Syria’s youthful president sounded resolute and defiant this week in his first public comment on the Israeli air raid that struck deep into his country’s territory.
”We can, with full confidence, say that what happened will only make Syria’s role more effective and influential,” Bashar al-Assad told the pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat. ”We are not a superpower, but we are not a weak state either. We’re not a country without cards … We are not a state that can be ignored.”
In the face of an onslaught from neo-conservatives in the United States and a new threat from the Israeli prime minister to hit enemies ”in any place and in any way”, al-Assad (38) may still have some cards to play, but few would deny that he holds a weak hand.
”His options are very limited,” said David Butter of The Economist intelligence unit. ”The old rules of the Syria-Israel game were that it was always possible for Syria to give a nod and a wink to heat up the Lebanese border [with Israel].”
In the days of al-Assad’s father, Hafez, that would have been the obvious Syrian response, but it is no longer a practical option.
The Israeli air strike inside Syria, the first in 20 years, shows that the rules of the game have changed, Butter said. ”Israel would say that any action on the Lebanese border is ultimately a Syrian responsibility.”
Syria’s best option, according to Daniel Neep, head of the Middle East programme at the Royal United Services Institute in London, is to maintain the constraints on Hizbullah ”while pursuing its complaints through international legal institutions such as the [United Nations] Security Council”.
This strategy would seek to portray Syria as a law-abiding country. It would also be effective if the international agenda later moved on to the question of Syrian chemical and biological weapons programmes, he added.
When that issue last came up, in April, ”Syria countered by saying it would be happy to ratify the chemical and biological conventions if Israel did the same,” Neep continued. ”If the Syrians manage to keep the debate on legal grounds they can do quite well.”
Syria’s other potential strength is that it is not a pariah state, despite what US President George W Bush may say. It is a member of the Security Council and has good relations with Britain, among many other countries.
The downside is that restraint in the face of Israel’s attack can be viewed as weakness, especially by the Ba’athist old guard who still dominate Syria’s defence and foreign policy.
Another problem is that, while Syria has given the US significant help in dealing with al-Qaeda, there are suspicions that Syria is allowing resistance fighters across its border into Iraq.
Apart from backing Hizbullah in Lebanon, Syria also hosts several Palestinian groups of the anti-Arafat variety, but insists that their activities in the country are strictly political.
Syria views Hizbullah and the Palestinian groups as bargaining counters to be sacrificed, eventually, for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights.
But in the view from the US, and to some extent Europe, under the post-September 11 rules that is no longer an acceptable trade-off. — Â