As the sun prepared to set on October 26, 2008, over the farms of Al-Sukkariya, a Syrian enclave five miles west of the Iraqi frontier city of Qaim, three US helicopters hovered over a group of buildings. According to reports by Syria’s state news agency, a number of US troops descended “from helicopters and attacked a civilian building under construction and opened fire on workers inside—including the wife of the building guard—leading to [the deaths] of eight civilians…. The helicopters then left Syrian territory towards Iraqi territory.”1 One witness in the area, who was somehow able to log onto the BBC website despite the regime’s close monitoring of Internet traffic in the country, said that those killed were from the al-Mashada tribe, which has members near the Iraqi city of Tikrit—the hometown of late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the heart of the Sunni insurgency in the country. The mystery source said that the people there were “very relaxed, laid-back people, not very religious—there’s no Mujahideen from this tribe. The guard and the woman who died were very simple people.”2
The following morning, however, US sources quietly confirmed the death of someone far more complex and lethal: Badran Turki Hishan al-Mazidih, an Iraqi national sanctioned by the US Treasury Department back in February for “facilitating and controlling the flow of money, weapons, terrorists, and other resources through Syria to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).” A US military official said the raid demonstrated that US forces were “taking matters into [their] own hands” to shut down the networks of al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters moving between Syria and Iraq and using the former as a safe haven.3 In the coming days, reports emerged that the attack was one of a dozen of previously undisclosed US special-forces raids on al-Qaeda militants in Syria and Pakistan.4 The details of the raid differed from the line that Syrian members of the US-Syria Working Group had sold in Washington the previous summer. If Syria’s primary interest now focused on Iraq—over fears of sectarian strife in that country spilling into Syria—what were al-Qaeda fighters still doing camped out on its territory?
Damascus responded by closing the Damascus Community School—the American academy attended by Damascus’s elite that had remained formally unlicensed since its establishment in 1957 as part of a general effort to keep Syria out of the Soviet camp in the Cold War.5 The state also closed the American Cultural Center, which was housed in a building adjacent to the US embassy in Damascus and which organized community outreach and hosted the weekly and very popular “American movie night.” The center was preparing for a US election party, scheduled for the early hours of November 5 as the polls closed in the United States. The regime also closed the American Language Center (ALC), which is associated with the US embassy.
The center’s closure was also the preemptive end of my relationship with Syria. I had planned to travel from Beirut to Damascus to attend the event and write about people’s reactions—a natural scene to conclude this story and set the stage for what I thought would be a reconciliation between Damascus and Washington. Following the attack, however, the regime clamped down on visas for Americans, and I stayed in Beirut. I never had a chance to say good-bye to my friends in Damascus or my colleagues at Syria Today.
A little over a week later, on November 4, the American people elected Barack Hussein Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States. His early campaign promises to engage unconditionally with Iran and Syria led many close to the Syrian regime to believe that the new president would quickly come knocking on the doors of Damascus. Two days later, Syria’s state-run newspaper Al-Thawra ran an article saying that Syria “extends its hand” to president-elect Barack Obama. Sami Moubayed—the editor in chief of Forward, the English-language monthly magazine, and a member of the US-Syria Working Group—also penned the piece “Abu Hussein’s Invitation to Damascus.” He wrote that Damascus would “use its weight in the region to moderate the behavior of non-state players like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, and find solutions for the US standoff with Iran over its nuclear program.” In return, Moubayed listed ten things that Obama had to do to be “greeted with open arms in Damascus, like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.” While Moubayed later insisted that his article reflected only his own views, journalists and analysts widely regarded them as reflecting those of the Syrian regime.6 The requirements included the following:
From Damascus and the region, Syria’s “triumphalism” must have seemed justified.7 The Assad regime had outlasted not only the Bush administration’s isolation and confrontation policy but also the administration itself. However, to accomplish this, the Assad regime had concocted an eclectic and potentially volatile mixture of policies. To fight the United States and its allies in Iraq, Damascus allowed al-Qaeda–affiliated foreign-fighter networks to cross its territory into Iraq, where they were responsible for some of the conflict’s most spectacular attacks. This policy undermined the notion I and others had entertained following the September 11 attacks that a minority-led Alawite regime would never allow its territory to be used by Sunni extremists like al-Qaeda. That action plus the regime’s domestic outreach to Islam increased Assad’s domestic legitimacy at the expense of weakening the secular regime his father, Hafez, had built. He also continued the repressive aspects of his father’s rule by arresting regime opponents and perpetuating horrific human rights abuses. In Lebanon, Damascus had deepened its ties with Hezbollah to historic levels to contain the March 14 coalition, including frequent public meetings between President Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, a man that Bashar’s father had always held at arm’s length. To cement this relationship, Assad brought his country into a closer orbit with Iran, forming the “resistance axis” of countries allied against US and Israeli interests in the region. Last but not least, Assad appeared to have started a nuclear program, either as a deterrent against Israel or as part of a second Iranian nuclear program or, perhaps, both.
While the Assad regime might have survived the worst that the Bush administration would throw at it, the things the regime had to do to survive made reconciliation with the United States even more difficult, and the high-level engagement Damascus had hoped for didn’t materialize. An expectations gap rapidly grew between both countries.
