In the Lion's Den

by Andrew Tabler

  While Syrians were now free to resist Israel, Assad, like Nasser, was clear that political reform would remain on the back burner until the enemy was defeated and dignity restored. “We have made steps [toward greater freedoms], and we have a vision,” Assad said. “But we don’t want freedoms that are exploited from the outside, which is happening…. [We do not want to] enter into the framework of chaos or dependency and cheat our domestic situation. Loyalty to the country means not accepting foreign interference from any embassy…. Work continues on a new parties law, but we must have more room to accomplish it under the circumstances.”

  After two weeks of surveying Israel’s destruction in Lebanon, I took the Damascus Road over the Lebanon mountains and across the Bekaa Valley back to Syria’s Al-Jdeida border crossing. A Syrian border guard whom I knew smiled when he took my passport, sat down at his computer terminal, and typed in my name and passport number. I had made the crossing hundreds of times, so stamping in and out was a formality.

  He suddenly frowned and repeatedly hit a key on the keyboard, like he was scrolling down my file. Then he stood up, threw back his shoulders, and thrust my passport back at me. “You are forbidden from entry,” he said. When I tried to ask him what the computer said or what the problem was, he just brushed me aside with his hand.

  “You will never get back into Syria.”

  While Leila tried to sort out what was behind my ban and figure out how to get me back in the country (which eventually did happen), events in Washington and Beirut did not bode well for the Bush administration’s Syria policy. With sectarian violence spiraling in Iraq throughout 2006 and no end to the war in sight, Republicans and Democrats began openly questioning President Bush’s Iraq policy. The Iraq Study Group (ISG)—a bipartisan commission established in March 2006 to assess the situation in Iraq—had spent the better part of the year evaluating the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, with the goal of proposing a way out of the chaos. Its co-chairs, former secretary of state James Baker and former US representative Lee H. Hamilton, promised that, in order to keep the report nonpartisan, its findings would not be released until after the US general election on November 4.

  In reaction to the Iraq chaos as well as the summer war in Lebanon, Americans voted en masse for Democratic Party candidates, wresting the House of Representatives and the Senate away from Republican control. The following day, President Bush announced the resignation of secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. In the days that followed, the international media reported that the ISG report would recommend engaging Syria and Iran over Iraq and the Middle East. Baker began appearing on national television openly advocating “hard-nosed” engagement with Damascus, based on his experience negotiating with Hafez al-Assad to get Syria to attend the 1991 peace conference in Madrid.

  A few days later, on November 11, 2006, one day before a key vote in the Lebanese cabinet concerning the establishment of an international tribunal into the assassination of Rafik Hariri, Shiite ministers, led by Hezbollah, plus a Christian ally, walked out of the cabinet. While Lebanese premier Fouad Siniora technically had enough ministers to continue to hold cabinet sessions, the Hezbollah-led pullout from the cabinet left it with no representatives from the country’s Shiite community, essentially breaking the long-standing practice of communal shared participation in government. The opposition claimed Siniora’s rump cabinet was illegal, making its decisions nonbinding.

  In response, Hezbollah followers, as well as their Christian allies, took to the streets of downtown Beirut. The protestors surrounded the Grand Serail, Siniora’s administrative offices, and erected a tent city, essentially occupying the center of the Lebanese capital. The state’s internal security forces erected a barbed-wire barricade between the protestors and the Grand Serail, which divided the downtown area in two. Hezbollah and its allies opened hospitality tents for visitors and foreign journalists. Their message was simple: the tribunal into Hariri’s murder is a US-Israeli plot to destroy Lebanon.

  7

  PLAYING WITH FIRE IN EASTERN SYRIA

  Turning on the television the morning of January 11, 2007, I flicked through the local channels to catch the news, eager to get the Syrian reaction to President Bush’s much-anticipated policy announcement on Iraq the previous evening. Syrian TV Channel One reported on the spiraling violence in Iraq as well as criticisms by the new US Democratic House and Senate leaders of Bush’s speech. Eager to hear what the president said and with only a dial-up Internet connection at home, I headed for the Syria Today office, where one of the country’s relatively few DSL connections made video streaming possible.

  My Internet browser chugged for several minutes to load the file. Finally, President Bush’s face filled up my laptop screen. Wearing a blue tie and standing before a bookshelf in the White House library, he looked older than I remembered him, with graying hair and a puffy face. As he started the first few lines of what would become one of the most important policy speeches of his administration, he breathed deeply between each sentence.

  “Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror—and our safety here at home,” Bush said, his voice slightly shaky. “The new strategy I outline tonight will change America’s course in Iraq and help us succeed in the fight against terror.”1

  Bush went on to say that almost a year earlier, twelve million Iraqis had cast their ballots “for a unified and democratic nation.” However, spiraling violence following al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque of Sammara in February 2006 had overwhelmed the election’s political gains. Calling the situation “unacceptable to the American people” as well as himself, Bush, in a rare mea culpa, admitted “mistakes have been made” and that “the responsibility rests with me.”

