“Trust but verify.” Those were the watchwords of President Ronald Reagan when he embarked upon the historic series of negotiations with the Soviet Union that would culminate with the START I Treaty designed to reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Soviet Union. Today a tempest in a teapot has ensued over President Bush’s remarks before the Israeli Knesset comparing negotiations with hostile foreign dictators as tantamount to Neville Chamberlain’s alleged “appeasement” of Adolph Hitler at Munich in 1938.
These remarks were largely characterized in the media as a not so subtle jab at the likely Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama who has said that he would be willing to meet with hostile foreign dictators with no preset conditions although in all fairness he has “revised and extended” those remarks as they say in Congress since. After President Bush’s remarks, John McCain attacked Obama as exhibiting “inexperience and reckless judgment” in the latter’s remarks that such nations as Cuba, Iran and Venezuela do not pose the kind of threat faced by the United States as did the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Leaving aside the question of North Korea and Venezuela for the sake of brevity in this article (although I might add that the Bush administration is accepting quite a bit on faith as regards Kim Jong Il with regard to the latest negotiations being undertaken by Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill), I would like to address some of the problems with entering into high level negotiations with either Syria or Iran. Syria, as most readers know or should know, is a Baathist state ostensibly run by Bashar al-Assad son of the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. From a religious standpoint, Syria is a predominantly Sunni country with the Alawite sect (a minority offshoot of Shiite Islam) of which the Assads are members a distinct minority. With little petroleum wealth of its own and sandwiched between Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Shiite Iran, the Assads have always maintained a kind of shifting allegiance until quite recently with the regime’s serving as a funnel for Iranian arms and money to the Shiite militia Hizb’allah in Lebanon.
Given its precarious position it would stand to reason that we could do business with Assad (especially now that the Israelis seem to have embarked upon negotiations with the regime through Turkey’s good offices) in an effort to gain his regime’s assistance in both stabilizing Lebanon and wooing it away from Teheran’s orbit. Or would it? Unfortunately it’s not altogether clear that Assad would be able to deliver on anything we negotiate with him. Why? Because in the intra-familial politics that rules Syria, it is unclear if Assad is really as much in charge of the regime as we might think:
The Feb. 12 assassination of Hezbollah top commander Imad Mughniyah in Damascus has exposed what appears to be a massive power struggle afflicting Syria’s ruling al Assad family. Since the assassination, Stratfor has received reports from a variety of sources that indicate the death of Hezbollah’s most seasoned operative might not have been a surprise to certain elements of the Syrian regime. These suspicions appear to be shared by Syria’s allies Hezbollah and Iran.
As Stratfor has discussed previously, even if the Israeli Mossad orchestrated the operation to take out Mughniyah, it likely had an inside source - perhaps in Syria’s security apparatus - that facilitated the operation.
That “source” is widely believed to be tied to Syrian intelligence chief Asef Shawkat, Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law. And the Iranians and Hizb’allah aren’t happy about it one bit. The wild card in all of this is that no one can determine with any degree of accuracy as to who might hold the upper hand within Syria’s ruling clique those who would continue Syria’s close embrace of Iran or those, like Shawkat, who might think the utility of these ties has reached its zenith and can only decline much as Anwar Sadat saw the handwriting on the wall with respect to Egypt’s formerly close embrace of Moscow when he shocked the region and the world by making peace with Israel in 1979. If the Syrians made an open and binding deal with both Israel and the U.S., and that’s a big if, Teheran and Hizb’allah are still quite capable of making life miserable for the Assad regime and by extension us by playing to the regime elements still in their favor and also by Hizb’allah’s demonstrated ability to strike nearly anywhere in the world.
Moving onto Iran, the same situation holds although it would appear that for now the conservative faction holds sway. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad while the titular head of state holds no real power of his own. That power resides with the Guardian Council comprised of the regime’s senior clerics including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has widely been rumored to be ill with cancer in some intelligence reports for the past several years although rumors of his imminent demise have been exaggerated. The “gun” that dispenses the conservative elements “power” is Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (Pasdaran in Persian) and its elite “Quds Force” (implicated in training and supplying Shiite insurgents with explosive force projectiles in Iraq) which is separate from the regular Iranian army and whose leadership while ostensibly loyal and fanatical in its defense of the regime is also reported to be grousing about their relative poverty as compared to the ruling mullahs who are all quite wealthy men. The “reform” element in Iran which was formerly embodied in former prime minister Mohammed Khatami and now is championed by Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani has been set back of late not through popular sentiment among Iran’s young, well-educated populace which is surprisingly pro-American but in its inability to put forth candidates in elections due to the conservatives disallowing their candidacy. Where all this leaves us now with respect to Iran, especially in light of today’s findings by the IAEA that Iran is willfully not cooperating vis-a-vis the extent of its uranium enrichment program, is an open question.
This essay is not meant as an endorsement of either McCain or Obama’s positions on the subject as quite frankly neither one of them has been exactly helpful in examining the issues at play here. This author believes that, given the proper groundwork, preparation and mixture of carrots with sticks, negotiations with both Syria and Iran might eventually bear fruit but given the fractious nature of these regimes at present it is probably best that these discussions remain low level and exploratory only for the time being.
Bill Harrison is a writer and political analyst. His writing has appeared in the American Spectator, as well as on NeoConstant and his column at Newsvine.
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