Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly UpdatesSyria's Ambassador to Washington 'Imad Mustafa on Feb. 25 had talks at the State Department with acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, a former ambassador to Beirut where he learned a great deal about the 'Alawite/Ba'thist regime of Bashar al-Assad and his behaviour. On Feb. 27, Mustafa told the US-funded pan-Arab TV network al-Hurra Damascus was ready to co-operate with Washington on all issues discussed but could not accept "demands" - i.e., orders. He implied that Syria was ready to change its behaviour but not the way the Democratic administration of Barack Hussein Obama was "demanding", as the Republican administration of George W. Bush used to do.
Mustafa found there was not much difference between Obama's demands and what Bush wanted. But while Obama wants to engage in a dialogue and Bush shunned Assad on all occasions through his eight years at the White House, the change of style is hardly satisfactory to Damascus. In addition to the list of Bush's demands of the Assad regime, Mustafa on Feb. 25 heard the US side demanding that Syria give credible assurances that it will not acquire nuclear weapons. The nuclear issue was added to the list of US demands after recent revelations in Vienna that International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors found traces of uranium during their tour of Syria. Damascus said these were from missiles fired by Israeli aircraft when the Jewish state's air force on Sept. 6, 2007, raided a building in north-eastern Syria suspected to being developed by North Koreans for a nuclear reactor.
The Feb. 25 meeting marked an official opening of a dialogue between the US and Syria, although unofficially US-Syrian talks had been going on quietly since Obama took office in January. But Mustafa on Feb. 27 and later in the week kept stressing that the talks were "preparations for", and not a dialogue. In this, Mustafa was saying it was for the US to change its behaviour, rather than for the Syrian regime to do that, continually stressing that Syrian policies were consistent and based on sound foundations - what a super-power would say of itself.
From Feltman, Mustafa had to swallow such demands which from Assad's standpoint were in this order: (1) stop "trading in terrorism" and interfering in Lebanese affairs, (2) stop backing Neo-Salafi and Shi'ite militants in Iraq and the Islamist groups in the Palestinian territories, (3) stop being part of the Iran-led axis of anti-US/anti-Israel forces in the Greater Middle East (GME), and (4) stop trying to acquire nuclear war-heads or any other weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
US State Department officials, however, said after the Feb. 25 meeting that Syria played a more constructive role during peace talks in Doha, Qatar, in the aftermath of armed clashes in Lebanon in May 2008. They said the number of insurgent volunteers moving into Iraq from Syria had decreased.
In reality, the traffic for Neo-Salafi suicide bombers from Syria to Iraq has been reversed. Now they are moving back to Syria, being hunted down in the north-western Iraqi province of Nineveh which borders with Syria. Likewise, the traffic for such bombers from Iran to Iraq is in reverse, with fellow bombers being hunted down in Iraq's north-eastern province of Diyala which border with Iran. Indeed, it was via Iran that Abu Ayub al-Masri, head of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and a nephew of al-Qaeda central's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, left Iraq for Afghanistan. The US intelligence networks, including the CIA, are said to be fully aware of al-Qaeda's movements and dealings with both Syria and Iran.
At-taqiyah, which in the Muslim world means to deceive or lie and many other things, is being used extensively in Iraq, Iran, Syria and elsewhere. Even the US is using its own version of it among the rival forces in Iraq and elsewhere in the GME - a huge energy-rich part of the world stretching from Russia to Pakistan and from the Central Asian part of China to Morocco in the southern Mediterranean and to the Horn of Africa, i.e., including most of the Muslim world.
Taqiyah is the key to power in the Muslim world. This is part of a phrase uttered by the Prophet Muhammad to justify making pacts with the Jews and Christians of Arabia in the early period of a religion he established: Islam. Taqiyah has since become a formula allowing Muslims to deceive or make temporary truce arrangements, etc. After 'Ali ibn Abi-Taleb, his cousin and son-in-law, rebelled against the Sunni caliph and established Shi'ism and thus became the first of the Ja'fari (Twelver) Shi'ites' 12th holiest and partly "divine" imams, his followers used taqiyah to escape persecution at the hands of very oppressive Sunni caliphs (see Part 41 in sbme1IraqTaqiyahJan5-09).
