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From: Opinion

Opinion

How much time will Obama waste trying to engage Syria?

Fresh off a year of failed attempts at engaging Iran - in the hopes of convincing it to stop supporting terrorism
Fresh off a year of failed attempts at engaging Iran - in the hopes of convincing it to stop supporting terrorism, desist in its quest for nuclear weapons and generally become a responsible member of the international community - the Obama administration has now set its eyes on neighboring Syria as the next recipient of its entreaties.

Last week the White House nominated a new ambassador to Damascus. If approved by the Senate, Robert Ford will become the first American ambassador to Syria since 2005, when the U.S. recalled its top envoy to protest the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. A leader of pro-Western orientation, Hariri was a constant thorn in the side of Syria, which had occupied Lebanon for nearly three decades. Hariri, along with 21 others, paid for that independence with his life in a massive, daylight car bomb explosion in central Beirut.

All signs point to Syria or its proxy army Hezbollah, which murdered 241 American servicemen in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks, controls southern Lebanon and provoked a devastating war with Israel in 2006. And despite the insistence of the United Nations that it stop arming Hezbollah, (literally "Party of God" in Arabic), Syria continues to smuggle weapons across Lebanon’s porous border to the terrorist group. Today, it is estimated to be in possession of 42,000 rockets, three times as many as it had in 2006. Nor is Lebanon the only country in the region where Syria wreaks havoc; Damascus has also become the main transit hub for jihadists en route to kill American troops in Iraq.

There is nothing to indicate that Syria will desist in any of its malign behavior, no matter the warmth of Washington’s new embrace.

Indeed, Syrian President Bashar Assad could not have delivered a more flagrant message of defiance this past week with his welcoming Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Damascus where the two dictators met with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad praised Iran and Syria’s "deep" ties and once again reiterated his promise to eliminate Israel (for good measure, the Syrian foreign minister earlier this month threatened "all-out" war against the Jewish State).

"If the Zionist regime wants to repeat its past mistakes, this will constitute its demise and annihilation," Ahmadinejad warned. "With Allah’s help the new Middle East will be a Middle East without Zionists and Imperialists."

In a move clearly intended to humiliate both Secretary of State Clinton and the United States, this literal rogues gallery was convened just a day after she called upon Syria "to begin to move away from the relationship with Iran."

Assad didn’t get the message. Western objections to Iranian nuclear advancement, he declared, represent "neo-colonization." Ahmadinejad went further, stating that, "The Americans want to dominate the region but they feel Iran and Syria are preventing this. We tell them that instead of interfering in the region’s affairs, to pack their things and leave."

For all the Syrian and Iranian blather of Western "domination," "colonization" and "interference," it is these two nations that are the region’s true imperialists. Damascus and Tehran fund and outfit the fanatical murder cults Hamas and Hezbollah. Damascus and Tehran have ruined Lebanon, suborning the assassinations of politicians who dare speak out about the nefarious influence these regimes play in the region. Damascus and Tehran have both violated international standards regarding nuclear technology; the Iranian weapons program continues apace while Israel destroyed a secret Syrian nuclear site in 2007.

But it seems that no amount of Syrian spit in our eyes will dissuade the engagers. Rather than admit they were wrong in the first place, defenders of the accommodationist approach have spun Iran’s rejection of American overtures into a diplomatic victory. At least the United States tried to talk the Iranians out of their madness, they say. Now, with a series of good-faith efforts rejected, America can more credibly present the case of isolating Iran to the world.

This rosy narrative - which will no doubt inform the logic of Syria-engagers over the course of the next year or more - obfuscates the fact that Washington, including the allegedly "unilateralist" Bush administration, has tried for years to persuade Iran and Syria to adopt the most basic characteristics of good international citizens, all to no avail. And concomitant attempts to "split" Damascus from Tehran are as fruitless as they are frequent.

At some point, we must realize that the behavior of these regimes is due to deep ideological impulses and an instinct for self-preservation. All that the failed attempts at wooing Iran have done was waste an entire year that could have been devoted to sanctioning and weakening the regime from within. Today, we’re 12 months closer to the point where Iran has nuclear weapons. And now we are repeating the same mistakes with Syria.

Damascus has made it abundantly clear that it has no interest in cooperating with the United States to make the Middle East more stable. The sooner we realize that the better.