Less than a week after Moubayed’s article, the IAEA put Syria on the agenda of its November 19 board of governors’ meeting. Among the environmental samples taken during its June 2008 inspection of the Al Kibar site, the IAEA had found traces of uranium that were not part of Syria’s declared inventory of nuclear material. Damascus later blamed the presence of uranium on Israeli depleted-uranium munitions that might have been used to destroy the facility, but nuclear experts doubted that the kind of uranium found at the site—anthropogenic, or man-manipulated, uranium—was in any way similar to depleted uranium. In subsequent reports, the IAEA said that it found the same type of particles at Syria’s declared research reactor outside Damascus as well. While the Syrian regime stopped answering questions on Al Kibar in September 2008, it continued to allow inspectors access to Syria’s research reactor and provided two sets of explanations for the presence of the particles. The IAEA rejected both explanations, and in June 2011 the IAEA board announced publicly what was known privately: Syria appeared to have constructed a nuclear reactor. As of the time of writing, the investigation was still ongoing.8
With tensions between the two countries mounting and Damascus anticipating high-level engagement with the incoming Obama administration, the regime began a comprehensive crackdown on journalists in Syria, forcing them to toe the regime’s line. Given what I knew about Syria’s recent behavior, investigations by the Syrian authorities into my political beliefs, and my inability to obtain a visa, I accepted a new fellowship with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy—a think tank that had been critical of Syrian policies during the Bush administration. My fellowship dealt with how to engage Syria and maintain US national-security interests. In the United States, I visited Leila, who had left Syria in May 2007 to study journalism. While Leila didn’t like the Washington Institute’s position on Syria and was critical of my work, she understood that I was leaving Syria behind.
Those advocating a quick rapprochement with Damascus pointed to rumors that the indirect peace talks between Israel and Syria under Turkish auspices in Ankara were getting tantalizingly close to a deal. The specifics of the talks were not officially announced, but by spring 2009, some details had emerged.
Syria was rumored to have asked Israel for clarification regarding six points along the “line of June 4, 1967”—the line of separation between Israeli and Syrian forces before the former captured the Golan Heights two days later. Syria was also rumored to have agreed to cede its riparian rights to the Sea of Galilee, though not of the Jordan River, and to the immediate exchange of ambassadors and the “normalization of relations” with Israel while Israeli forces disengaged from the Golan Heights in stages over three to eight years. The Golan would be demilitarized and turned into a “peace park,” which would allow Israelis access without visas. This was an idea first developed by Frederic Hof—a longtime Levant observer and a close associate of Senator George Mitchell—whose report on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 2001 had recommended rebuilding the Palestinian Authority following the al-Aqsa intifada, ending all Israeli settlement activity and Palestinian violence. Last but not least, Syria had apparently agreed to allow Lebanon to pursue its own negotiations with Israel.
These hopes for progress were dashed on December 22, 2008, however, when Hamas refused to renew the ceasefire with Israel and began shooting hundreds of rockets per day into Israel. Israel responded with a massive incursion into Gaza, code-named Cast Lead. Syria then broke off the indirect talks in Ankara. When the conflict ended in early January, Israelis had become increasingly cynical about the benefits of returning territory for peace. In elections on February 10, 2009, the Kadima Party, led by Tzipi Livni, earned one more Knesset seat than Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party. However, other right-of-center parties gathered around Likud did better, causing Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, to ask Netanyahu to form a government. The coalition that Netanyahu formed was skeptical of progress on the Syrian track and refused to return to indirect talks. Instead, it advocated talks with no preconditions (that is, no commitment to the June 4, 1967, line) under American auspices.
So with peace talks on hold, secretary of state Hillary Clinton dispatched assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs Jeffrey Feltman on February 26, 2009, for talks with the Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha. The president was rumored to have given Clinton two instructions. The first was that his administration was elected on the idea of engagement with America’s adversaries and that Washington would work with Damascus as part of that effort. The second was that a victory by Hezbollah and its allies in the elections scheduled for June 7 should be avoided at all costs—therefore, engagement with Syria should not come at the expense of US allies in Lebanon.
Feltman was not the engager that Syria had in mind, given his previous tenure as ambassador to Lebanon during Syria’s forced withdrawal from the country following Hariri’s assassination in February 2005. Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moallem had once quipped to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon that “Feltman should leave [Lebanon]; I’m prepared to pay for his vacation to Hawaii.”9 In the first meeting with Moustapha, Feltman raised the issues of Syria’s “support to terrorist groups and networks, acquisition of nuclear and nonconventional weaponry, interference in Lebanon, and worsening human rights situation.”
Syrian-regime analysts immediately attacked Feltman in the press for using the “language of the neocons.” Following the meeting, however, both sides labeled the talks “constructive,” leading to another round of discussions in Damascus on March 7 between Feltman and National Security Council Middle East director Daniel Shapiro and Moallem. Following the talks, Feltman announced that both sides had found “a lot of common ground” and that instead of setting “benchmarks” for Damascus, each side was watching the future “choices” of the other.
Two days later, Assad stepped into the fray. In the ensuing twenty-three days, he gave six interviews to international media—this was unprecedented for a Syrian president over such a short period of time. Rather than dealing with the issues discussed during Feltman and Shapiro’s visit, however, Assad targeted Israel, offering it only a cold peace. He blamed outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert for the failure of recent indirect Syrian-Israeli negotiations and refused to talk about cutting ties with Hezbollah, Hamas, and Tehran. In another interview, Assad implied that he had been asked to mediate between Washington and Tehran. Then, in his first-ever e-mail interview with an American journalist, Assad told The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh that he not only sought US mediation with Israel, but he also wanted direct contact with President Obama.
