The road to Damascus

What is Syria8217;s game plan in Lebanon?

It was no doubt a coincidence that Lebanon8217;s industry minister, Pierre Gemayel, was assassinated a day after Syria8217;s foreign minister was in Baghdad, where Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki emerged from a meeting with the Syrian visitor to announce that the two neighbors were restoring diplomatic relations after a quarter century of hostility. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the two events casts light on a noxious pattern of Syrian behavior.

Walid al-Muallem, Syria8217;s foreign minister, greeted the historic renewal of relations between his mafia-style regime and Iraq by vowing that Syria would help curtail the sectarian violence raging between Iraqi Shi8217;ites and Sunni Arabs. Since for its own reasons the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad has been harboring former bigwigs in Saddam Hussein8217;s Ba8217;athist regime and allowing jihadists from Al Qaeda and like-minded bands to assemble in Syria and then infiltrate into Iraq, there was something disingenuous, if not downright cynical, in the pledge of the Syrian foreign minister.

Between them, the Iraqi Ba8217;athists and the foreign Islamist radicals share responsibility for a strategy of deliberately murdering Shi8217;ites and blowing up Shi8217;ite holy sites to provoke a sectarian civil war in Iraq. It has been an open secret in the region that the Assad regime has been playing an audacious, high-stakes game with these two principal components of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. The transparent Syrian aim was to enable the Iraqi Ba8217;athists and the jihadists to stir the Iraqi cauldron just enough to bog the US military down in counter-insurgency warfare 8212; so that the Americans would be dissuaded from any intention they might originally have had to follow up the toppling of Saddam with a similar strike against the Syrian regime.

Commendably, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki made it plain in a statement issued after his meeting with Muallem that he was not oblivious to the role the Syrian government has played in helping nurture the forces driving Iraq toward a full-scale civil war. 8220;We refuse to let any regional neighbor countries become a passage or a headquarters for the terrorist organizations that hurt Iraq,8221; Maliki said.

Nearly everyone in Iraq and the surrounding region understands that this is precisely what Syria has been doing for the past three years. So Maliki8217;s declaration was a barely veiled way of warning the regime in Damascus that it cannot pretend to be acting as a friendly neighbor if it continues allowing the forces organizing and financing the Sunni insurgency in Iraq to operate from Syria8230;

Excerpted from an editorial in 8216;The Boston Globe8217;, November 23