Syria’s Bashar Assad, derided as the son even his own father didn’t want to succeed him, is turning out to share many of Hafez’s wily and cautious traits. Despite a series of recent blows to his homeland security (the killings of Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh and Syrian military adviser Muhammad Suleiman, the IAF’s destruction of his nascent nuclear plant, and an American Special Forces raid on his border with Iraq), Assad junior is managing to keep a steady hand on the reins of power.
Early intelligence assessments that he would prove a weak and perhaps even quickly disposable successor have been disproved.
Assad Jr. is plainly looking to the long-term. He has accounts to settle with several players in the region, but for the moment he’s playing it cool. And for this, and his indirect talks with Israel, the West, and notably France, have rewarded him with greater acceptance.
Assad may have slammed Israel on Sunday as “not serious” about peace, but he does not want to abandon the talks. Far from wanting to return to pariah status, he wants to parlay his newly acceptable status into a warmed relationship with Washington.
Israel, the current government at least, doesn’t want the talks halted either. Its prime concern is halting Iran’s nuclear drive. And the road to Tehran might just run through Damascus.
An Israel-Syria peace agreement hurts Iran above all. If Syria moves away from its alliance with the Islamic Republic, there is no other Arab country giving its push for regional hegemony a semblance of legitimacy.
A non-Arab Shi’ite state, Iran is bent on taking over the majority Sunni Arab Middle East, and it’s making considerable headway. The majority of Sunni Arab leaders in the region are scared to death of the threat looming in the East. Hence Sunday’s unprecedented meeting between Arab leaders and the EU and US envoys to the Quartet talks in Sharm e-Sheikh.
For now, Syria is Iran’s Sunni Arab fig leaf. Remove that critical partnership, and Tehran is exposed as a power hungry Shi’ite regime, with a rapacious religious agenda, taking advantage of America’s current weakness in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remove it, and Iran starts to look isolated, even illegitimate, with only its Shi’ite Hizbullah creation at its side. Its other proxies and allies, including Hamas (with its Damascus-based leadership), are immediately weakened.
Watching the back of Bashar Assad’s head to its left, and dated photos of (the ailing?) North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to its right, Iran could start to feel lonely on the axis of evil.
A savvy, energetic new American president might even find it amenable to some kind of engagement, or more vulnerable to toughened economic and diplomatic sanctions.
The assessment in Israel, nonetheless, is that even under these circumstances, Iran is unlikely to abandon its primary goal of attaining a nuclear weapons capability.
The thinking here is that Iran is not planning to build a single nuclear device, tie a red, white and green ribbon to it, and hoist it to the top of the Freedom Tower in Teheran’s Azadi Square – in a brazen challenge to the international community.
Neither does Jerusalem expect the Islamic Republic to secretly test a nuclear device in some remote mountain region.
The understanding, instead, is that Iran is moving slowly and methodically to acquire all the elements it needs to complete a nuclear weapons program, but without actually putting the finishing touches to it. Should it take the decision to complete the program, the final push would be very quick.
Until then, even in the face of international intelligence claims that a weapons program is ongoing, the Iranians can argue, as they always have, that they have the right to develop a nuclear capability, and that theirs is geared exclusively toward civilian energy uses.
There is ample intelligence to undermine that claim even today. But after the no-WMD fiasco in Iraq, there is also ample skepticism about the intelligence.
In the meantime, the Iranians are doing everything they can to physically protect their program from attack.
They are also playing for time by agreeing, intermittently, to “seriously consider” discussions and proposals made by the international community on nuclear negotiations, enrichment suspension et al. They will doubtless utilize this tactic with Barack Obama when he assumes the US presidency. “The Iranians play chess, not backgammon,” says a top Israeli official, adding: “They think four steps ahead.”
As Defense Minister Ehud Barak told US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this weekend, Israel is keeping all options on the table, including the military one, and others should do so, too. But, increasingly, Israeli officials are privately starting to grapple with the possibility of having to live with a nuclear Iran, and to question the glib, grim depiction of a nuclear Iran as an existential threat. That assessment, they say, does not properly reflect the true balance of forces. Iran knows what Israel’s red lines are, officials here say. The message has been conveyed to Tehran.
Will Assad now change the wider, regional picture, discomfiting Iran?
That seems unlikely in the next few weeks, even months – with Washington and Israel in transition.
And that amounts to good news for Tehran. Obama may have used his first news conference on Friday to brand Iran’s nuclear weapons ambition as “unacceptable.” But he has no way yet to do anything about it, and nobody else, for now, seems to have the will.
