By Katie Mattern and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON, Jun 24 2009 (IPS)

After informing the Syrian embassy in Washington on Tuesday night, the U.S. State Department announced on Wednesday that President Barack Obama will be sending an ambassador to Damascus for the first time since 2005.

The move follows the renewal of sanctions on Syria in May, which many thought were an obstacle to new ties to Damascus as part of the bold regional engagement Obama had promised during the presidential campaigns.

Officials informed the Syrian ambassador to the U.S., Imad Moustapha, and the Foreign Ministry in Damascus on Tuesday night, the State Department confirmed on Wednesday.

Ahmed Salkini, a spokesperson for the Syrian embassy in Washington, told IPS that they were unofficially informed of the decision but had yet to receive an official or written communiqué.

“[W]e’re prepared to move forward with Syria to advance our interests through direct and continuing dialogue,” said State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly at a briefing Wednesday. “[W]e continue to have concerns about Syria’s role in this region. And we think one way to address those concerns is to have an ambassador in Damascus.”

“[T]his is part of a natural evolution of our reengagement with Syria,” he added.

“It’s in our interests to have an ambassador in Syria,” a senior administration official told CNN. “We have been having more and more discussions, and we need to have someone there to engage.”

The move is seen as part of Obama’s plan to improve relations with the Middle East in general and Syria, in particular, which the U.S. hopes to draw away from its alliance with Iran.

Syria is often thought as a key player in regional peace. Syria maintains ties with Iran and plays a role in the Palestinian armed resistance.

“Mitchell came away with his magical word that Syria plays an ‘integral’ role in regional peace, and that was very important for Syria to hear,” said Oklahoma University professor Joshua Landis, who authors the widely-read Syria Comment blog and returned from a trip to Syria on Tuesday.

“[T]his decision reflects the administration’s recognition of the important role Syria plays in the region,” Kelly said at Wednesday press briefing. “And of course, we hope that they will continue to play such a constructive role to promote peace and stability in the region.”

But prospects for Israeli-Syrian peace remain dim as long as right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to compromise on giving up the occupied Golan Heights, which Israel seized in 1967’s Six Day War, though Netanyahu said he is willing to talk in other areas.

“Everyone wants to show that they’re willing to talk,” said Landis. “The ultimate goal for Syria is getting out from under these sanctions that they’ve been under for 30 years now. That means making a deal with Israel because a lot of these sanctions are connected to Syria’s enmity with Israel.”

Syria diplomacy had been moving slowly, and some commentators suspected that the renewed sanctions in May and the little attention paid to Syria recently might have indicated that the U.S. was less determined to renew ties.

“Everything was on hold for the Lebanese elections which turned out very well for the U.S.,” Landis told IPS. An anti-Syrian coalition won the election in Lebanon, holding onto a delicate majority.

Lebanon had been caught in a “tug of war” between Syria and U.S., Landis said. “Now the status quo has been reaffirmed and I think that means that this tug of war can be put to rest. That means that Syria and the U.S. can move on and deal with other situations,” including Palestinian issues and the situation in Iraq, he said.

U.S. ambassador to Syria Margaret Scobey was withdrawn from Damascus by former President George W. Bush in 2005 after the assassination of then-Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Washington accused Syria of playing a role in the killing, which Syria staunchly denies. A U.N. investigation into the attack that killed Hariri and 22 others is ongoing.

George Mitchell, the U.S. envoy for Middle East peace, visited Syria two weeks ago and met with President Bashar al-Assad. Mitchell was the highest level official to visit Damascus in four years.

Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, a former Bush ambassador to Lebanon, and National Security Council official Daniel Shapiro have also made two visits to Syria.

Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell was also in the region previous to Mitchell’s trip to assess the security situation in Damascus. The U.S. has expressed interest in building a new embassy there, though Kelley denied on Wednesday that any decisions had been made.

“It’s a reflection of Syria being a pivotal country in terms of achieving a comprehensive peace in the region,” one senior official told the New York Times. “There is a lot of work to do in the region for which Syria can play a role. For that, it helps to have a fully staffed embassy.”

“He [Obama] is doing the right thing,” Landis wrote. “Indeed, this should have been done long ago… The Bush administration’s policy of conquering Iraq while telling its neighbours that they were next in line for regime-change was bad. Syria and Iran had little choice but to fan the flames of the Iraq insurgency in the hopes of sinking Washington’s regional plans which were inimical to their interests.”

Mitchell called his discussions with President al-Assad “serious and productive” and discussed Obama’s plan for regional peace laid out in his Cairo speech earlier this month. According to CNN’s report, Mitchell also stressed the importance of peace between Syria and Israel, and Lebanon and Israel.

The U.S. is also said to be interested in using Syria’s influence with Hamas, whose senior political leadership, including the head of the organisation’s political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, resides in Damascus.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) was also recently in the region, including Damascus, meeting with Hamas officials. While in Syria, he also met with Assad. IPS reported that Carter briefed Mitchell on his findings.

Earlier this year, Moustapha said that there had been indications that the U.S. would be willing to engage Syria even if the heads of these groups, which are viewed as terrorist groups by the U.S., were not kicked out of Damascus.

Syria itself is listed as a state sponsor of terror, and Kelly said he was unaware of any discussions about removing the country from that list.

Bush had criticised Syria for allowing terrorists to move freely into Iraq. These terrorists had been accused of contributing to the insurgency within Iraq.

Officials have said that Syria has promised to try to stem the flow of these foreigners into Iraq. A U.S. military contingent had also visited the country to discuss this issue.