In the June 7, 2009, Lebanese elections, the pro-West March 14 coalition achieved an unexpected victory over the Hezbollah-led opposition. A little over a week later, US Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell—together with his new special coordinator for regional affairs and point man on Syria-Israel peace talks, Frederic Hof—headed to Damascus for a first round of talks with President Assad. The discussions focused not only on getting Syria involved in possible Middle East peace talks but also on repairing bilateral relations between the two countries, most notably over the issue of foreign fighters traveling through Syria to Iraq.
Unexpectedly, Syria reiterated its earlier demand that the United States lift its sanctions—measures that until then the Syrian government had claimed had had little effect on the country. Days after the visit, the State Department announced that the United States would return its ambassador to Syria. In Mitchell’s second meeting with Assad that July, the US envoy was said to have spent hours with Assad personally going over the US sanctions regime—an unusual topic for a Syrian president to be discussing with Washington’s chief Middle East peace negotiator.
Signs that US sanctions were having an increased impact had been steadily growing. The Syrian economy had performed relatively well in recent years, posting an average annual economic growth rate of around 5 percent, which was fueled by high oil prices and increased investment from the Gulf. However, there were big problems. Oil production—proceeds from which account for a little less than a third of state revenues—had declined by 30 percent since 2005. And Syrian industry—accounting for 28 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP)—had contracted 15 percent as a result of its free-trade agreement with Turkey. A record three-year drought had also devastated the Syrian agricultural sector, which accounts for a quarter of Syrian economic output.
Following the global economic downturn, Syria’s economic situation worsened. The collapse in oil prices forced the state to revise its budget oil price downward to $51 for light crude and $42 for heavy, which resulted in an estimated record budget deficit of $4.8 billion, or roughly 10 percent of its GDP. Although the state usually makes up for budget shortfalls by slashing investment spending—a line item that accounted for 40 percent of its 2009 budget—this tactic was becoming increasingly difficult. Syrians born in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the country was among the top-twenty fastest-growing populations in the world, were flooding the job market. According to an interview in January 2009 with the Syrian deputy prime minister for economic affairs, Abdullah Dardari, Syria needed $14 billion of investment over the next two years to meet the 6 to 7 percent economic-growth targets required to create enough jobs for the expanding workforce.
The bad economic news explained Damascus’s demand that Washington drop its sanctions. In an interview with Reuters in February 2009, Dardari said that “to have normal relations between Syria and the United States, sanctions should be lifted…. This is going to be a very important part of any dialogue.” His statements echoed those of Sami Moubayed’s “Invitation to Abu Hussein” article.
These statements represented a reversal of the regime’s standard rhetoric on sanctions. When the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SAA) was implemented in May 2004, analysts that I interviewed in Damascus bragged that the sanctions would have little effect due to historically small amounts of bilateral trade. At the time it made sense. Many Syria observers—including me—questioned the effectiveness of US sanctions, as spiraling food, commodity, and oil prices drove the dollar value (but not volume) of US-Syrian trade to all-time highs.
Slowly but surely, US sanctions on Damascus had an increasing impact. The SAA, which bans all US exports to Syria (except food and medicine), hit Syrian aviation particularly hard. State-owned Syrian Air could not obtain parts for its fleet of American-made Boeing jets nor purchase new aircraft from Europe’s Airbus, which also has substantial US content in its planes. The SAA also complicated Syrian oil and gas production by denying companies that operated in Syria the necessary US technology to reverse the diminishing output of Syrian crude. Indeed, in the summer of 2007, Damascus blamed electricity blackouts on the “knock-on effect” of US sanctions; companies specializing in major high-tech projects shunned operations in Syria for fear of running foul of US law. The only legal exceptions to the sanctions were export licenses for US goods for certain humanitarian purposes, such as to promote the exchange of information and to help maintain aviation safety.
At the same time, US actions targeting the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria (CBS) exacerbated Damascus’s financial woes by making it more difficult to repatriate critical oil revenues. In March 2006, the US Treasury Department’s designation of CBS—the depository for the lion’s share of Syria’s estimated eighteen to twenty billion dollars in foreign-currency reserves—as a “primary money-laundering concern” under the USA Patriot Act led all US banks, as well as a number of European ones, to close their correspondent accounts. In anticipation of the move, Damascus switched state foreign-currency transactions from dollars to euros. Since oil, the regime’s lifeline, is denominated in dollars, the switch complicated the regime’s ability to fund itself. In addition, the designation scared businessmen away from CBS and toward the country’s new private-sector banks, which operate under less regime control, effectively reducing the amount of cash the regime could access.
Executive orders freezing the US assets of Syrian officials likewise made global banks and investors wary of doing business with Syrian officials and regime businessmen. In May 2008, two American executives of Gulfsands Petroleum—a company contracted to boost crude output in eastern Syria—resigned, and the company moved its headquarters from the United States to the United Kingdom after one of the company’s partners, business tycoon and President Assad’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf, was targeted by an executive order focusing on public corruption in Syria.
Later, Washington successfully pressured the Turkish mobile-phone provider Turkcell to abandon its bid to buy Syriatel, another Makhlouf-owned business. The US move was hailed by Syria’s business community, which views Makhlouf, according to a 2009 International Crisis Group report, as “a symbol of crony capitalism, resented by many colleagues for having bullied them into forced partnerships or out of lucrative deals.”
