WASHINGTON - The US President Barack Obama team may get modest benefits from ending a five-year chill with Damascus but will find it hard, if not impossible to peel Syria way from hardline ally Iran and break the Arab- Israeli stalemate, analysts said. Obama's administration said last week it submitted its nominee for ambassador to Damascus, the fruit of a year-long drive to engage Syria in a bid to promote Arab- Israeli peace. Syria says it is studying the proposed nominee, who is widely reported to be Robert Ford, a career diplomat with experience in Arab countries like Algeria and Iraq, his most recent posting. He would be the first US Ambassador to Damascus since the one recalled after former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri was killed in a bombing blamed on Syria on February 14, 2005. Analysts said a thaw in ties could allow Washington to reap benefits from intelligence co-operation with Damascus and improve chances for Syria-Israeli peace, even while Palestinian-Israeli peace remains elusive. Indeed, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker last week, disclosed that the Syrian secret services have already resumed cooperation with the CIA and Britain's MI6. Aaron David Miller, who was a Middle East adviser in past US administrations, said Washington could achieve modest objectives, such as intelligence sharing, but he set expectations low. The appointment of an ambassador "doesn't reflect anything like a significant improvement, let alone a transformation in the US-Syrian relationship", Miller told reporters. Syria is a hard nut to crack, he said, because President Bashar al-Assad, from the minority Alawite sect, focuses foremost on ensuring his regime's survival ��" and that means having strategic ties with non-Arab and Shi'ite Iran. "I'm not suggesting that it (the relationship) isn't amenable to change, but it would only change if the Syrians could convince themselves that they could get their needs met elsewhere," he added. And its needs flow from its stakeholding in Lebanon via Hizbollah, the powerful Shi'ite Muslim political and military movement, which Iran has also backed in its decades-old campaign against Israel. "As long as the Hizbollah-Iranian relationship is as close as it is, the Syrians, I think, will only alienate the Iranians at their own peril," Miller said. He added Assad's Syria, which has a majority Sunni Muslim population, sees Iran as a hedge against a Sunni-led Arab world that it mistrusts, while it also looks to energy-rich Tehran for economic support. Syria also needs Israel to return the Golan Heights, which was captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, said Miller, a Woodrow Wilson Center policy scholar.