  What Iraqis needed most was security, Bush said. With 80 percent of sectarian violence taking place within thirty miles of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, Bush announced that he was ordering a twenty-thousand-person increase in force levels that would assist Iraqi security services and the army to clear neighborhoods, protect the population, and, unlike in the past, hold areas under coalition control. In another new step, Bush announced that coalition forces would now have a “green light” to go into all neighborhoods. He said that past “political and sectarian interference” had prevented US forces from going after those fueling the violence, a situation Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki now promised would “not be tolerated.”

  Ten minutes into the speech, Bush turned his attention to Anbar Province, an area adjacent to Syria which al-Qaeda now used as a home base. Describing Anbar as “the most violent area outside the capital,” Bush cited a captured al-Qaeda document “describing the terrorists’ plan to infiltrate and seize control” of the province. Bush claimed that this would “bring al-Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq’s democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.” Bush said the situation was not without hope, as “local tribal leaders had begun to show their willingness to take on al-Qaeda,” a situation that US commanders believed provided “an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists.” To do that, Bush announced that he was ordering four thousand more troops to Anbar Province.

  Bush blamed the Iranian and Syrian regimes for allowing “terrorists and insurgents” to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. In a stark warning to both countries, Bush announced that US forces would “interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria” and “destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” Framing Iraq in ominous terms, Bush described the conflict there as part of “the decisive ideological struggle of our time.” He portrayed the struggle as one between “those who believe in freedom and moderation” and “extremists who kill the innocent and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life.” The best way to protect the American people was to “provide a hopeful alternative t
o the hateful ideology of the enemy by advancing liberty across a troubled region.”

  In concluding the speech, Bush struck a firm but conciliatory line with his critics from the Democratic Party. He said, “It is fair to hold our views up to scrutiny” but that “all involved have the responsibility to explain how the path they propose would be more likely to succeed.” In a rhetorical jab intended for those advocating a quick withdrawal from Iraq, Bush went on: “It can be tempting to think that America can put aside the burdens of freedom,” but “throughout our history, Americans have always defied the pessimists and seen our faith in freedom redeemed.”

  In Damascus, Syrians close to the regime were triumphant about what they viewed as their victory over Bush’s attempt to transform the region. One analyst told me in an interview that the United States was now in a “trap of its own making” in Iraq and predicted that it would withdraw soon. While such bravado was standard in Damascus, for the first time in nearly two years, the United States was listening to what Syrians had to say.

  In the final days of the 2006 Lebanon War, Washington replaced its top diplomat, Stephen Seche, with Michael Corbin, a seasoned diplomat who previously served in the US embassy in Cairo. Almost immediately after his arrival in August, Corbin began reaching out to Syrian businessmen and media figures, holding small gatherings at his residence in West Mezze. During the Muslim month of Ramadan in October, the embassy hosted an iftar (the breaking of the fast) celebration attended by Damascus’s rich and famous. The US Cultural Center in Damascus also began reaching out as well.

  This was a far cry from the depths of Washington’s isolation of Syria the year before, when the embassy refused to hold even a Fourth of July celebration. Some said that it was because the embassy feared regime pressure would keep Syrians from showing up, but more than one person had pointed out the irony of how a US administration pushing “liberty” in Syria was incapable of celebrating its own—if for no one else than other foreign diplomats.

  Damascus’s early response to these overtures did not bode well for the prospects of US engagement with Syria. On September 12, 2007, a group of militants attacked the US embassy in Damascus, wounding fourteen. Washington expressed appreciation for efforts by Syrian security guards to stop the attackers; following the incident, however, the Syrian government refused to share any intelligence gathered from the attackers.

  In late November, the regime ordered the closure of the Damascus offices of AMIDEAST, an American nongovernmental association dedicated to fostering better communication and educational links with the Arab world. What made this particularly ironic was that the president and CEO of AMIDEAST was Theodore Kattouf, an American of Lebanese origin and former ambassador to Syria during the early days of the Bush administration who was known for his criticism of Washington’s isolation policy. The Syrian regime also stopped cooperating with the embassy’s Fulbright program, which had sent scores of Syrian students to the United States over the years to study in a variety of professional fields. American Fulbright students also began to encounter problems acquiring visas to Syria or renewing their residency permits if they were already in Damascus. It was almost as if the Syrian regime preferred isolation to engagement.

  Damascus prepared to put its best face forward though. In late 2004, Syrian historian Sami Moubayed and Abdulsalam Haykal, a Syrian businessman with close links to the Syrian regime, had founded Forward, an English-language magazine that, according to its website, looked at “the bright side of things.” While the magazine most definitely targeted the international community, the fact that Forward was the name of America’s most popular Jewish-American magazine showed that—despite the fact both publishers had graduated from the American University in Beirut—both remained markedly out of touch with the outside world. More worrying, however, was the magazine’s content. In its first few editions, the magazine ran essays on how Syria was the “key” to the Middle East. A regular contributor to the magazine was the Syrian ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, who wrote articles that were intensely critical of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. While Forward was nominally a competitor of Syria Today, its approach was more about public relations than actual journalism.

