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Wild Card of the Middle East
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12210 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1987 |
2,025 Words |
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Robert G. Neumann
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Syria has been a constant puzzle to America and the West, an unending picture of contradictions. It is the original home of Arab nationalism and yet has been instrumental in preventing greater Arab unity. Its leaders, especially President Hafez al-Assad, have displayed impressive feats of statesmanship and have been skillful negotiators yet have carefully targeted acts of terrorism against a variety of opponents.
Syria is an ally of fundamentalist Iran but is a secular regime of the type detested by Khomeini, and Syria is fearful of fundamentalism rising within Syria itself or in Syrian-occupied Lebanon. It supports the cause of the Palestinians and yet is the most implacable enemy of PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. Its attitude toward the United States has been ambivalent, constantly thwarting or repelling U.S. initiatives, but obviously flattered by U.S. leaders who pay it special attention.
Syria has been the most consistent enemy of Israel, yet the Israeli-Syrian border has been the most stable and the most peaceful. Syria is the Soviet Union's principal, in effect almost only, window to the Middle East and has greatly profited from Soviet military support. Yet the relationship between the two is full of frustration and antagonism.
The official social and economic policy of Syria under its Ba'ath (Arab Socialist Renaissance Party) is nominally socialist, yet there is no country in the Middle East more bourgeois than Syria.
With all those contradictions, one might well ask whether one can speak at all of a Syrian "policy" or is Syrian policy rather a maneuver for short-range gains?
History of conflict
Ancient Syria saw its land ruled by Amorites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, and Hebrews. It endured many waves of foreign invasions - Armenian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian - and for a long time lived under Turkish rule. Shortly after 600 B.C. Syria became the center of the Arab conquest of the Middle East, and the flower of the Arabic language in the Damascus-centered caliphate of the Omayyad Dynasty. Then for 400 years, from 1516 to 1918, it was part of the loosely governed Ottoman Empire.
Between the two world wars, France controlled Syria through the instrument of a mandate under the League of Nations. Only on April 17, 1946, did Syria finally obtain its independence.
During those days of foreign occupation, Syria developed a strong sense of nationalism which it honed in its struggle against Turkish and later French domination. It did not help the Turks that they were fellow Muslims. It did not help the French that the Syrians avidly took up French culture; they refused to let the French use the appeal of French culture as an instrument of political domination.
At all times the relationship between Syria and Lebanon remained ambiguous, but the two countries have regarded themselves more or less as one through most of their history.
Syrian politics was essentially local rather than national; yet, during the various attempts of
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