THE UNITED NATIONS, New York — I was at the United Nations in New York Monday when the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1636 demanding Syria’s full cooperation on the investigation of the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. It was very clear that Syria is in much deeper trouble than it seems to acknowledge. The significance of Monday’s vote is that the United Nations Security Council took the unprecedented step of taking specific action to support an international investigation into the actions of individuals and organizations in one country (Syria) related to a capital crime committed in another country (Lebanon).
Bashar Assad and the Syrian government are being squeezed into a diplomatic corner, isolated and pressured politically, and are having their sovereignty slowly whittled away. This important trend was manifested by five key aspects of the resolution: it was adopted unanimously, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter that requires mandatory compliance and authorizes enforcement measures in the presence of the foreign ministers of most council members, repeatedly affirms a concern about possible Syrian involvement with the Hariri murder terror attack, and demands specific Syrian actions, including detaining officials and individuals who are part of the inner circle of power and are considered as suspects in the attack.
Damascus does not seem to realize that its traditional responses to foreign pressure — delaying, denying, giving in just enough to prevent the worst threats from materializing, pointing out the contradictions between how the world treats Syria and Israel — no longer work. The world is unimpressed, unconvinced and unmoved. It has responded by making Syria the international test case and example of a political dynamic that has heretofore been a purely American enterprise — demanding changes in Arab states’ behavior in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, as a means of “draining the swamp” and reducing the threat of extremism and terror from our region.
An intriguing element in the proceedings Monday was the disdainful manner in which the U.S. and U.K. foreign ministers personally criticized Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa after his comments on the resolution. The U.K.’s Jack Straw called the Syrian remarks “grotesque and insensitive” and “at best, absurd,” and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice later referred to Sharaa’s comments as a “really unbelievable tirade” and “a truly strange presentation.”
The combination of the political pressure and the aggressive rhetoric against Syria reflect less a genteel diplomatic process and more an exasperated attempt to discipline an unruly adolescent or wayward family member.
The unanimous nature of the resolution also must be seen in the light of another important development that is very clear here at the UN headquarters in New York: in the first year of George W. Bush’s second term, the United States has started to scale back on its unilateral military approach to changing the world after 9/11, and instead is selectively using a much more multilateral approach, anchored in working with the Europeans and through the Security Council.
As such, Resolution 1636 is as much about affirming a legitimate form of international intervention in the internal affairs and external behavior of individual states as it is about addressing the specifics of the Hariri murder investigation. Respected American analysts in Washington who follow these things closely believe that “realists” in the U.S. administration are implementing policies that still aim to achieve the same goals that were first defined by the neoconservatives a few years ago, but on the basis of the lessons of America’s troubles in Iraq.
“We can only do one Iraq at a time, because it’s all-consuming” one respected analyst-columnist told me, “so there is a deal to be done with Syria, where the U.S. wants behavior change, not necessarily regime change.”
The Iraqi link in the Syrian situation is a critical one from the American perspective, as Rice made clear in her remarks at the UN. She specifically singled out Syria’s “false statements, its support for terrorism, its interference in the affairs of its neighbors and its destabilizing behavior in the Middle East. Now the Syrian government must make a strategic decision to fundamentally change its behavior.”
Many analysts in Washington seem to agree that the U.S. has limited military options in Syria while it is bogged down in Iraq, does not want to risk chaos in two large Arab countries at once, and is concerned about who might replace Assad should regime change be attempted. This suggests again that a deal is there to be made, whereby the Syrian regime complies with demands to change its regional behavior in return for retaining power inside Syria. This is so especially since Rice and other American officials tend not to stress Syria’s domestic policies, but focus instead on its regional links, to Iraq, Palestinians, Iran, and Hizbullah in Lebanon.
The steady stream of UN resolutions pressuring Syria will continue, with another one expected soon on Syria’s compliance with previous UN resolutions demanding that it stop interfering in Lebanon. The demands being made on the Syrian president and regime are increasingly difficult for them to meet, but the demands are only getting more severe with each new resolution.
If a deal can be made, its outlines will have to be made clear in the coming six weeks, before the mid-December deadline set by Monday’s resolution. The chances of this happening are good, I suspect, but it will probably require significant internal changes that modify the bases of the Syrian regime’s legitimacy and incumbency, somewhat akin to what Mikhail Gorbachev did in the Soviet Union shortly after he took power.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 02 November 2005
Word Count: 930
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