BLINDSIDING CONGRESS ON THE SYRIAN DEAL: CLINTON HOPES TO GO NON-STOP FROM ‘IT’S PREMATURE TO DEBATE’ TO ‘IT’S TOO LATE’

(Washington, D.C.): With the completion of Secretary of
State Warren Christopher’s latest diplomatic mission to the
Mideast, one thing is indisputable: It is clearly no longer
“premature” for Congress to debate the role the Clinton
Administration proposes to have the United States play in a peace
agreement between Syria and Israel.

While the official U.S. and Israeli government line continues
to be that such a debate should wait until all the details are
worked out, enough is already known about the nature of the
“security arrangements” and other particulars that Mr.
Christopher is brokering to permit informed and decisive
congressional deliberations. More to the point, if they do not
occur now, Congress will — as a practical matter — be
denied a voice in the matter.

‘Stonewall Me Once…’

This would not be the first time that the Clinton
team has tried to render Congress irrelevant to the conduct of
U.S. foreign policy. Consider the recent record: Last year, the
Administration purposefully accelerated its “invasion”
of Haiti so as to present the legislative branch — which was
overwhelmingly opposed to such an action — with a fait
accompli.

It has also attempted to finesse opposition on Capitol Hill
to the deal it struck with North Korea by averring that that
accord is not a “treaty” requiring ratification.
(Indeed, the accord is now not even called an
“agreement”; it is said, instead, to be an
“agreed framework.”) And, in recent days, the
Administration has served notice that it has no intention of
submitting to the Senate for its formal advice and consent the
results of yet another diplomatic gambit that would further limit
U.S. missile defense options by amending the 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty.

The good news is that the Congress has shown increasing
unwillingness to put up with such cavalier, if not
unconstitutional, treatment. Notably, this week, Senate Majority
Leader Robert Dole — at the urging of the chairmen of the Senate
Foreign Relations, Energy and Natural Resources and Intelligence
Committees — has challenged the Clinton Administration’s
position on the legal status of the North Korean accord. And, in
part due to the Senate’s experience with the Pyongyang deal,
Senator Dole and twelve other ranking Republicans last week took
preemptive action on the ABM front. They wrote President Clinton
that changes to the scope of and signatories to the ABM Treaty
now being negotiated by his Administration “would be subject
to the advice and consent of the Senate.”

The question occurs: Does Congress want to be put in the
position vis á vis an Israeli- Syrian agreement where it
is once again “informed” after the fact, rather than
genuinely consulted before it? Can it afford to be
presented in this especially sensitive and politically volatile
area with a “done deal” that it will find exceedingly
difficult to alter, particularly since such alterations will be
portrayed as a mortal threat to the entire “peace
process.” (A small taste of the vehemence of the criticism
such congressional “meddling” will encounter was
evident in the harsh response from the Clinton Administration and
various Mideast governments to recent actions by the House
Appropriations Committee on debt relief for Jordan.^{1})

What Clinton Is Wreaking

The following are among the more troublesome aspects of the
deal the Clinton Administration seems determined to present to
Congress as a fait accompli:

1. Removal of Syria from the list of terrorist-sponsoring
   and drug-trafficking nations: Of course, such a step
   cannot be justified on the merits. The Syrians continue
   to be the hosts, backers, logistical supporters and
   protectors of most of the world’s terrorist
   organizations. Damascus is also still actively involved
   in the international drug trade.^{2}

The Administration clearly appreciates that it must,
nonetheless, stop stigmatizing Damascus for ongoing,
malevolent Syrian behavior if the U.S. is to take other
steps on Assad’s behalf. According to a report circulated
by COMPASS-Middle East Wire Service on 15 March,
President Clinton authorized the Saudi Foreign Minister,
Saud Al-Faisal, during a recent Washington meeting to
communicate to Assad Mr. Clinton’s “personal
promise” to “help remove Syria from the State
Department’s list of states sponsoring terrorism and
involved in drug trafficking.” He reportedly did so
despite efforts by his Middle East coordinator, Dennis
Ross, to hedge on that point.

