Collapse

JSOU Report 16-1
believed that the crisis had abated. Their assessment was that the United
States was now bogged down in an unwinnable insurgency and that further
adventurism in Syria was unlikely no matter how certain political elements
in Washington wanted to see such a move. The situation allowed the Alawite
regime to return to what it did best—straddle the regional fence. While Syria
did not want to see the Iraq conflict spill over its borders, it played a double
game of border cooperation with U.S. forces while simultaneously turning
its head to cross border traffic in fighters and arms. Syria wanted a united
but weakened Iraq because should Iraq split into its sectarian parts, then
Damascus understood that it could be the next target for the united Sunnis
of Syria and Western Iraq. 167
For the Americans in Iraq, the situation had gone from bad to worse. For
this reason, the Syrian regime calculated that it had some additional room
for maneuver against its enemies—particularly those in Lebanon. In 2005,
former Lebanese Rafiq Hariri was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut. An
opponent of the Syrian military occupation and an ally of Saudi Arabia and
the West, the immediate reaction was to blame the Assad regime, the pro-
Syrian Lebanese government, and Hezbollah. The assassination resulted in
massive protests, the Cedar Revolution, that forced the withdrawal of Syrian
forces from Lebanon. 168 The political storm following Hariri’s death undermined
any hope that the Assad regime might have had for international
rehabilitation. It fit squarely into the Western narrative that the Alawite
regime was in fact a rogue regime.
That said, the aftermath likely encouraged the view in Damascus that
it should act to protect what it perceived as its own interests regardless of
world opinion and Western condemnation, because in the end, neither the
United States nor France were willing to do much about it in this case. Pro-
Syrian elements stonewalled the investigation and assassinated witnesses
and investigators; in the end, only low-level perpetrators from Hezbollah
were indicted. After the Syrian withdrawal, the Cedar Revolution burned
itself out. As one commentator pointed out, “The reality is that Lebanon
has had democracy for quite some time … But instead of being a panacea
for the country’s problems, this relative excess of democracy has merely
exacerbated them.” Lebanon, like Syria and Iraq, is a “bewildering array
of ethno-religious and political fiefdoms.” It has avoided the centralized
authoritarian rule by “devolving power back to the various clans, parties,
and religious groups that constitute, in effect, a collection of mini-states.” 169
82