By late summer 2009, rumors swirled around Washington and the Middle East that the White House was preparing to turn a new page with Damascus. The first test of this new relationship would be over the issue that caused the breakdown in US-Syrian relations more than six years before: the flow of jihadi militants from Syria to Iraq. A CENTCOMled delegation visited Damascus and concluded a tentative agreement with Syria on a “technical assessment of Iraqi-Syrian border posts.”
Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, miffed at being initially left out of these promising talks, visited Damascus on August 18 to seal the tripartite deal. The string of bomb blasts that greeted him upon his return to Baghdad the next day—the bloodiest in more than eighteen months and later claimed by an al-Qaeda affiliate—led Iraq to demand that Syria expel Iraqi Baathists and jihadi militants from its soil and recall its ambassador. Damascus responded in kind, effectively blowing up Washington’s initiative on the launch pad.10 The jihadi issue proved so explosive that even when Damascus had wanted to show its ability to turn a new page with the United States, it was unable to deliver. A month later, deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad arrived in Washington for talks that dealt almost exclusively with US sanctions and how they could be lifted.
Mekdad’s visit signaled the end of the cold war between Washington and Damascus. It was replaced with a cold détente to solve the pile of bilateral issues between the two countries and achieve the Obama administration’s goal of fostering “comprehensive Middle East peace.” Damascus might have expected that negotiations with Israel would solve other outstanding issues between the United States and Syria, but with Israel and Syria unable to even come to terms on returning to talks, it was unclear when this would happen. Perhaps the best summary of the Obama administration’s position on Syria came in an interview on December 1, 2009, by the left-of-center think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP) with Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell. After answering numerous questions on the administration’s failed efforts to get Israeli-Palestinian talks off the ground, Mitchell turned his attention to Syria in the final question:
Question: What is the prospect of resuming talks on the Syrian track? How do these efforts tie in with the administration’s policy toward Syria and with the broader regional strategy for the Middle East?
Mitchell: President Obama is committed to comprehensive Middle East peace…. President Obama has directed that we engage Syria diplomatically. His objective is to assess Syria’s readiness to improve the US-Syria bilateral relationship so that Syrian policies and actions that have been problematic for successive US administrations will change in ways that permit the relaxation and eventual elimination of US economic and political sanctions. If the US and Syria were to share a substantially common regional, strategic outlook the implications for Middle Eastern political stability and economic progress would be quite positive.
The key problem affecting the US-Syria relationship is Syrian support of terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah and Hamas. If Syria truly wants a better relationship with the United States and a stable, prosperous future for its people, it must end its support for terrorist groups and move toward resolution of its conflict with Israel through peaceful negotiations.
We are encouraging Syria and Israel to re-engage in negotiations as soon as possible. We have offered to facilitate their discussions in any way they see fit. We recognize there will be a major US role in helping them implement a peace treaty. We intend to continue encouraging the Parties to engage by helping them come to agreement on certain understandings that would enable each to have a positive and compelling idea of what peace between them would look like once it is achieved.
Finally, on February 17, 2010, the administration dispatched undersecretary of state William Burns to Damascus to meet President Assad. Burns became the highest-level US official to visit the capital since former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage did so in January 2005. Washington simultaneously announced that Robert Ford, a former ambassador to Algeria then serving as deputy chief of mission in Iraq, would be President Obama’s choice as ambassador to Syria. For the better part of a year, the name of the administration’s candidate for ambassador had been a closely held secret, leading to wild rumors in the press. Finally, it seemed, engagement was getting off the ground in earnest. On February 24, Secretary of State Clinton told a Senate committee that the United States was “asking Syria to move away from Iran.”11
The following day, Assad invited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to Damascus for meetings and a public dinner, which was branded in the press by pundits as the “Axis of Evil Banquet.” While Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah’s comments slamming Israel and hailing the “resistance” were predictable, what was unexpected was an especially defiant tone from President Assad. Openly mocking Clinton’s request, Assad said, “We must have understood Clinton wrong because of bad translation or our limited understanding, so we signed the agreement to cancel the visas…. I find it strange that [Americans] talk about Middle East stability and peace and the other beautiful principles and call for two countries to move away from each other.” Ahmadinejad added that “Clinton said we should maintain a distance. I say there is no distance between Iran and Syria…. We have the same goals, same interests and same enemies. Our circle of cooperation is expanding day after day.”12 Shortly thereafter, reports began to surface of Syria transferring advanced weaponry—including Scud missiles—to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon.13
During his nomination hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 16, 2010, Ford outlined the five things that the Obama administration sought with the Assad regime. First, the United States sought Syria’s help in stabilizing Iraq, which he specifically clarified as stopping the networks that fed foreign fighters into Iraq. Second, the administration wanted help in maintaining stability in Lebanon. The third goal was to gain Damascus’s support for peace talks with Israel, and the fourth was to obtain Syria’s cooperation with the IAEA. Finally, the United States wanted improvement of the deteriorating human rights situation in the country. Ford added that US sanctions on Syria would not be lifted unless Syria changed its position on those key issues.
