In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [112]
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