The Mehlis Countdown
from Bilal El-Amine - 10.10.2005 00:20
It astounds how much political drama a country as tiny as Lebanon is
capable of producing, with consequences not only for the region but
the world (and we haven’t a drop of oil!). There were, for instance,
three separate Lebanese delegations in New York to attend events
related to the UN summit, in the midst of which Condoleezza Rice was
not too busy to meet Saad Harriri, who leads the largest
parliamentary bloc here.
The recently passed UN Resolution 1959 (not to be confused with last year’s Res. 1559 calling for Syria’s withdrawal and disarming the resistance) legally puts every member nation and its intelligence services at the service of a UN commission—led by the German judge Detlev Mehlis—whose mission it is to find out who killed Lebanon’s prime minister Rafiq Harriri.
The whole country is on edge awaiting the judge’s final report, now
due to come out at end of October. Everyday new rumors circulate
about the supposedly secret proceedings of the commission, the vast
majority of which have turned out to be untrue. There are many
indications, however, that Mehlis has come up with a general idea of
what happened but has yet to connect all the dots and back them up
with hard evidence. His investigative team has scoured the seashore
near the site of the explosion, called in over 300 witnesses, lifted
banking secrecy protection (exceptionally rare in Lebanon) from
several accounts, and incredibly, to the astonishment of all, hauled
in four generals who together ran Lebanon’s security services under
the Syrians, all but accusing them of committing the crime.
The big question is how far up the political ladder will the blame
go. If a group of mid-level intelligence officers—Syrian as well as
Lebanese—are implicated, then perhaps the ensuing crisis can be
contained. Even if the pro-Syrian president of Lebanon Emile Lahoud
(suspected by many to be involved) were ensnared, Lebanon and Syria
would still be able to weather the storm. But what if it goes all the
way up to Bashar Asad, it’s not like he can just resign like Lahoud.
An authoritarian—and now apparently hereditary—regime like the one in
Damascus does not step down willingly, nor surrender to a world court
if that’s what it comes to. What will the US (oops, I mean the UN) do
then?
It may sound from the venom directed at Syria that the Bush
administration wants nothing short of toppling the Baath. But this
seems unlikely if not impossible given the situation in Iraq. The
military option, the quickest and surest way to regime change, is not
on the table, as confirmed recently by Rice herself. There’s also the
alternatives problem: at the moment, if Bashar falls, Syria faces
either prolonged sectarian strife, Iraqi style, or the anti-US Muslim
Brotherhood taking over. (Of course there is always the possibility
of more sanctions or an all out embargo like in Iraq—that is if
Washington can get it through the UN Security Council again.)
Instead the US plan, for now at least, appears to be continued
pressure on Damascus on all fronts with the intent of isolating it
regionally and globally. Getting the European Union, for example, to
take a hard line can be very damaging to Syria’s economic prospects.
And if the Syrian regime is convincingly linked to Harriri’s
assassination, then the US can easily solicit the help of Egypt and
Saudi Arabia, in addition of course to Lebanon, to squeeze Syria
regionally. The end goal may be more akin to taming the regime than
all out regime change as was done in Iraq. After all, Washington
knows very well that Damascus has shown a willingness to cooperate as
it did after the 9/11 attacks by handing over doles of intelligence
to the CIA, even having a go at Lebanon’s Sunni Islamists groups to
show that they mean it.
Three Fronts
The US wants Syria to deliver on three critical fronts—the Lebanese,
Iraqi and Palestinian—which would give Bush’s flagging Middle East
crusade a much-needed boost. In Lebanon, Syria quickly obliged and
withdrew its troops as was called for in Res. 1559, but Washington
still insists that Syria help disarm the Hizbullah resistance
(something that Syria can probably do very little about now that its
military has left). The Bush administration erroneously believes that
by weakening the Baath in Syria and encouraging the pro-American
opposition in Lebanon, it can at least hobble Hizbullah, if not
neutralize it altogether. Hizbullah’s unprecedented trouncing of
Israeli forces and their allies in southern Lebanon has earned it a
top rank in Washington’s list of targets in the region (definitely in
the top three along with Syria and Iran).
On the Iraqi front, Syria is accused of allowing Arab and Muslim
fighters to infiltrate across its border—not to mention the more
recent claim that they are being trained in Syrian “terrorist
training camps”—effectively making Damascus responsible for the
bloody mess created by US occupation. It may very well be true that
some of this is happening, with Syrian consent even, but according to
a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington, foreign fighters are barely 10% of the Iraqi armed
resistance, some 3,000 men altogether. And Syria has gone to great
lengths to guard its long border with Iraq, building a huge
embankment across it, even inviting the international media to come
and see for themselves. Syrian officials have repeatedly pointed out
that despite all the steps taken on their side of the border, they
have yet to see anything comparable on the other side (in fact,
according to the Syrians, no US or Iraqi troops ever bother to patrol
their side.)
The same goes for the Palestinian-Israeli front—Damascus has
generally been very cooperative by closing the offices of several
radical Palestinian organizations there. Asad has gone further by
encouraging these factions and others like the influential Hamas and
Islamic Jihad to hold their fire as Israel withdraws from Gaza. And
don’t forget that for about three decades now, Syria has kept its
border with Israel remarkably quite, a truce only broken when Israeli
jets come across from the other direction to bomb “Palestinian
targets” in Syrian territory.
On the most important issue (which I seriously doubt Bashar can
possibly concede on and survive), it is unclear what the US
administration expects from Syria in matter of the occupied Golan
Heights. Here too Damascus has repeatedly offered to negotiate a
settlement even acceding to Israeli demands that it be allowed access
to a strip along the Syrian side of Lake Tiberias, but to no avail.
It seems that regardless of how much Syria tries to cooperate, the
result is the same: more pressure for greater concessions. Each time
Syria relents, it only whets the neocon’s appetite for more. So, some
in the Damascus now ask, why continue to comply at all.
Given his country’s fragile economy, weak military and near-complete
isolation in the wake of the Harriri assassination, Bashar Asad may
not have a choice but to continue some form of organized retreat by
slowly accommodating US demands. But don’t be so quick to write off
the Baath regime, it has beaten the odds before (for example after
the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and more recently after its
equally humiliating withdrawal). It has always been quite adept at
using its strategic location—nestled as it is among Lebanon, Turkey,
Iraq, Israel and Jordan—its Arab nationalist credentials (or what
little remains of them), and a strategic alliance with Iran to its
advantage.
The Left does not have to make a choice of either supporting the US
project or the Bashar regime. One Syrian writer in a recent editorial
suggests a way out by calling on his government to use this critical
moment to mobilize its people behind it by implementing long-awaited
internal reforms that would give ordinary Syrians a greater stake in
their country. Only then will they be motivated to truly defend it
from an American assault. The Baath do seem to be taking partial
steps in that direction but, unfortunately, only in the economic
field—what many Syrian commentators describe as the “Chinese model,”
meaning free market economic reforms carried out by the firm hand of
a centralized and authoritarian political regime. It’s hard to
predict whether this will be enough—the Baath should not be
surprised, however, if most Syrians desert them at their moment of
greatest need.
Bilal El-Amine is a writer based in Lebanon. He can be reached at
zaloom33 at yahoo.com. Previous reports on the Lebanese elections and other articles by Bilal can be found on Left Turn, Indymedia Beirut, Muslim WakeUp! and ZMag.