With Syria’s behavior worsening and engagement not going according to plan, Washington policy makers launched an informal review of US-Syria policy in the summer of 2010 as the Obama administration tightened sanctions on Iran and stories began to appear in the international press that Israel was contemplating striking Tehran’s nuclear program. The debate quickly fell into the old pattern. Advocates of a US approach based on engagement to foster Syria-Israel peace talks pointed to the strategic advantages of “realigning” Assad away from Iran and Hezbollah via a peace treaty, championing deeper diplomacy with no pressure or negative inducements as the best way to get Assad back to the negotiating table. This policy echoed the constructive engagement policy of the 1970s and 1990s, when Washington believed it had more ability to reward good behavior than punish Damascus’s problematic policies. Critics of this approach, most notably those in the Republican Party, said that the best way to deal with the Iranian problem and proxies like Hezbollah is to stop engagement and pressure Assad until his regime changed its behavior.
But a look back at the cold war between Washington and the Assad regime showed that the neither peace talks nor pressure alone were likely to work. Basing a policy of engaging Damascus with only the goal of reaching a peace treaty and thus fundamentally changing the Assad regime’s behavior has historically had limited success. Unlike the case of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya, which Washington engaged successfully to end its nuclear program, the primary carrot Damascus seeks—the Golan Heights—is controlled by a third party, Israel. Because Israel and Syria are such bitter foes, and handing back the Golan would actually require an Israeli referendum, the best the United States has achieved to date is a “peace process” that allows Syria to carry on with policies that have grown worse over time. While brokering a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty should remain an important objective, the slow pace of the peace process combined with the growing list of problems with Assad’s regime make the possibility of “flipping” Syria into a Western orbit difficult at best.
On a domestic level, the Assad regime continues to use Syria’s state of war with Israel to justify an authoritarian form of government that reforms with only half measures, generating one of the highest corruption rates in the world. Without a firm legal foundation, Syrians are forced to bribe the minority-dominated networks that dominate the regime. This corruption has become the mortar holding Syria’s regime together. Even in the event of a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty, unless Damascus institutes fundamental domestic reforms on the issues of human rights and rule of law, it is unclear how the United States can underwrite a treaty the same way it did in Egypt and Jordan.
Basing a policy solely on pressure and isolation hasn’t worked well either, with US unilateral and multilateral pressure failing to change the Assad regime’s behavior. Following Rafik Hariri’s 2005 murder, US allies fell into line to compel the Assad regime to pull its forces out of Lebanon—a primary goal of the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SAA). It also relaxed its domestic repression and allowed signatories of the Damascus Declaration to organize openly. Economically, the withdrawal from Lebanon caused the Assad regime to follow through on promises to liberalize its finance sector and lift its ban on imported goods, bringing prosperity to Syrians—at least to those who could afford it. In all cases, Assad only changed course when faced with a dilemma of the lesser of two evils.
Damascus was able to roll back some of these changes, however. Sensing its survival was at stake, the Assad regime was simply more ruthless and flexible than the United States and its Western allies in obtaining its objectives. To fight the United States in Iraq, the Assad regime made a tacit Faustian bargain with Sunni al-Qaeda networks who otherwise despise Syria’s minority Alawite-based regime. It was a deal many foreign-policy analysts said in the past was impossible. Syria deepened its relationship with Iran to unprecedented levels and provided Hezbollah with sophisticated arms from its own stockpile, including the Kornet-E antitank weapon, which Hezbollah used to decimate Israeli tank columns and command posts in Lebanon.
On the domestic scene, the regime reached out to Syria’s majority Sunni Muslim community in unprecedented ways that changed the nature of Hafez al-Assad’s secular Syria. It also launched the biggest crackdown on the Syrian opposition since the regime’s brutal repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s. The Assad regime used all these factors to divide the United States and its allies on what to do when things did not go according to plan—most notably during the 2006 Lebanon War. Assad’s plan of “flexibility and steadfastness”—which was announced at the Baath Party conference of 2005 but implemented in the aftermath of the October 2005 report on the murder of Rafik Hariri—allowed Syria to pragmatically adopt and adjust policies to resist and reverse Washington’s pressure campaign.
Washington’s ability to deal with Damascus’s responses improved substantially after the United States launched the “Surge” and “Awakening” campaigns in Iraq. Washington also showed great skill by cooperating with Israel in its firm but nuanced response to Syria’s nuclear reactor at Al Kibar. But in Syria and Lebanon, the United States was simply not creative or flexible enough to counter Assad’s moves. An unfortunate ancillary side effect of American isolation was Washington’s inability to respond to the Assad regime’s skillful use of the chaos of sectarian bloodshed in US-occupied Iraq and war in Lebanon to rally the Syrian people around the flag and arrest domestic pressure on the regime. Washington’s lack of a response to Hezbollah’s “takeover” of west Beirut in May 2008 and the subsequent veto power given to the Party of God over the Lebanese state showed that when push came to shove in Lebanon, the Bush administration was unwilling—and perhaps ultimately unable—to push back. It also was unable to develop a diplomatic strategy to arrest Hezbollah’s rise in Lebanon.
When US engagement finally resumed in 2009 in the name of creating tension between Iran and Syria, the Assad regime’s deepening of relations with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon clashed directly with the Obama administration’s objective of using a Syrian-Israel peace treaty to reorient Syria away from Iran. Insisting that he sought peace with Israel but was unwilling to give up Syria’s close relations with Iran and Hezbollah, Assad attempted to have his political cake and eat it too.
