The Syrian Accountability Act's progress through the US Congress is not only a blow to Syria but to regional stability at large, Sami Moubayed writes The American accusations have been building for some time against Damascus, orchestrated by the Bush administration. Now Congress has joined the circus, with the Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 sweeping through the House of Representatives in a nearly unanimous vote. The Accountability Act has also been introduced into the US Senate by Senators Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, and Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican. The act, highly symbolic in meaning but of little tangible substance to the average Syrian, holds Syria accountable for supporting "terrorism", the "continued occupation of Lebanon", and the "possession and continued development of weapons of mass destruction". The bill was lobbied for by Zionists in the US and by anti-Syrian opposition figures from Lebanon, headed by former Army Commander Michel Aoun. President Bush, who agrees with the bill's content, but feels its timing is politically inconvenient, has expressed mild reservations. However, when it comes to signing the bill into law, Bush is likely to follow suit. The mainstream American media, political activists, talk shows, and staged rallies have all contributed to demonising Syria. Every day, American citizens are bombarded with largely baseless or exaggerated claims about Syria, much the way they were force-fed propaganda about the threat of Saddam Hussein's Iraq to America. Edward Walker, a former US ambassador who currently is president of the Middle East Institute, wrote that Syria under Bashar Al-Assad has repeatedly deceived the US, whereas the late President Hafez Al-Assad fulfiled the few promises he made to America. "Had Syria lived up to its promises vis- à-vis Iraq, then there would have been no air strike by Israel on 5 October," Walker claims, "and even if there were, the US would have been first to condemn it." Supporters of the bill have argued that Syria is subject to fewer sanctions than any other country on the US list of state- sponsors of terrorism (Syria has been on the list since 1979). They also point out that there is no ban on trade with Syria, and that the US still has full diplomatic relations with Syria. Hence, American leniency has encouraged Syria to rebuke US demands to expel organisations that the US considers terrorist, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and Hizbullah. As part of the lobbying, supporters mailed an urgent appeal to the constituencies of select legislators saying: "urge your senators and representatives to co-sponsor and help pass the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration bill of 2003. This is an important part of the United States-led war on terrorism." The mass mailing ended with a hotline to call senators, a mailing address, and a sample letter to use in addressing elected officials on the issue of Syria. The sample letter reads: "As the nightmare of Saddam Hussein's despotic regime comes to an end, it is becoming dangerously evident that Saddam's deadly associates and designs are relocating to neighbouring Syria. Syria continues to produce weapons of mass destruction, harbours the world's most infamous terrorist organisations, and encourages its citizens to attack American troops in Iraq. I urge you to sponsor the Syria Accountability Act. This is a necessary first stop to provide security to American forces in the region, to neighbouring countries in the Middle East, and to fight the global scourge of terrorism." The accusations of Syria's sponsorship of terrorism arise from President Bashar Al-Assad's insistence that Hizbullah is carrying out legitimate resistance in South Lebanon, similar to the resistance to the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. He has also maintained Syria's support of the Palestinian resistance, especially since the Intifada broke out in 2000, and which has aggravated relations with Washington. The US also accuses Syria of being a corridor for Arabs streaming into Iraq to fight the US Army, and of harbouring officials from the Saddam regime. If these allegations are true, Syria would be in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (passed on 28 September 2001), which mandates that all states refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to "entities or persons involved in terrorist acts" and to take the necessary steps to "deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts". The bill also asserts that Syria has violated Resolution 661, banning trade with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, except in the framework of the Oil-for-Food programme. For its part, Syria has started to send signals to Washington that it wants to cooperate on the Iraqi issue. It closed down its borders with Iraq and expelled figures from Saddam Hussein's regime, including Tarek Aziz. It has unwillingly recognised that it must deal with the occupation of Iraq as a reality in the new Middle East. At the Islamic States Summit in Malaysia, Al-Assad had a high-profile meeting with members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the American-instaled interim government of Iraq. He invited them to Syria, in a conciliatory gesture to the new Iraqi government. Some in America see this move as too little, too late, comparing it to the burst of Syria cooperation in the war on Al-Qa'eda in the aftermath of 9/11. At that time, US Ambassador to Syria Theodore Kattouf told Foreign Minister Farouk Al-Sharaa that despite Syria's efforts, Syria would not receive a "get out of jail free card". With regard to Lebanon, the bill claims that Syria "occupied Lebanon" at the end of the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War and has since deployed 30,000 troops on Lebanese territory. Syria has, the bill adds, prevented the deployment of the Lebanese Army in South Lebanon as required by Resolution 425, to keep tensions high on the Israeli border. With Syria preferring to not fight Israel head-on after the disengagement agreements signed in the wake of the 1973 War, it fought Israel by proxy in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s. This "violation", according to the Syria Accountability Act, lets South Lebanon fall under the control of Hizbullah, which the US considers a terrorist