Caught between the involuntary complicity of two improbable bed-fellows -- anti-Arab zealots in Washington and anti-American reformists in Syria -- Syria's "old guard" is just playing the waiting game, writes David Hirst in Damascus Fadil Shururu, chief political officer of Ahmad Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, has come a long way since I first met him 35 years ago in Jordan's Ghor Valley, seed-bed of the new-born guerrilla movement that was to liberate the whole of the Palestinian homeland lost to Israel in 1948; the Syrian Ba'thist regime, also in its fire-breathing youth, was its militant Arab backer. He could not even receive me in his own office; he came to my hotel instead. For the PFLP is now one of four Palestinian "terrorist" organisations whose Damascus-based branch the Americans have called on Syria to shut down completely. In the case of the militarily inactive PFLP, Syrian acquiescence seems to have been cosmetic at most, more substantive in the case of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. "But mark my words," said Shururu, "the time is coming when George Bush will need Bashar Al-Assad more than Bashar needs him." What is not in doubt is that the Arab government which, in the aftermath of the Iraq war and open support for Saddam Hussein during it, most feared that it, too, was about to be attacked, believes that the US is now sinking inexorably into an Iraqi "quagmire", and that the deeper it does the less inclined it will become to take on Syria too. "Who is more comfortable now?" asks, Deputy Foreign Minister Walid Muallam, "Syria or the US." Yet, despite what Syrian officials see as their country's almost cheek- turning excess of post-war caution, the Bush administration continues to single it out for special, hostile attention, and to persist in demanding from it far more than it feels able to give: such as the complete dismantling of the military wing of Lebanon's Hizbullah. After President Bush, for no specific reason Syrian officials or Western diplomats could discern, accused Syria of "continuing to assist and harbour terrorists", Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa blew his top. His administration, he said, surpassed all others in "foolishness and proneness to violence"; its "hawks want the sword to remain hanging over Syria's head". Such outbreaks of ferocious rhetoric are seen here as a symptom of the deep-seated antipathy between two adversaries, the neo-conservatives who have shaped the Bush administration's grandiose, neo-imperial, Middle East strategies, and the Syrian "old guard", that deeply entrenched power structure put in place by the late Hafiz Al-Assad which continues to dominate the policies of his son, Bashar, a would-be moderniser apparently struggling to extricate himself from its sclerotic clutches. For the neo-conservatives, no Arab country, after Iraq, represents such an obstacle to all they are trying to achieve, none where American- engineered "regime change" and "democracy" could have a more beneficial effect throughout the region. They make little secret of that -- or of the fact that Syria is one of the key battlegrounds in their Middle East policy conflicts with the more moderate elements of the Bush administration. While these, for example, appreciate Syria's very helpful collaboration in the fight against Al-Qa'eda and "international terrorism", the neo-conservatives hold the Ba'thist regime to an intrinsic part of the region's problems, unfit for any role in solving them. They are constantly pushing arguments to that effect, like the attempts of John Bolton, the hawkish undersecretary of state for arms control, to establish, in defiance of the professional intelligence community, that Syria's development of weapons of mass destruction is now so advanced as to constitute a threat to the whole region -- just the kind of assessment that led to war on Iraq. What, at bottom, the neo-conservatives, as pro-Israeli zealots, are deemed to abhor is precisely what the "old guard" ostensibly stands for. This is the proposition that, strategically and ideologically, Syria is -- as Bashar's spokeswoman Butheina Shaaban put it -- "the pulse and identity of the Arab world", that the pan-Arab nationalism to which, of all Arab countries, it most ardently subscribes, is the natural antithesis of Zionism and its inherent drive to keep the Arab "nation" fragmented. Its destiny is to stand most firmly for pan-Arab causes -- which now means Iraq in addition to the perennial one of Palestine. That is the theory. In practice, for all its centrality in Arab politics and psyche, Syria, the modern state, has always been frustratingly weak in relation to the role it aspires to. Under Ba'thist management, it has gradually become yet weaker, losing "card" after strategic "card" -- with Hizbullah, a few now ineffectual Palestinian factions, a much reduced militarily presence in Lebanon just about the last of them in the ever-diminishing pack. Rarely has Syria felt more besieged than it is today -- and rarely has external siege had such potential domestic ramifications. For in addition to the traditional, Zionist enemy on one flank, and the new, unprecedentedly pro-Israeli America in direct occupation of a key Arab neighbour on the other, it faces what Riad Turk, much-imprisoned doyen of Syrian dissidents, calls the "third force in this equation": the Syrian people. The Syrian people may well resonate to the pan-Arab nationalism which the "old guard" invokes, they may revile America, but they, or rather the increasingly vocal reformists among them, have a dilemma. For the "old guard" is the very embodiment of all that they yearn to be rid of; they know that for it, the striking of nationalist poses, on Iraq, Palestine or the US, is mainly a means of embarrassing all opposition, of justifying the perpetuation of repressive "emergency" laws in place since 1963, and all the more phony in that this "old guard" itself, with its longevity and misrule, has done so much, just like Saddam, to incapacitate the country for a nationalist struggle of any kind. "It makes us schizophrenic," said Anwar Bunni, a leading human rights activist, "we know that America's call for democracy is just a cover for its strategic and economic interests; but some of us say that it is only because of what America did in Iraq, the fright it gave our own rulers, that we reformers stand a chance here." Caught between the involuntary complicity of two such improbable bed-fellows -- anti-Arab zealots in Washington, anti-American reformists in Syria -- the "old guard" is just playing the waiting game which, in its weakness, has for years been the only one that it can play. Waiting, now, for America to sink deeper into the Iraqi mire. "Put crudely," said a Western diplomat, "the body count of US soldiers is the most accurate barometer of Syria's morale." It will do nothing to hurry the process along. Why should it, anyway? "Iraq is not Lebanon," said Butheina Shaaban, in implicit reference to the key role Syria did play in driving Israeli and American troops out of that country in the 1980s, "for the Americans to worry about Syrian interference is to under-estimate the Iraqis themselves." It is always possible that, despite this studied passivity, the neo-conservatives will still win the argument in Washington over what to do about Syria, that, exasperated by growing problems in Iraq, Bush will turn to Syria (and Iran too) as an explanation for them -- then attack it as a solution. But the calculation in Damascus is clearly that, as Information Minister Adnan Omran put it, "Bush will realise that the neo-conservatives are leading him to his own perdition," that he will retreat, not escalate, and that the traditional, pragmatic strain in American Middle East diplomacy will re-assert itself, the one which sees Syria as a vital interlocutor in the everlasting quest for a general Middle East settlement. A relief to the "old guard", such a defeat for the neo-conservatives might not be such an unmixed blessing for the Syrian people, some of whom fear that if the regime ever had any inclination to heed their demands for democratic reform, with the American ogre in retreat, it would have none. And that would be a pity, Arab reformists everywhere say, because, given Syria's historically vanguard role in the development of Arab political consciousness, authentic, home-grown reform there would have a far wider and deeper impact than any American- imposed ones in Iraq.