But then the winds of change blew through Syria. In January 2011, antiregime protests in Tunisia and Egypt brought down the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes. Suddenly the strongly held notion in Washington and throughout the world that autocratic Arab regimes were stable was called into question. Dramatic scenes spread around the world of knife-wielding regime thugs riding horses and camels and assaulting pro-democracy protestors, who were using Facebook and Twitter accounts via smartphones to demand civic and human rights, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Clearly, there was a gap between these regimes’ anachronistic and brutal idea of governance and the protestors living their lives in the twenty-first century.
True to form, Assad reacted with hubris. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2011, Assad claimed that his regime was impervious to the kind of protests that brought down the governments of Ben Ali and Mubarak, because his policies were so “closely linked to the beliefs of the people.”14 He quickly lifted the regime’s Internet firewall—which blocked Facebook and Twitter—as a sign of his domestic legitimacy, seemingly daring antiregime activists to test him.
And they did. On March 15, a small antiregime protest broke out in front of Damascus University, followed by unrest in the southern Syrian city of Der’a, the capital of the southern Houran region of Syria from which my business partner, Leila Hourani, and her family hail. The protests were instigated when security officials arrested a group of children aged ten to fourteen for scrawling on a wall, “The people want the fall of the regime”—a slogan seen widely in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. After failing to convince the regime to release the children, their families flooded the streets of Der’a to demand their release. The regime responded with force on March 18, killing six and injuring scores of others.
On March 21, the regime sent a delegation of high-level officials native to Der’a, including deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad, to engage with local tribal leaders and quell the violence. The children were released and the governor of Der’a was sacked, but the regime continued to use force to disperse demonstrators on March 22, killing another six. While the protests were non-Islamic in nature, on March 23 the protestors also chanted “No to Iran, no to Hizballah!” and “We want a leader who fears God!” The latter of these slogans constitutes a reference to the Assad family’s roots in the Alawite faith, the heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam that dominates the Syrian regime.
Perhaps more notable than the scale of the protests was the protestors’ demographic base. The tribal Sunni population of the Houran region has played a key role in stabilizing the Assad regime. For hundreds of years, tensions had flared between Syria’s Alawite community and its Sunni majority. The flash point for this simmering conflict had last occurred in February 1982, when the Sunni-based Muslim Brotherhood threw Hafez al-Assad’s security forces out of the northern Syrian city of Hama. The regime responded by shelling the city, killing an estimated thirty thousand people, and arresting thousands of suspected Muslim Brotherhood supporters all across Syria, many of whose whereabouts remain unknown to this day. To stabilize the regime, Hafez gave it a veneer of Sunni legitimacy by co-opting tribal Sunnis from the Houran region and the Jazeera region of eastern Syria—as well as the Sunni Damascene and Aleppine merchant trading families—to join the regime’s core of Alawites, Druze, Ismailis, and Christians. The protests in Der’a began to crack and break away that Sunni veneer.
In response to the 2011 uprisings, Assad delivered a speech before the Syrian parliament on March 30, 2011. Despite multiple reports that Assad would announce sweeping reforms, the president instead gave a defiant speech with no specific details. Nearly two dozen times, Assad blamed the protests on a vague conspiracy of some type coming from the United States and Israel, and he dismissed the notion that an “old guard” or other hard-line faction was holding him back from launching domestic reforms. The protests quickly spread to other Sunni areas and cities, including Homs, Latakia, and Banias on the Syrian coast. The regime reacted with lethal fire as well as the deploying of Shabbiha (Ghosts), bands of Alawite thugs and militia that threatened and terrorized Sunni communities. Sectarian tensions increased, and Sunni refugees from the village of Tal Khalak, which is surrounded by a constellation of Alawite villages located along the Lebanese frontier southwest of Homs, fled into Lebanon. By late April, around one thousand Syrians had perished, and the regime had arrested another ten thousand in what had quickly become its biggest crackdown under Bashar al-Assad, dwarfing its arrests following the 2000 to 2001 Damascus Spring and the 2005 Damascus Declaration.
The unrest created a problem for the Obama administration in terms of how to punish the Assad regime for the crackdown. The Bush administration, for all its emphasis on democracy promotion, had not included provisions for human rights. On April 29, the Obama administration issued Executive Order 13572, which declared the Syrian regime’s “continuing escalation of violence against the people of Syria, including through attacks on protestors, arrests and harassment of protestors and political activists, and repression of democratic change” a national emergency. The administration targeted Assad’s brother Maher, the commander of Syria’s Fourth Armored Division who played a key role in suppressing protests in Der’a; Atif Najib, Assad’s cousin and head of the Political Security Directorate; Ali Mamlouk, chief of the General Intelligence Directorate (GID); and the organization itself. Unexpectedly, the administration also sanctioned Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Quds Force (IRGC-QF) for “providing material support to the Syrian government related to the crackdown.” While the nature of that support was unclear, it was widely rumored in policy and activist circles that Iran had provided software to track Facebook and Twitter users, thus helping to explain the apparent reason for Assad’s magnanimous gesture of lifting his regime’s Internet block on both platforms.
Then, in a speech on May 19 that outlined US policy on what had become known as the Arab Spring, Obama chided Assad by saying the Syrian president had to lead a transition to democracy or “get out of the way.” The same day, Obama issued another order sanctioning Assad himself, vice president Farouk al-Shara, prime minister Adel Safar, interior minister Mohammad Ibrahim al-Shaar, defense minister Ali Habib Mahmoud, military intelligence chief Abdul Fatah Qudsiya, and Political Security Directorate head Mohammed Dib Zaitoun for responsibility for the crackdown.
