With tensions between the two countries mounting and Damascus anticipating high-level engagement with the incoming Obama administration, the regime began a comprehensive crackdown on journalists in Syria, forcing them to toe the regime’s line. Given what I knew about Syria’s recent behavior, investigations by the Syrian authorities into my political beliefs, and my inability to obtain a visa, I accepted a new fellowship with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy—a think tank that had been critical of Syrian policies during the Bush administration. My fellowship dealt with how to engage Syria and maintain US national-security interests. In the United States, I visited Leila, who had left Syria in May 2007 to study journalism. While Leila didn’t like the Washington Institute’s position on Syria and was critical of my work, she understood that I was leaving Syria behind.
Those advocating a quick rapprochement with Damascus pointed to rumors that the indirect peace talks between Israel and Syria under Turkish auspices in Ankara were getting tantalizingly close to a deal. The specifics of the talks were not officially announced, but by spring 2009, some details had emerged.
Syria was rumored to have asked Israel for clarification regarding six points along the “line of June 4, 1967”—the line of separation between Israeli and Syrian forces before the former captured the Golan Heights two days later. Syria was also rumored to have agreed to cede its riparian rights to the Sea of Galilee, though not of the Jordan River, and to the immediate exchange of ambassadors and the “normalization of relations” with Israel while Israeli forces disengaged from the Golan Heights in stages over three to eight years. The Golan would be demilitarized and turned into a “peace park,” which would allow Israelis access without visas. This was an idea first developed by Frederic Hof—a longtime Levant observer and a close associate of Senator George Mitchell—whose report on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 2001 had recommended rebuilding the Palestinian Authority following the al-Aqsa intifada, ending all Israeli settlement activity and Palestinian violence. Last but not least, Syria had apparently agreed to allow Lebanon to pursue its own negotiations with Israel.
These hopes for progress were dashed on December 22, 2008, however, when Hamas refused to renew the ceasefire with Israel and began shooting hundreds of rockets per day into Israel. Israel responded with a massive incursion into Gaza, code-named Cast Lead. Syria then broke off the indirect talks in Ankara. When the conflict ended in early January, Israelis had become increasingly cynical about the benefits of returning territory for peace. In elections on February 10, 2009, the Kadima Party, led by Tzipi Livni, earned one more Knesset seat than Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party. However, other right-of-center parties gathered around Likud did better, causing Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, to ask Netanyahu to form a government. The coalition that Netanyahu formed was skeptical of progress on the Syrian track and refused to return to indirect talks. Instead, it advocated talks with no preconditions (that is, no commitment to the June 4, 1967, line) under American auspices.
So with peace talks on hold, secretary of state Hillary Clinton dispatched assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs Jeffrey Feltman on February 26, 2009, for talks with the Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha. The president was rumored to have given Clinton two instructions. The first was that his administration was elected on the idea of engagement with America’s adversaries and that Washington would work with Damascus as part of that effort. The second was that a victory by Hezbollah and its allies in the elections scheduled for June 7 should be avoided at all costs—therefore, engagement with Syria should not come at the expense of US allies in Lebanon.
Feltman was not the engager that Syria had in mind, given his previous tenure as ambassador to Lebanon during Syria’s forced withdrawal from the country following Hariri’s assassination in February 2005. Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moallem had once quipped to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon that “Feltman should leave [Lebanon]; I’m prepared to pay for his vacation to Hawaii.”9 In the first meeting with Moustapha, Feltman raised the issues of Syria’s “support to terrorist groups and networks, acquisition of nuclear and nonconventional weaponry, interference in Lebanon, and worsening human rights situation.”
Syrian-regime analysts immediately attacked Feltman in the press for using the “language of the neocons.” Following the meeting, however, both sides labeled the talks “constructive,” leading to another round of discussions in Damascus on March 7 between Feltman and National Security Council Middle East director Daniel Shapiro and Moallem. Following the talks, Feltman announced that both sides had found “a lot of common ground” and that instead of setting “benchmarks” for Damascus, each side was watching the future “choices” of the other.
Two days later, Assad stepped into the fray. In the ensuing twenty-three days, he gave six interviews to international media—this was unprecedented for a Syrian president over such a short period of time. Rather than dealing with the issues discussed during Feltman and Shapiro’s visit, however, Assad targeted Israel, offering it only a cold peace. He blamed outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert for the failure of recent indirect Syrian-Israeli negotiations and refused to talk about cutting ties with Hezbollah, Hamas, and Tehran. In another interview, Assad implied that he had been asked to mediate between Washington and Tehran. Then, in his first-ever e-mail interview with an American journalist, Assad told The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh that he not only sought US mediation with Israel, but he also wanted direct contact with President Obama.
