupying power to the doorsteps of its metropolitan?
How could any country tolerate such an existential threat!
The United States and Israel are contemplating a NATO-led international
force at Syria’s doorsteps, and to bring about a pro-U.S. or a
puppet regime in Beirut.
Israeli bombardment of Lebanon is driving hundreds of thousands of refugees
to flee the atrocities of the Israeli midwife of the “new”
sovereign and democratic Lebanon from the west into Syria, which is
hardly coping with the ongoing flow of thousands of Iraqi refugees fleeing
the birth horrors of another democratic regime that was midwifed by
the US-led invasion of its eastern neighbour, in addition to slightly
less than half a million Palestinian refugees the country is hosting
since the creation of the state of Israel forced them out in 1948.
Syria, however, is strongly holding on to its strategic option of peace
and negotiations. The Syrian – Israeli front has for decades remained
the only “silent” front, more silent than even both fronts
of Jordan and Egypt, the only Arab countries to sign peace treaties
with Israel.
On Sunday Syria said it was willing to engage in direct talks with the
U.S. to help end the fighting in Lebanon within the framework of a broader
peace initiative that would include a return of the Golan Heights, occupied
by Israel in 1967.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, swiftly dismissed any talks
with Syria, which “doesn't need dialogue to know what they need
to do,” he told Fox News Sunday, adding: “Syria, along with
Iran, is really part of the problem.”
“American officials are very good at vernacular descriptions,
but lousy at history and political reality in the Middle East,”
Lebanese journalist Rami G. Khouri wrote in The Daily Star on Monday.
The Bush administration's approach to the “New Middle East”
is doomed to failure because it rules out addressing Syrian national
strategic concerns and Syria as a regional key player, irrespective
of who rules in Damascus.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in
Ramallah, West Bank. He is the editor of the English language Web site
of the Palestine Media Centre (PMC).