“I know that they have played a positive role in addressing some of our very real concerns about foreign fighters crossing from Syria [into Iraq],” Kelly said at the State Department.

The U.S. has yet to pick a new ambassador for Syria. The appointee would have to be approved by both the U.S. Senate and the Syrian government.

Excerpt:

Sunday’s announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Washington will begin talks with Cuba on bilateral migration issues and resume direct postal service between the two countries suggests the new administration of President Barack Obama intends to proceed cautiously toward normalising ties with the Caribbean nation, according to veteran experts here.

The announcement, which Clinton made while visiting El Salvador for Monday’s inauguration of its new president, Mauricio Funes, came on the eve of the annual General Assembly of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Honduras, where Cuba’s proposed re-admission to the hemispheric body is likely to dominate the proceedings.

It also came six weeks after Obama lifted all restrictions on Cuban Americans to visit their homeland and send money to family members in what was regarded as the first major step toward the new president’s campaign promise to engage Havana.

“We’ve made more progress in four months than has been made in a number of years,” Clinton bragged to reporters in San Salvador Sunday. “We need to work together to continue that kind of progress, keeping in mind the legitimate aspirations and human rights of the people in Cuba.”

But analysts here said the resumption of migration talks, which had been suspended under former President George W. Bush in 2003, was the least that Obama could do, particularly after his speech last month at the Summit of the Americas where he cited immigration explicitly as one of the key issues on which he was prepared to engage.

“He should’ve started these talks the day after his inauguration,” said Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana who has long worked to normalise ties between the two nations as a fellow at the Centre for International Policy (CIP) here.

“They still need to remove the restrictions on academic and scientific exchanges and people-to-people programmes and issue visas to Cubans so they can come here for academic conferences and the like; it seems like they haven’t even thought of that yet,” he noted.

Smith added, however, that the resumption of the immigration talks, as well an apparent agreement to also address drug interdiction and hurricane relief efforts on a more formal basis than before, showed that the new administration was “at least moving”.

William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert at American University, echoed Smith’s analysis, noting as well that the decision to restore direct postal service was a “logical follow-on” to Obama’s decision to end restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to their homeland.

But he said the latest announcement showed that Obama wanted to move cautiously on Cuba and suggested that the fact it occurred just before the OAS meeting was not coincidental.

“Just as they relaxed the restrictions on Cuban Americans just before the Summit of the Americas, now they are offering migration talks just before the OAS meeting,” he said. “It seems clear that they’re trying to inoculate themselves from criticism by Latin Americans about Cuba policy and at the same time avoid picking political fights with (anti-Castro) forces at home. It’s calculated.”

How much the new measures will provoke opposition remains to be seen, but they did succeed in gaining the endorsement of one key group, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF).

“This is a very positive development and something that our organisation has recommended,” said Francisco Hernandez, CANF’s president.

The latest exchanges between Havana and Washington were initiated May 22, when the State Department delivered a diplomatic note to the Cuban Interests Section here asking to resume migration talks. Washington received a positive reply Saturday, according to a senior State Department official.

In their reply, the Cubans said they were also willing to engage in talks with Washington regarding counter-terrorism, drug trafficking, hurricane relief, and direct postal service. Clinton said Sunday she was “very pleased” with the response.

Clinton was in San Salvador as part of a three-day swing through the region beginning with Funes’s inauguration Monday and culminating in the first day of annual OAS meeting Tuesday in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

The re-admission of Cuba into the hemispheric body will almost certainly be the most controversial issue at the OAS meeting. Significantly, as one of his first acts as president, Funes, the leader of the left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a former guerrilla group, is expected to announce the normalisation of relations between El Salvador and Cuba, leaving the U.S. as the only nation in the hemisphere without full diplomatic ties with Havana.

Largely at Washington’s behest, the OAS suspended Cuba’s membership in the OAS in 1962, one year after the Central Intelligence Agency’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and a month before Washington imposed its trade embargo against the island.

Virtually all of Latin America’s leaders, including OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza, have called for Havana to be re-instated as a full member, despite the fact that the government of President Raul Castro has denied any interest in rejoining an organisation that it calls “that decrepit old house of Washington.”

The OAS headquarters, built by Andrew Carnegie, is located just off the Ellipse within shouting distance of the White House.

The Obama administration has said it is willing to end Cuba’s suspension but that its formal re-admission should be conditioned on Havana’s implementing political reforms that meet the requirements of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Last week, the OAS permanent council formed a small working group to come up with a compromise that most observers here believe will result in lifting the suspension and beginning talks with Havana over the terms of its re-admission.

“None of the parties involved oppose ending Cuba’s suspension, and so the issue is, will Cuba want to re-join the OAS and what kind of discussion needs to happen to make that possible,” said Geoff Thale, a Cuba specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

Anti-Castro forces here are mobilising against re-admission. “The U.S. position has been firmly rooted in the promotion of freedom and democracy for the Cuban nation,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee whose district includes “Little Havana” in Miami.

“We have clearly said that Cuba should not participate in regional groups until there is a freely elected, fully participatory, democratic government in power in Cuba,” she said.

But Thale said efforts by Washington to insist on major democratic reforms in Cuba risked harming its relations with other, more important Latin American countries.

“This issue is a litmus test for virtually the entire continent,” said Thale. “Everyone else has decided that the way to deal with the issue is to engage in diplomatic relations, and it doesn’t behoove us to threaten the only regional organisation of which we’re a member.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.