Assad responded with more force and defiance, and the protests spread to Syria’s Idlib governorate in the country’s northwest region. In the village of Jisr al-Shughour, protestors under the threat of government forces picked up guns and, along with support from unknown gunmen, forced the regime’s forces from the town. As the Syrian army approached Jisr al-Shughour, nearly eleven thousand refugees fled over the border into Turkey. When the regime forces arrived, they claimed those defending the village were takfiri extremists—Sunni Islamists who deem non-Sunnis apostates.
Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had a long history of positive rapport with Assad, unleashed rare public criticism of the president, describing the crackdown as “barbaric” and saying that his telephone conversations with Assad indicated he was “taking the issue lightly.” Rumors soon spread that Erdogan said Assad had to ask his brother Maher to leave the country and implement reform or risk Turkey’s wrath.
In response, Rami Makhlouf—who, only a few weeks before, had threatened in a New York Times interview that the regime would essentially fight to the death and warned that “if there is no stability here, there’s no way there will be stability in Israel”—announced that he would divest his shares in the country’s lucrative mobile-phone carrier, Syriatel, as well as real estate investments, and he would donate the proceeds to charity.15 Then, on May 20, Assad delivered a speech at Damascus University in an attempt to quell three months of antiregime protests sweeping Syria. While recognizing some of the protestors had legitimate concerns, Assad continued to blame the demonstrations on a “conspiracy” of “outlaws,” “vandals,” and “takfiri extremists.” Perhaps most offensively, Assad refused to recognize the regime’s brutal crackdown on the protesters. He also dismissed “rumors related to the president and his family”—a reference to reports that Maher was leading efforts to snuff out the demonstrations.
But the fact that Assad dedicated his speech to themes of reform demonstrates that the Assad family was beginning to see the need for change under the pressure of growing antiregime protests and international pressure from Turkey, France, and the United States. Assad promised to address corruption (which, Transparency International’s figures show, has skyrocketed under his reign), a new law for elections, increased media freedoms, and local administrative reform. Assad also dangled the prospect of constitutional reforms in response to a “new political reality in Syria.”
Instead of immediately implementing the measures by presidential decree—which he could easily do under Syria’s presidential system—he chose to push responsibility for the decision into various committees ahead of a “National Dialogue” that he vaguely said would roll out sometime in the next two months.
All the measures Assad outlined had been under consideration by the regime for years, so it was unclear how much discussion would be required for passage, other than that of Assad’s willingness to sign the measures into law. In addressing the issue of why reform in Syria has been so slow, Assad said there was “no reason”—a reference to his speech on March 30 in which he dismissed the notion that a group of hard-line or old-guard figures were holding him back. Finally, Assad indicated that Syria’s parliamentary elections, which were originally set for August, might be rescheduled before the end of 2011.16
As Washington officials struggled to come up with a further policy response to the Syrian uprising, it was clear that any strategy they chose going forward had to cut through the ambiguity and duplicity that was the hallmark of Bashar al-Assad’s reign. In speeches on March 30 and June 20, he blamed the unrest sweeping his country on foreign “conspiracies” and refused to announce any specific reforms, indicating that he was not about to change his ways—at least not without a push from the outside.17
Assad had spent the last eleven years promising political “reform,” but he had never delivered on the promise. This pattern is a well-established one. He talks about peace with Israel and at the same time sends Scud missiles to Hezbollah. He promises to keep his hands off Lebanon but worked with Hezbollah to bring down the government in Beirut. He says that as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty he wants a nuclear-free Middle East, but he stonewalls International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors investigating the rubble of his North Korean–designed nuclear program.
Until the uprising, the Obama administration had engaged Assad with the primary goal of restarting peace talks between Syria and Israel while trying to mitigate the regional damage from Syria’s worsening policies. Washington has attempted to test Assad’s intention and ability to reorient his country away from Iran and toward the West in Syria-Israel peace talks by putting him on the horns of a dilemma: Either you get back the Golan Heights, or you keep supporting Hezbollah—but not both. Those well-intentioned efforts failed to break the gridlock. Israel watched Assad’s transfer of weapons to Hezbollah, doubted his peaceful intentions, and refused to make the risky political decision to rejoin talks. With Washington unable to deliver Israel to the negotiating table, Assad was not compelled to show his hand.
The Obama administration was right to use dilemmas as a negotiating strategy; a dilemma can force a clear choice and reveal the other side’s character and intentions. But the dilemma has to fit the context. Assad, who repeatedly attributed the unrest to Israeli and American meddling, has lost significant public support by using live fire on protesters, and he is not likely to risk further alienating his supporters by signing on the dotted line with Israel—at least anytime soon.
Dilemmas also only work if they are set up properly. The Obama administration tried to conduct its test by talking behind closed doors with Assad about peace with Israel and his destructive policies while keeping US sanctions in place. But it had not introduced new negative incentives in response to Assad’s regional meddling and hardhanded tactics that diametrically oppose US interests or values. And Assad had little fear that Washington would, especially when US officials made his case for him by repeatedly emphasizing their lack of leverage in Damascus. Pressure alone, much like engagement alone, would not be enough to change Assad’s policies. Both stood a far better chance of being effective if used in concert. That required focus and creativity—two things Washington’s Syria policy has historically lacked.
