May 4, 2007

The Bush Administration may finally be getting some sense. It has decided to start talking with Syria and Iran.

Apparently chastened by reality, the State Department has engaged in conversations with Syrian and Iranian officials at a summit being held at Sharm El Sheik in Egypt to deliberate on the future of Iraq.

While the meeting with Iran seems to have been a perfunctory three-minute throwaway involving State Department underlings, the U.S.-Syria encounter was more substantive. Condoleezza Rice met for 30 minutes with her Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moallem. The meeting mostly focused on the infiltration of insurrectionists across the Syria-Iraq border, which the Bush Administration alleges the Syrian government is doing little to stop.

This marks an interesting turnaround from just a few weeks ago, when Dick Cheney labeled Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Damascus “bad behavior.” In fact, Rice reportedly called up Pelosi to prepare for her own meeting.

The situation in Iraq is so hopeless that the United States can’t hope for a solution without involving other countries in the area.

Bush the Lesser is belatedly following the recommendation of Bush the Elder’s advisers, given via the Iraq Study Group.

Syria may be an easier nut to crack than Iran. Iran’s nuclear aspirations and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rancorous relationship with Bush make it more difficult for the United States and Iran to arrive at a modus vivendi. Indeed, Iran’s foreign minister left without having dinner to preempt Rice from approaching him at an official banquet. The opening remarks by the minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, were also lacking in conciliation.

Syria, on the contrary, is not known to be pursuing nuclear weapons.

Also in contrast to Iran, it is headed by a determinedly secular regime, especially since it is led by Alawites, a sect of Islam considered heretical by fundamentalist Muslims. (“State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East,” by Roger Owen, contains some useful background on the country.) Bashar al-Assad’s human rights record is certainly better than his dad’s.

But let us have no illusions about this ophthalmologist. After a brief so-called Damascus Spring at the onset of his accession, Assad Junior has also cracked down on dissidents. (See the Human Rights Watch’s webpage on Syria for a compendium of the regime’s abuses.)

And Syria’s record outside its borders has been even more troubling, most notably in Lebanon, where it quite certainly has been involved in the assassination of several notables, including ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. (For a nuanced critique of the regime’s record, take a look at a recent commentary by Professor Stephen Zunes, a contributor to the Progressive Media Project.)

All that is being asked for here, however, is an engagement with the regime, not large-scale support. Washington’s strategy of isolating Bashar al-Assad has not worked. Also, to its credit, the Syrian government initially cooperated quite eagerly against Al Qaeda, knowing that a secular regime such as itself was also in the group’s cross hairs. (The story about Syria’s willingness to cooperate and the Bush Administration’s rebuff was first broken in The New Yorker by the great reporter Seymour Hersh.)

But if cooperation meant torture at the behest of Washington, as it did in the case of Maher Arar, that’s nothing to applaud.) And, as Zunes points out, the ruling Syrian Baathists have little love lost for the Iraqi Baathist insurgents, bizarre as that may seem, since Saddam and Assad Senior headed rival factions of the party that competed for the affection of the Arab world. This animosity led Assad Senior to back Iran during the Iran-Iraq War.

After years of pigheadedness, the Bush folks may have finally realized that there is no other way out from the conundrum they have created for themselves in Iraq than to engage other countries in the region. At least so it seems today.