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Syria And Turkey Defy The United States
Patrick Seale Al-Hayat 2004/01/9
This week's visit to Turkey by Syria's young leader, President Bashar Al Assad, is of considerable geo-strategic significance. It has taken place in close coordination with Syria's ally Iran, whose foreign minister, Kamal Kharazzi, was in Damascus on the eve of the visit, while Turkey's foreign minister Abdullah Gul is expected in Tehran on Saturday.
The three countries are intent on sending a firm message to the United States about its policy in Iraq. They are telling Washington that Iraq must remain a unitary state and that they will strongly oppose any attempt to break it up into three mini-states, Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite, as several influential American commentators have recently been recommending. Above all, they are warning the U.S. not to encourage the Kurds to seek permanent autonomy, let alone independence.
Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, Prince Saud Al Faisal, has also said this week that the dismemberment of Iraq would be a threat to his country's security.
This is the first time that the major states bordering Iraq have publicly joined forces to check what they see as a dangerous American temptation, strongly supported by Israel, to seek to weaken Iraq permanently by rebuilding it on a federal basis, without a strong center -- thereby dealing a blow to the entire Arab system.
No one in the region is seeking a confrontation with the United States. The local states want to conciliate Washington, not to threaten it. On receiving the new American ambassador to Syria this week, Foreign Minister Farouq Al Sharaa went out of his way to stress Syria's desire for dialogue and cooperation. President Assad has sent a similar message in a recent interview with The New York Times. Iran, in turn, has seized the occasion provided by the devastating earthquake at Bam to signal that it is ready for friendlier relations with the United States.
Every state in the region has had to recognize that America's armed intervention in Iraq - and its declared intention to remain there for several years - has profoundly altered the strategic environment. But Syria and its neighbors want to remind Washington that they, too, have interests, which cannot be ignored. Syria, Turkey and Iran believe they can help the United States to stabilize Iraq, but only if the United States recognizes their security interests and concerns.
Fears about U.S. and Israeli policy
It is now widely recognized that the United States invaded and occupied Iraq, following 13 years of punitive sanctions, not because of the alleged danger from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, nor because of his gross abuses of human rights, but because a strong and independent Iraq was seen as a threat both to the Western-dominated political order in the Gulf and to Israel.
The Washington hawks who pressed for war - several of them friends and allies of Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - made no secret of the fact that, in their eyes, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was only the first move in an ambitious project to reshape the entire Middle East. Their hope was that, once Arab nationalism, Islamic militancy and Palestinian resistance had been defeated, the Arab world could be remade on 'democratic' lines, under a sort of U.S.-Israeli protectorate.
The local states are now rebelling against this geo-political fantasy, which they see as fundamentally hostile to their interests and aspirations. This is the sense of President Bashar Assad's to Turkey, and it is also the reason why Iran and Egypt are considering resuming diplomatic relations after a breach of nearly a quarter of a century.
Regional states share a profound apprehension about the future intentions of the United States and Israel. Do these powers want peace and stability or are they planning further aggressions? How will the U.S. deal with the resistance it continues to face in Iraq? What will happen next June when it plans to hand back authority to the Iraqis? How long will it maintain its armies at the heart of the Arab world? Can the U.S., now in the hands of dangerous ideologues, be counted on to behave rationally?
The fate of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation, suffering appalling hardship and daily killing in the face of apparent American indifference, is another huge factor of uncertainty and instability, not least because of the passions it arouses among the Arab and Muslim public.
The future of Syrian-Turkish relations
The Middle East peace process was among the subjects discussed this week by President Assad and his Turkish hosts, with the suggestion that Turkey might play a mediating role between Syria and Israel. Assad has recently called on the United States to revive the Syrian track of the peace process, and has indicated he is ready to resume negotiations at the point at which they were broken off in 1999-2000 between his father and the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak. But few observers believe Sharon is ready to return the Golan, which is the price of a deal with Syria, or that the U.S., preoccupied with Iraq, will put much energy into promoting an Israeli-Syrian settlement.
Both Syria and Turkey have no love for the 'neo-cons' now in power in Washington or for their policies of preventive war and 'regime change'. Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. deputy defense secretary, is generally thought to have offended Turkey by pressuring it - unsuccessfully as it turned out - to allow American troops through its territory to attack Iraq last March. Syria, in turn, believes that the 'neo-cons' have no interest in a regional peace, but would rather see the Syrian regime overthrown, as Richard Perle, a leading 'neo-con' and Arab hater, has advocated in a recent book.
The fact that U.S. President George W. Bush is only ten months away from a presidential election, while Sharon is facing increasing opposition at home, only adds to the general apprehension and uncertainty.
Such is the context for the current striking improvement in Syrian-Turkish relations, cemented by Bashar Assad's visit to Ankara, the first by a Syrian head of state since the Second World War. As it follows a visit by the Syrian president to Athens last month, it indicates that Syria is seeking to strike a balance in its relations with Greece and Turkey. Syria had previously tilted strongly towards Greece, largely because of Turkey's close ties with Israel.
The suggestion today is that the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in turn seeking to strike a balance in Turkey's relations with Israel and the Arab states, as well as to distance himself from Sharon's aggressive policies towards the Palestinians and Syria. Turkish sources say that Erdogan has been angered by reports that Israeli agents have been encouraging Kurdish separatism in northern Iraq, as they have often done in the past during the long history of conflict between the Kurds and the Baghdad government.
Two subjects were not raised in Ankara this week because they would have spoiled the cordial atmosphere. The first concerns the Turkish province of Hatay, formerly the Syrian sanjak of Alexandretta, which France, then the mandatory power in Syria, ceded to Turkey on the eve of the Second World War. The Syrians have not forgotten or forgiven this flagrant act of political immorality, but few Syrians can hope the territory will ever be recovered. The Turks have their own, even older, grievance dating back to the First World War when, they would claim, the Arabs, lured by false promises of independence by Britain, 'stabbed the Ottoman Empire in the back'.
The second question not raised in Ankara this week has been a burning issue for years. Syria's contention is that Turkey's large-scale programme of dam-building and irrigation in south-east Anatolia is starving it of a fair share of Euphrates water, vital to the life of Syria's own Jazira province. In retaliation, Syria for many years gave shelter to the Kurdish separatist leader Abdallah Occalan, and provided his men with training camps in Lebanon's Bekaa valley. War between Turkey and Syria was averted in 1998 only when Syria agreed to expel Occalan, who now languishes in a Turkish prison.
Today, united in their joint defense of Iraq's territorial integrity, the two neighbors have decided resolutely to put such disputes behind them and look to their joint defenses in a dangerously unsettled world.
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