In the June 7, 2009, Lebanese elections, the pro-West March 14 coalition achieved an unexpected victory over the Hezbollah-led opposition. A little over a week later, US Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell—together with his new special coordinator for regional affairs and point man on Syria-Israel peace talks, Frederic Hof—headed to Damascus for a first round of talks with President Assad. The discussions focused not only on getting Syria involved in possible Middle East peace talks but also on repairing bilateral relations between the two countries, most notably over the issue of foreign fighters traveling through Syria to Iraq.
Unexpectedly, Syria reiterated its earlier demand that the United States lift its sanctions—measures that until then the Syrian government had claimed had had little effect on the country. Days after the visit, the State Department announced that the United States would return its ambassador to Syria. In Mitchell’s second meeting with Assad that July, the US envoy was said to have spent hours with Assad personally going over the US sanctions regime—an unusual topic for a Syrian president to be discussing with Washington’s chief Middle East peace negotiator.
Signs that US sanctions were having an increased impact had been steadily growing. The Syrian economy had performed relatively well in recent years, posting an average annual economic growth rate of around 5 percent, which was fueled by high oil prices and increased investment from the Gulf. However, there were big problems. Oil production—proceeds from which account for a little less than a third of state revenues—had declined by 30 percent since 2005. And Syrian industry—accounting for 28 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP)—had contracted 15 percent as a result of its free-trade agreement with Turkey. A record three-year drought had also devastated the Syrian agricultural sector, which accounts for a quarter of Syrian economic output.
Following the global economic downturn, Syria’s economic situation worsened. The collapse in oil prices forced the state to revise its budget oil price downward to $51 for light crude and $42 for heavy, which resulted in an estimated record budget deficit of $4.8 billion, or roughly 10 percent of its GDP. Although the state usually makes up for budget shortfalls by slashing investment spending—a line item that accounted for 40 percent of its 2009 budget—this tactic was becoming increasingly difficult. Syrians born in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the country was among the top-twenty fastest-growing populations in the world, were flooding the job market. According to an interview in January 2009 with the Syrian
deputy prime minister for economic affairs, Abdullah Dardari, Syria needed $14 billion of investment over the next two years to meet the 6 to 7 percent economic-growth targets required to create enough jobs for the expanding workforce.
The bad economic news explained Damascus’s demand that Washington drop its sanctions. In an interview with Reuters in February 2009, Dardari said that “to have normal relations between Syria and the United States, sanctions should be lifted…. This is going to be a very important part of any dialogue.” His statements echoed those of Sami Moubayed’s “Invitation to Abu Hussein” article.
These statements represented a reversal of the regime’s standard rhetoric on sanctions. When the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SAA) was implemented in May 2004, analysts that I interviewed in Damascus bragged that the sanctions would have little effect due to historically small amounts of bilateral trade. At the time it made sense. Many Syria observers—including me—questioned the effectiveness of US sanctions, as spiraling food, commodity, and oil prices drove the dollar value (but not volume) of US-Syrian trade to all-time highs.
Slowly but surely, US sanctions on Damascus had an increasing impact. The SAA, which bans all US exports to Syria (except food and medicine), hit Syrian aviation particularly hard. State-owned Syrian Air could not obtain parts for its fleet of American-made Boeing jets nor purchase new aircraft from Europe’s Airbus, which also has substantial US content in its planes. The SAA also complicated Syrian oil and gas production by denying companies that operated in Syria the necessary US technology to reverse the diminishing output of Syrian crude. Indeed, in the summer of 2007, Damascus blamed electricity blackouts on the “knock-on effect” of US sanctions; companies specializing in major high-tech projects shunned operations in Syria for fear of running foul of US law. The only legal exceptions to the sanctions were export licenses for US goods for certain humanitarian purposes, such as to promote the exchange of information and to help maintain aviation safety.
At the same time, US actions targeting the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria (CBS) exacerbated Damascus’s financial woes by making it more difficult to repatriate critical oil revenues. In March 2006, the US Treasury Department’s designation of CBS—the depository for the lion’s share of Syria’s estimated eighteen to twenty billion dollars in foreign-currency reserves—as a “primary money-laundering concern” under the USA Patriot Act led all US banks, as well as a number of European ones, to close their correspondent accounts. In anticipation of the move, Damascus switched state foreign-currency transactions from dollars to euros. Since oil, the regime’s lifeline, is denominated in dollars, the switch complicated the regime’s ability to fund itself. In addition, the designation scared businessmen away from CBS and toward the country’s new private-sector banks, which operate under less regime control, effectively reducing the amount of cash the regime could access.
Executive orders freezing the US assets of Syrian officials likewise made global banks and investors wary of doing business with Syrian officials and regime businessmen. In May 2008, two American executives of Gulfsands Petroleum—a company contracted to boost crude output in eastern Syria—resigned, and the company moved its headquarters from the United States to the United Kingdom after one of the company’s partners, business tycoon and President Assad’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf, was targeted by an executive order focusing on public corruption in Syria.
