Being Hafiz al-Assad: Syria's Chilly but Consistent Peace Strategy

Henry Siegman

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2000

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Summary:  Unleashing Hezbollah, stalling talks, and having the state-run media spew anti-Israel vitriol hardly seem pacific, but Syria's dictator has a consistent if chilly peace strategy.

Henry Siegman is Senior Fellow and Director of the U.S./Middle East Project at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hafiz al-Assad's on-again, off-again approach to the Middle East peace process frequently drives U.S. and Israeli policymakers to distraction. Both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton have argued that Syria's president has made a "strategic decision" to resolve his differences with Israel peacefully. But some wonder if Syria has really resigned itself to peace. Assad's refusal to return to the table after January's Israeli-Syrian peace talks in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, a subsequent wave of deadly violence in southern Lebanon, and a frosty March summit in Geneva with Clinton hardly seemed evidence of pacific intentions.

Is the Syrian leader temperamental and unpredictable? Have Clinton and Barak been gulled by the mistaken view -- first advanced by Henry Kissinger after the 1973 Yom Kippur War and now accepted as conventional wisdom in foreign ministries worldwide -- that Assad, a maddeningly clever negotiator, is entirely trustworthy once he has given his word? In light of Assad's enigmatic behavior, should Israel and the United States not forgo the notion that only procedure, not substance, stands in the way of an Israel-Syria agreement?

Many pundits in Israel and the United States have answered yes to all these important questions. A pall of skepticism enveloped the Syrian track, especially after attacks on Israeli troops by Hezbollah, the radical Shiite militia that operates with Assad's blessing in southern Lebanon. Indeed, for some observers, Syria's behavior showed that Assad is not resigned to Israel's existence and is interested not in peace but in process -- in stringing out the negotiations to preserve Syria's regional position rather than cutting a deal.

But this is a serious misreading of Assad, one that could easily lead policymakers to miss a rare opportunity to achieve a larger Middle East peace. In fact, Assad's behavior has been anything but erratic: it has been consistent and predictable. To understand that consistency, one must understand the man known as the sphinx of Damascus and the world in which he lives.

HOW THE SPHINX THINKS

Syria has long been the great holdout in the peace process and the leader of Arab hard-liners who reject accommodation with the Jewish state. Assad himself was defense minister when Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War, and since then, he has kept their return high on his list of priorities, which also includes reinforcing his narrowly based regime and extending de facto Syrian control over Lebanon. But when Assad's Soviet patron collapsed, the sphinx of Damascus began rethinking his anti-Western orientation. He joined the 1991 Gulf War coalition against his rival, Saddam Hussein, and sent Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara to the subsequent Madrid peace conference. Analysts such as Moshe Ma'oz argued that Assad had realized that he no longer had a military option and had adopted a new Israel strategy based on diplomacy.

Such a decision helps explain the 1994 series of high-level negotiations between Syria and Israel at the Wye Plantation in Maryland in the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian ...

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