Hafez el Assad, the father of Syrian President Bashar Assad, established Syria's primacy in the Levant and transformed a country ravaged by nearly 30 coups in 24 years into a country led by one leader for nearly 30.
The elder Assad made sure that Syria manipulated events in the Middle East, and not the other way around. Seeking greater influence outside his borders, he succeeded in bringing Lebanon under his heel and made Syria a main patron of the Palestinian cause. Intervention in the latter became so pronounced that Patrick Seale, Hafez el Assad's biographer, remarked that Mr. Assad believed "the Palestinian problem was too important to be left to the Palestinians."
Although Bashar Assad does not possess the same state-building skills as his father, the American quagmire in Iraq, Syria's strong ties to rising power Iran and Damascus' support of Palestinian terrorist groups have all recently converged to offer Mr. Assad his first real opportunity to manipulate Middle Eastern affairs on a grand scale.
With Washington and Jerusalem shutting their doors to dialogue, Mr. Assad is forging his own way ahead in Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The United States and Israel think Syria will be a regional "spoiler," but neither country is offering enough or threatening enough to make Syria a "helper." Instead, they continue to offer little more than tough talk.
Over the past few weeks, Syria has woken up to its two most pressing problems: the continuing deluge of Iraqi refugees and a dire economic crisis. While President Bush has refused to answer any telephone calls from the Presidential Palace in Damascus, Syria has gone ahead and reopened its embassy in Baghdad and begun a series of bilateral agreements with Iraq on migration and border control. Syria's resources to deal with its 800,000 (and growing) Iraqi refugees are stretched to the breaking point, and this problem is more important for it to address than the international community's wish that Syria stop the 150 foreign fighters who cross each month into Iraq from Syria's eastern border.
Syria is also keen on stabilizing this border in order to restart the Syrian-Iraqi oil pipeline. In the 1990s, oil discoveries in eastern Syria fueled Syria's economy, accounting for more than 50 percent of exports. No new major oil discoveries have been made in the past 10 years, but Syria has continued its dependence on oil income. From 2000 until the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Syria illegally imported discounted crude from Iraq for its domestic needs, while exporting its own oil on the international market. By 2009, Syria could become a net importer of oil. With oil production decreasing and an economy slow to reform, the country is headed for an economic crisis.