group. The Syrian troop presence is also counter to UN Resolution 520 (passed on 17 September 1982) which calls for "respect of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, unity and political independence of Lebanon under the sole and exclusive authority of the Government of Lebanon". Since 1990, the Senate and House of Representatives have passed seven bills and resolutions for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, to no avail. The fact that Al-Assad ordered four troop repositionings since coming to power in 2000, as specified by the Taif Accord, is not mentioned in the bill. This summer, Syria halved its troop presence in Lebanon, pulling out an estimated 15,000 troops. Rather, the Accountability Act makes the claim that since Israel withdrew its troops from Lebanon in May 2000, in accordance with Resolution 425, Syrian troops should leave as well. It is not mentioned that, unlike the Israeli Army, which was an occupying force, the Syrian Army entered Lebanon to save the Maronite Christians from defeat at the hands of the PLO and its allies. The Maronites who pleaded for Syrian intervention were not controlled by Syria, but were the traditional and communal leaders of Christian Lebanon. Syria claims that it cannot leave Lebanon so long as Israel continues to occupy the disputed Sheba Farms area along the Lebanese-Israeli border. Syria's stabilising presence is still requested by the current government of Lebanon. The bill states that Syria permits attacks on Sheba "under the false guise that it remains Lebanese land. Syria also permits attacks on civilian targets in Israel." Syria is also handed responsibility for all Hizbullah attacks. This statement is misleading, however, in that although Hizbullah consults with Damascus regularly, it makes its own strategic decisions. Hizbullah is inherently a Lebanese Shi'ite entity resisting the Israeli occupation, and its policies reflect its constituency's wishes. The Accountability Act sets out a long series of "obligations" that Syria must fulfil -- first, to "immediately halt support for terrorism"; second, to close the Syrian offices of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, and DFLP in Syria; third, to withdraw all of its forces from Lebanon; fourth, to set a well- defined schedule for withdrawal from Lebanon; fifth, to halt the development and production of biological and chemical weapons; sixth, to halt import of oil from Iraq, which the US considers illegal; and seventh, to "enter into serious unconditional bilateral negotiations with the Government of Israel in order to realise a full and permanent peace". Until Syria has fully complied with all these demands, the Accountability Act proposes several punitive measures. These include prohibiting weapons sales to Syria, prohibiting the export of American products to Syria (except for medicine and food), preventing US businessmen from investing in Syria, reducing diplomatic representation in Syria, and blocking transactions in which the Syrian government has any interest. The bill also restricts travel of Syrian diplomats assigned to Washington or the UN headquarters in New York to a 25-mile radius of their place of work. In reality, all of these sanctions carry little weight to them, except for the one regarding Lebanon. The US had given Syria the green light to stay in Lebanon and exile Michel Aoun as a reward for Syria's contribution to Operation Desert Storm. Although Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait because of his own grandiose territorial ambitions and Syria entered Lebanon to help end the civil war and bring peace to its neighbouring country, today the drastic differences between the two cases are being erased in American rhetoric. Today, the US has turned to Aoun to use him in its argument against Syria, putting him before Congress to speak about the "occupation" of Lebanon by Syrian troops. Although the Syrian- Lebanese case is very different from the Iraq-Kuwaiti one, the US is trying to show them as parallel cases of one state occupying a much smaller neighbour, thereby endangering the entire Middle East. As for the other sanctions, Syrians already have little investment in the US, and American companies have little investment in Syria. Nevertheless, the fact that Syria is being "punished" by a foreign power is something very insulting to the Syrian people. If anything, it will further enflame hatred against America, which has been mounting ever since the Palestinian Intifada. It would cause them to support the rising Iraqi Intifada, if there is such a word. On an official level, Al- Assad has attached little weight to the bill, saying that he did not discuss it with legislators who came to Syria because: "The issue is an American issue and Congress is an American institution." A group of Syrian intellectuals authored a letter to every US member of Congress, expressing their views on the Accountability Act, saying: "it affects not only the government of Syria, but the future and pride of Syria as well." They reminded the members of Congress that at no point in recent history have Americans been in danger in Syria. Former US Ambassador Christopher Ross used to be seen regularly in Damascus, jogging through the streets at midnight with no bodyguards, a practice few diplomats in Washington would dare try. The bill will hinder cooperation between the two countries in the war on terror, and make it very difficult for Arabs to view the US as an honest broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Syrians have no problem with the US, and if it were not for the security of Israel, the US would have no problem with Syria -- every clause in the Accountability Act is aimed at protecting Israeli national security. Another generation of Syrians nostalgically remembers the "good old days", when the US was a dependable ally. In 1946, the US helped secure Syria's independence from France, and a decade later forced a halt to the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt. During Jimmy Carter's term in office, before the Reagan administration took an antagonistic stance towards Syria, the US was widely respected as a force for peace. In conclusion, the letter reads: "The Syrian Accountability bill is not only a tremendous mistake, but more dangerously, a time bomb that must be dismantled for the sake of better relations between our countries."