The unrest sweeping Syria and the rest of the Middle East provided Washington with an opportunity to launch a Syria policy that would allow the administering of more tests in better ways. First, Washington should continue to shine a light on the Assad regime’s human rights violations by bringing it before the UN Security Council. On the multilateral front, the administration should be working closely with European allies and Turkey to establish an effective sanctions regime—including diplomatic isolation—against Assad to push him to stop his bloody crackdown on protesters and follow through on his reform promises. Second, the Obama administration should continue to issue sanctions and executive orders targeting individuals responsible for human rights abuses in Syria. Third, it should use this remit to designate more Syrian officials and figures under Executive Order 13460, which targets rampant regime corruption—the mortar that holds Assad’s regime together and a key issue that has brought protesters out into the streets. Elite defections could play a key role in pressuring the regime either to cut a deal with the country’s Sunni majority or leave power. Along those lines, Washington should impose costs on other Syrian businesspeople who continue to back the regime. One way to do so is to lengthen the list of US Treasury Department designations aimed at businesspeople close to the regime, many of whom are the exclusive importers of a wide variety of goods on the Syrian market. This would not only create fissures in the regime’s traditional alliance with the Sunni business elite, it would also diminish government revenue, since many major trading families pay an increasingly larger share of state revenues via a flat 20-percent corporate tax.
Fourth, the Obama administration should target Syrian energy. Syrian oil production has been in steady decline since the mid-1990s and is now around 390,000 barrels per day. Of that, Syria exports around 148,000 barrels per day, with revenues accruing directly to the state. According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) and US government estimates, oil sales account for between a quarter and a third of state revenue, with the remainder increasingly made up through corporate and public-sector employee taxes. As the protests decrease tax receipts, Damascus is likely to become increasingly reliant on oil revenue, forcing the regime to tap reserves and/or resort to deficit spending. This in turn would constrain the regime’s ability to maintain market subsidies (for example, for diesel fuel) and payoffs to patronage networks.
Accordingly, the Obama administration should prod the chief buyers of Syrian oil—Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands—to stop purchasing the regime’s heavy crude. It should also pressure multinational energy companies operating in Syria—Royal Dutch Shell; Total; Croatia’s INA Nafta; India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC); Canada’s Petro-Canada; and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Sinochem—to exit the country. In addition, it should ask Britain to halt the operations of Gulfsands Petroleum, the one-time Houston-based company specializing in extracting heavy oil from depleted fields. The firm relocated to Britain in 2008 to avoid US sanctions on Rami Makhlouf, Assad’s cousin and the regime’s primary businessman.
With these additional measures in place, Washington can rally allies around a common cause, send a strong message to Assad that his crackdown will cost him, and lead Assad toward a soft landing with his people and a transition toward a more accountable government in Damascus. In the meantime, Washington can also use these instruments on Assad’s worsening domestic position to extract concessions on his relationship with Iran, be it his relationship with Hezbollah or—eventually, if he holds on in some capacity and the time is right—peace talks with Israel. It will also teach Assad that Washington will judge him on his actions, not just his words to US officials behind closed doors.
In terms of regional dilemmas, perhaps the most intriguing—and the one with deep implications for the Syrian-Iranian alliance in the short term—remained the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) investigation into the 2005 murder of Rafik Hariri. On June 30, 2011, the tribunal indicted a number of members of Hezbollah for the murder operation itself based on forensic and communications evidence. While the Assad regime must have breathed a collective sigh of relief for being spared, the indictments of Hezbollah members placed the Assad regime in an awkward position—especially following a diplomatic effort by Saudi Arabia in 2010 to reconcile Assad and the former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri and a simultaneous attempt by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah to shift blame for Hariri’s assassination to Israel. Would Syria back Hezbollah as indictments were issued? Would Syria support a Hezbollah attempt to cut off Lebanon’s 51-percent share of funding for the tribunal?
The second dilemma involved the IAEA investigation into Syria’s nuclear program. As Syria continued to deny all access to the Al Kibar site, the IAEA and the Obama administration considered issuing a “special inspection” of suspected Syrian nuclear sites.18 The urgency had less to do with the Syrian program—by all accounts whatever was going on at Al Kibar was destroyed by Israeli aircraft—than with what kind of example Syria’s case held out to other would-be nuclear proliferators looking to buck the international nonproliferation regime. If the special inspection were ordered, Syria faced referral to the Security Council and possible UN sanctions. Would the Assad regime come clean on its activities in the face of a showdown with the IAEA that threatened the international community’s courting of the Assad regime? Or would it attempt to deflect pressure from the international community by reducing its demands for entering into peace talks with Israel?
The third dilemma involved the Assad regime’s economics. With oil revenue declining as a percentage of government revenue and waves of young Syrians hitting the job market every year, the Assad regime faced increasingly stark choices. While it could continue its alliance with Hezbollah and Iran against Israel, it would have a hard time maintaining its war footing and the corruption it generates while attracting the kind of foreign investment necessary for job creation. The deep economic problems these policies produce for the Assad regime’s finances presented the Obama administration with what would seem ample leverage through easing or tightening US sanctions.
But in the end, the hardest part for Washington will be reading Assad’s response. For if there is one thing I learned from my engagement with Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, it’s that there are at least three answers for every question—yes, no, and no response. In the words of a good friend, “The Assad regime cannot exist in a world of black or white—only shades of gray.”