How Damascus Is Slowly Gravitating To A Riyadh-Led Camp: Yet extensive taqiyah-user Assad has been affected by a money war being waged against the Shi'ite theocracy of Iran by Saudi Arabia, a war hitting hard in view of a worsening global recession and an imploding Iranian economy no longer able to bail Syria out. There is, in fact, a race for a dialogue with the US between Syria's regime and the Shi'ite theocracy. Although the latter two are long-standing allies, they are potential adversaries as each of them wants to be the first to have a dialogue with the US. Each of them intends to have the dialogue to succeed for itself at the expense of the other. Both Damascus and Tehran claim to possess the "cards" of - i.e., control over - Syria and Iran, as well as the "cards" of Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, the six-state Arab Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) which Saudi Arabia leads and other parts of the Muslim world as well as the GME which includes the Caucasus and parts of Russia (see news7SauIrnMoneyWarFeb16-09).
Assad saw an opportunity in Saudi King 'Abdullah's dramatic plea during the Arab economic summit in Kuwait on Jan. 19, urging an end to inter-Arab conflicts. So now Assad is gravitating back to a Sunni camp led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the US and EU. Assad is hoping to visit Saudi Arabia for a meeting with King 'Abdullah before the next Arab League summit due to be held in Doha in late March.
Assad had caused a serious crisis with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Sunni Arab states on Aug. 15, 2006, when one day after a 34-day Israeli-Hizbullah war in Lebanon came to an end, he declared victory over Israel and called the rulers of these states "half-men" - because these rulers had criticised Hizbullah for having captured two Israeli soldiers on July 12 which caused the 2006 war. At the time, world oil prices were high and Iran was awash with cash, able to finance a Tehran-led axis of which the Syrian regime used to draw much benefit.
'Abdullah ibn 'Abdul-'Aziz, whose mother was the daughter of a chief of the Shammar confederation of Arab tribes whose territory extends from southern Turkey and north-eastern Syria down to the heart of Saudi Arabia, with an important branch in Iraq's Nineveh and Mosul is its capital, had known since the early 1970s how the Assad clan tought and behaved. He had married a fellow 'Alawite woman related to Rif'at al-Assad. His friendship with Rif'at now remains quite close, a friendship having survived a deadly power-struggle within the Assad clan. Now Rif'at, a younger brother of the late Gen Hafez al-Assad, is part of the Syrian opposition bent on toppling the latter's ruling son in Damascus, Bashar.
As a ruling crown prince of Saudi Arabia, 'Abdullah in late March 2002 presented to the Arab League's summit in Beirut a plan for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. The Arab League summit in Riyadh in late March 2007 adopted the plan as the only viable formula for sustainable peace between the Arabs and Israel. But Bashar, who inherited the Syrian "throne" upon the June 2000 death of his father Hafez, wanted a peace treaty with Israel that gave him the clan's "Greater Syria" project - which none of the Sunni Arab regimes would accept as this was to include control over Lebanon and parts of other Arab countries surrounding today's Syria, as well as the Palestinian territories.
Here comes the role of the Iran-led axis which, among the various allied GME groups, includes the Shi'ite theocracy's Lebanon offshoot Hizbullah. Although Syria is part of the Iran-led axis, Bashar's "Greater Syria" project runs counter to the regional ambitions of Tehran. So the question whether Iran and Syria were both behind Hizbullah's July 12, 2006, move or whether Hizbullah acted independently has been left open since then.
At the same time as Hizbullah was fighting Israel, however, Assad was having peace talks with Israel done in secret and his side was represented by US-based but Syrian-born businessman Ibrahim Suleiman. One of the secret Israeli-Syrian sessions took place in the very heat of that 2006 war, when many Lebanese including children and women died of an Israeli air raid in the south of the country. The Syrian businessman/negotiator, with a US nationality, is the brother of top Syrian intelligence officer Bahjat Suleiman, one of the pillars of Assad's regime.
The Saudis and other fellow Sunni Arabs were fully aware of what was happening between Assad's proxy man, Suleiman, and the Israeli negotiators. Suleiman had already reached such depths in digging into the Israel lobbies in Washington that he even was invited to give lectures at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful among these lobbies. Now AIPAC occasionally co-ordinates secret contracts in the US between Syrian and Israeli emissaries.
Among others who also knew well of what was going on between Assad and Israel was the Shi'ite theocracy which by mid-2006 had dug deep into the intelligence community of the Syrian regime. There is even talk among Sunni Arab politicians that the theocracy controls the Syrian regime, though Assad prefers always to show things in reverse - that his invisible 'Alawite/Ba'thist elite guides the theocracy.
FEED