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SYRIA: Assad Keeps Footing Amid Political Tremors

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 28 2006 (IPS) - Despite a U.N. probe into his possible role in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and a public challenge to his rule by a prominent Syrian politician in exile, Syrian President Bashar Assad appears likely to endure for the foreseeable future, according to experts here.

Hamas’ sweeping victory in this week’s Palestinian elections was just the latest in a series of events that appears to have strengthened his position. The fact that Hamas’ chairman, Khaled Meshal, is based in Damascus reminds the outside world that Assad remains an important player in the region.

“(Meshal) wouldn’t be there if they didn’t want him,” said Michael Hudson of the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. “I don’t think the connections (the Syrians) have with Hamas are anything like the ones they have with Hezbollah (in Lebanon), but the fact that the (two groups) are similar gives the Syrians a sense of reflected satisfaction.”

Even before the election results were announced, however, things appeared to be going Assad’s way, both in Lebanon and the wider Middle East. Despite efforts earlier this month by visiting U.S. Vice Pres. Dick Cheney to press Saudi Arabia and Egypt into a harder line against Damascus, opposition to moves that might lead to Syria’s destabilisation remains high, particularly given the violent and uncertain situation next door in Iraq.

Indeed, the growing prospects for Assad’s weathering the storm are due as much to fears by his neighbours, particularly Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, about what might replace him, as to his own manoeuvring – and ruthlessness – in both Lebanon and Syria in the tumultuous months that followed Hariri’s assassination nearly one year ago.

Even Israel has become increasingly insistent in recent months that it much prefers a relatively weakened, but pragmatic, Assad in Damascus to any likely alternative.

“(The Israelis) have been our biggest problem in dealing with the (U.S.) administration,” according to one well-connected Lebanese source, who believes that “regime change” in Damascus is the only way to free Lebanon from Syrian influence.

Hamas’ smashing victory in the Palestinian territories also supplies sceptics in both the Arab world and Europe – not to mention the U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – with new evidence that U.S. Pres. George W. Bush’s zeal for democratising the Middle East, including Damascus, is bringing to power extremist forces that are fundamentally hostile to the West and to Israel.

“Like (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak, Assad will be smirking at U.S. discomfiture as Washington sees its desire for democracy fulfilled,” noted Oklahoma University professor Joshua Landis, whose weblog, www.SyriaComment.com, is widely read by regional specialists.

“When groups that represent an antithetical position to the interests, projects or designs of the U.S. and Israel in the region (come to power), then it serves Syria,” according to Bassam Haddad, a Syria specialist at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

“(Hamas’ victory) definitely sends a message of where the public is going, and that’s not in a direction that the U.S. favours,” he noted, adding that it also marks a major setback to Washington’s efforts at isolating Damascus.

The popular uproar over the elder Hariri’s assassination, as well as U.S. and French-led actions by the U.N. Security Council, resulted in the withdrawal of the almost 30,000 Syrian troops who remained in Lebanon after its civil war in the mid-1970s.

Despite their absence, as well as an aggressive U.N. investigation whose prosecutor has asked to depose Assad himself, Damascus and its Lebanese allies, notably Hezbollah, remain both formidable and feared.

Indeed, the anti-Syrian alliance led by Hariri’s son, Saad, and Druze chief Walid Jumblatt, which spearheaded the “Cedar Revolution” and won a majority of seats in last June’s parliamentary elections, appears uncertain, dispirited and intimidated after a series of killings in Beirut of prominent critics of Damascus.

The Lebanese government has recently been stymied by a boycott by Hezbollah and other pro-Syrian forces that oppose expanding the U.N. probe of Hariri’s death to include those killings.

Jumblatt has been holed up in his mountainside fortress for months, while the younger Hariri, whose visit to Washington this week was capped by a personal tete-a-tete with Bush at the White House Friday, has taken up de facto exile at his late father’s house in Paris.

“Certainly, anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon feel on the defensive, nervous, frightened, depressed,” said Hudson, who just returned from a visit to Beirut. “The Syrians may be out in one way, but in others they’re always right around the corner and have sufficient friends and supporters in Lebanon that make it unlikely it will turn into a seriously anti-Syrian place.”

While Hariri, who, as the leader of the parliamentary majority in Lebanon, reportedly asked Bush to provide the military personnel and equipment to oversee the rebuilding of Lebanon’s security forces and army, sat silent through the photo-op, Bush himself pledged that he was committed to working for a Lebanon “free of foreign influence, free of Syrian intimidation, and free to chart its own course”.

But how Bush can achieve that result is, at this point, much less clear. Washington has imposed far-reaching economic and other sanctions against the regime, including personal sanctions against Assad’s powerful brother-in-law, military intelligence chief Assef Shawkat.

However, it has had less success in persuading its allies in the European Union (EU) – Syria’s biggest trading partner – to follow suit, or even for that matter, to designate Hezbollah, Damascus’ chief Lebanese client, as a “terrorist” movement.

“I don’t know know how they’re going to get Saad Hariri back home,” said Landis, noting that former Syrian Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam, who earlier this month all but accused Assad of ordering the elder Hariri’s killing and called for the regime’s ouster, has also taken up exile in Paris.

“They might be in Paris for a long time – like White Russians (after the Bolshevik Revolution),” Landis told the Middle East Institute (MEI) here this week.

Khaddam’s denunciations of Assad, which were depicted here as the most serious challenge to the Syrian president yet, should be seen as more of a post-script to a lengthy power struggle between Assad’s circle and the “old guard” that effectively ended in Assad’s victory at the Ba’ath party congress last June.

“The sign that Khaddam is in Paris is one of weakness,” noted Landis, who has just returned from a year in Damascus.

Despite the fact that Washington itself now lacks the power to overthrow Assad and that none of its regional allies support regime change in Syria, the administration still refuses to engage Assad on possible cooperation in Iraq.

“The administration is stuck between a hard, hawkish policy which it can’t carry out and a soft, accommodationist policy which it refuses to consider,” said Landis.