Later, Washington successfully pressured the Turkish mobile-phone provider Turkcell to abandon its bid to buy Syriatel, another Makhlouf-owned business. The US move was hailed by Syria’s business community, which views Makhlouf, according to a 2009 International Crisis Group report, as “a symbol of crony capitalism, resented by many colleagues for having bullied them into forced partnerships or out of lucrative deals.”
By late summer 2009, rumors swirled around Washington and the Middle East that the White House was preparing to turn a new page with Damascus. The first test of this new relationship would be over the issue that caused the breakdown in US-Syrian relations more than six years before: the flow of jihadi militants from Syria to Iraq. A CENTCOMled delegation visited Damascus and concluded a tentative agreement with Syria on a “technical assessment of Iraqi-Syrian border posts.”
Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, miffed at being initially left out of these promising talks, visited Damascus on August 18 to seal the tripartite deal. The string of bomb blasts that greeted him upon his return to Baghdad the next day—the bloodiest in more than eighteen months and later claimed by an al-Qaeda affiliate—led Iraq to demand that Syria expel Iraqi Baathists and jihadi militants from its soil and recall its ambassador. Damascus responded in kind, effectively blowing up Washington’s initiative on the launch pad.10 The jihadi issue proved so explosive that even when Damascus had wanted to show its ability to turn a new page with the United States, it was unable to deliver. A month later, deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad arrived in Washington for talks that dealt almost exclusively with US sanctions and how they could be lifted.
Mekdad’s visit signaled the end of the cold war between Washington and Damascus. It was replaced with a cold détente to solve the pile of bilateral issues between the two countries and achieve the Obama administration’s goal of fostering “comprehensive Middle East peace.” Damascus might have expected that negotiations with Israel would solve other outstanding issues between the United States and Syria, but with Israel and Syria unable to even come to terms on returning to talks, it was unclear when this would happen. Perhaps the best summary of the Obama administration’s position on Syria came in an interview on December 1, 2009, by the left-of-center think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP) with Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell. After answering numerous questions on the administration’s failed efforts to get Israeli-Palestinian talks off the ground, Mitchell turned his attention to Syria in the final question:
Question: What is the prospect of resuming talks on the Syrian track? How do these efforts tie in with the administration’s policy toward Syria and with the broader regional strategy for the Middle East?
Mitchell: President Obama is committed to comprehensive Middle East peace…. President Obama has directed that we engage Syria diplomatically. His objective is to assess Syria’s readiness to improve the US-Syria bilateral relationship so that Syrian policies and actions that have been problematic for successive US administrations will change in ways that permit the relaxation and eventual elimination of US economic and political sanctions. If the US and Syria were to share a substantially common regional, strategic outlook the implications for Middle Eastern political stability and economic progress would be quite positive.
The key problem affecting the US-Syria relationship is Syrian support of terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah and Hamas. If Syria truly wants a better relationship with the United States and a stable, prosperous future for its people, it must end its support for terrorist groups and move toward resolution of its conflict with Israel through peaceful negotiations.
We are encouraging Syria and Israel to re-engage in negotiations as soon as possible. We have offered to facilitate their discussions in any way they see fit. We recognize there will be a major US role in helping them implement a peace treaty. We intend to continue encouraging the Parties to engage by helping them come to agreement on certain understandings that would enable each to have a positive and compelling idea of what peace between them would look like once it is achieved.
Finally, on February 17, 2010, the administration dispatched undersecretary of state William Burns to Damascus to meet President Assad. Burns became the highest-level US official to visit the capital since former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage did so in January 2005. Washington simultaneously announced that Robert Ford, a former ambassador to Algeria then serving as deputy chief of mission in Iraq, would be President Obama’s choice as ambassador to Syria. For the better part of a year, the name of the administration’s
candidate for ambassador had been a closely held secret, leading to wild rumors in the press. Finally, it seemed, engagement was getting off the ground in earnest. On February 24, Secretary of State Clinton told a Senate committee that the United States was “asking Syria to move away from Iran.”11
The following day, Assad invited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to Damascus for meetings and a public dinner, which was branded in the press by pundits as the “Axis of Evil Banquet.” While Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah’s comments slamming Israel and hailing the “resistance” were predictable, what was unexpected was an especially defiant tone from President Assad. Openly mocking Clinton’s request, Assad said, “We must have understood Clinton wrong because of bad translation or our limited understanding, so we signed the agreement to cancel the visas…. I find it strange that [Americans] talk about Middle East stability and peace and the other beautiful principles and call for two countries to move away from each other.” Ahmadinejad added that “Clinton said we should maintain a distance. I say there is no distance between Iran and Syria…. We have the same goals, same interests and same enemies. Our circle of cooperation is expanding day after day.”12 Shortly thereafter, reports began to surface of Syria transferring advanced weaponry—including Scud missiles—to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon.13
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