  Rumors of an Iranian “takeover” in Damascus filled the cafés and bars of Beirut and Amman. Some referred to reports that Israeli and UN forces in southern Lebanon had uncovered extensive evidence that Damascus had openly supplied Hezbollah with antitank weapons, including RPG-29s, AT-5s, AT-13s, and AT-14s, which had been extremely effective at knocking out Israeli armor. The weapons were also used to destroy buildings in southern Lebanon that Israeli soldiers used for command and control. Other rumors of spreading Iranian influence were based on announcements in the Syrian and Iranian press of millions of dollars of Iranian investments pouring into Syria. One report from Iran’s national news agency reported that Iranian investments in Syria had topped four hundred million dollars in 2006, representing 66 percent of the total Arab investment in the country.2

  To understand just how close Iran and Syria had become, I attended the Iranian embassy’s twenty-eighth anniversary celebration of the Islamic Revolution on February 8, 2007. After a quick check of our passports, Andrew Butters, correspondent for Time magazine, and I entered the embassy compound, which was decorated with beautiful cobalt-blue tiles with vine patterns.3 A press conference was under way between Syrian journalists and the Iranian ambassador to Syria Mohammad Hassan Akhtari, whose long beard, flowing robes, and white turban seemed to make him an archetypal ayatollah of the Islamic Republic. As he answered questions, I noticed that he spoke beautiful classical Arabic—something the journalists respected, if for no other reason than they didn’t have to dub the television or radio footage. Akhtari spoke about the strong relationship between Iran and Syria and boasted about the millions of dollars in projects being planned for the country. He looked keenly into the eyes of the journalists as he spoke, exuding a kind of self-confidence reminiscent of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The Syrian journalists ate it up, scribbling nearly every word he said into their notebooks.

  Suddenly the door to the room swung open, revealing a ruckus outside. In strutted Syrian minister of information Mohsen Bilal, the former ambassador to Spain and Syria’s chief spokesperson during the Israel-Hezbollah war. Sporting a mane of white hair and looking a bit like a retired rock star, Bilal walked over to Akhtari and shook his hand in front of the cameras. The ambassador motioned us to a square of tables, draped with bright yellow cloths reminiscent of the Hezbollah flag and heaving with platters of yellow rice and roasted chicken with pistachios.

  Akhtari graciously welcomed us to the celebration as we took our seats, and he urged us to dig in. Akhtari began a long, eloquent speech about the history of the Islamic Revolution and its significance in the Muslim world. While he didn’t look like a Westerner, Akhtari’s words indicated that he had a worldly intelligence and understood how to gauge an audience of journalists. He explained in very matter-of-fact terms that the Islamic Revolution was a product of the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s iron grip on his people and his alliance with America. While I didn’t agree with everything he said, I noticed that Akhtari didn’t take the opportunity to bash Bush or the United States. The audience clapped when he had finished, and Akhtari then motioned with his hand for the information minister to begin.

  On the surface, Bilal looked like any wealthy Westernized Arab, the cuffs of his fitted shirt flaring ever so slightly out of the sleeves of his expensive Italian suit. However, as he spoke, Bilal betrayed a deep distain for the West. He told the audience that the West had sat on their hands as Israel bombed Lebanon, killing untold numbers of civilian Lebanese. As the journalists struggled to jot down Bilal’s comments, he seemed to really get into his stride, his chest puffed out proudly like a rooster calling his mate. “You know, an Arab diplomat once asked me while I served in Paris, ‘Hey, how can a guy like you not like the United States?’;” Bilal said, pausing
to add a bit of suspense. “Do you know what I told him? ‘I can’t name one good thing about the United States!’”

  Suddenly the journalists stopped writing and looked over to the corner table where Andrew and I sat. Akhtari looked as well, a sorry look spreading across his face as he could tell from my grimace that I understood the ambassador’s words. My friend Ibrahim Hamidi, Al Hayat’s correspondent in Damascus, leaned over and said, “I don’t think he knows you are here.”

  After a few more bombastic lines, Bilal concluded his talk, shook Akhtari’s hand, and exited the room. As I gathered my things, I thought how ironic it was that Bilal—a man who dressed like a Westerner, spoke several foreign languages, and had lived in a number of European countries—used vitriolic language that most Americans would more readily expect from an Iranian official. The Iranian ambassador, however, spoke carefully and seemed a person from a culture and country that was confident enough in itself to allow the faculty of reason to flourish. As I shook Akhtari’s hand good-bye, I saw in his eye that he was the kind of person who thought things through. While his clothes looked nothing like mine, he seemed a reasonable diplomat, and his self-assurance reminded me of many American officials I had met over the years.

  Such ceremonies demonstrated that Syrian-Iranian ties were moving from strength to strength, but trying to assess to what degree Iranian influence was spreading in Syria was difficult. Throughout the spring, there were increasing reports of conversions of Syrian Sunnis to Shiite Islam—an issue particularly sensitive to Syria’s majority Sunni population and Washington’s Sunni allies. I had first come across the rumors on a trip the previous September to the Jazeera—the section of eastern Syria between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. A local notable there told me in a hushed voice over dinner that Iranian Shiite clerics were converting poor Sunnis in the dry riverbeds of eastern Syria to Shiite Islam in return for money or “a few bags of macaroni.”4