It goes without saying that — in the absence of a genuine
end to Syrian sponsorship of terrorism and the drug-trade
— such a step would represent a new and potentially
quite dangerous corruption of the standards by which the
United States maintains relations with foreign
governments. As the chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Sen. Jesse Helms, recently observed:
“The Syrian government has American blood on its
hands. Tell me how peace with Israel will cleanse those
hands?”

2. Providing Syria with Financial Assistance: Just
   how much money President Clinton is prepared to promise
   Hafez Assad as a lubricant to the peace process is not
   clear at this point. That he intends to do so, however,
   is not in doubt. After all, this accord is being
   explicitly modelled on the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David
   accords — a deal that has translated into tens of
   billions of dollars for Cairo. Syria has made clear that
   it expects to profit no less than Egypt has from the
   peace process.

Several avenues for providing Syria with financial
assistance are evidently being pursued. The donor of
first resort is, of course, Saudi Arabia. After
all, the Bush Administration persuaded the Saudis to pay
the Syrian dictator $2 billion as a reward for joining
the U.S.-led coalition — something that was very much in
his interest to do anyway since the coalition’s objective
was to wage war against Assad’s worst enemy, Saddam
Hussein. The Clinton team believes that it has now
induced the Saudis to signal a willingness to provide
further financial support to Damascus if Syria comes to
terms with Israel. It is portraying the Saudi Foreign
Minister’s meeting with Assad last week as evidence of
such a willingness.^{3}

A second avenue is debt relief. Syria
apparently expects that the United States will help
arrange for the cancellation of its foreign debt.
According to the February 1995 edition of the
London-based periodical The Middle East:

“Syrian analysts say that the country’s ‘only’
foreign debts to Russian and Eastern bloc countries will
be canceled once a peace deal is concluded. ‘Why should
Egypt and Jordan have their debts written off and Syria
be expected to pay theirs (sic)?’ asks one analyst. ‘It
will be part and package of the deal.’ Syria owes some
$14 billion to the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc
countries, mostly for arms.”

Since the holders of such debt are themselves broke,
it seems likely that the United States will have to offer
the Russians and others at least partial payment in
dollars if the latter are to wipe the slate clean for
Syria.

Such is his eagerness for a deal that President
Clinton may be making commitments in a third area:
promising that at least hundreds of millions, if not
billions, of U.S. taxpayer dollars will flow to
Syria — in the form of indirect assistance (e.g.,
via multilateral financial institutions), if not directly
from the U.S. Treasury. There is, however, little
realistic prospect that American financial assistance
will be forthcoming for Syria. According to the
Associated Press, on 15 March, Rep. Sonny Callahan,
the chairman of the House Foreign Operations
Appropriations Subcommittee:

“warned the Clinton Administration that he
would oppose providing any aid to Syria as part of a
future peace agreement with Israel….He is concerned
that Syria would seek the ‘annual entitlement’ of
foreign aid that Egypt and Israel have received since
they signed a peace treaty in 1979. ‘There is no money,’
Callahan said.” (Emphasis added.)

3. Deployment of U.S. “monitors” on the Golan
   Heights: Another explosive aspect of the incipient
   Syrian-Israeli agreement is the Clinton Administration’s
   commitment to place American personnel on the Golan as
   Israel withdraws from this strategic high-ground. The
   details of the proposed deployment have yet to be
   publicly disclosed.

It is, nonetheless, clear that such a deployment will
be fraught with serious risks: for the Americans who will
likely be the targets of terrorist attacks on the Golan;
for Israelis who may, wrongly, be induced by the presence
of those personnel to believe that the danger associated
with surrendering the Golan to Assad’s Syria has been
alleviated; and for the U.S.-Israeli relationship if the
deployment has the effect of transforming the United
States from Israel’s closest and strongest ally into a
“neutral” party.^{4}

There is, simply put, no resemblance between the
desolate, unpopulated and isolated Sinai — where U.S.
forces have been performing monitoring functions under
the Camp David accord for well over a decade — and the
Golan Heights. It is grossly misleading, therefore, to
suggest that just because the United States deployed
monitors to the Sinai it safely can, not to say that it must,
deploy them on the Golan.

4. Aiding Syria’s Arms Build-up: On the face of it,
   it seems preposterous that the United States would even
   consider helping a dangerous actor like Hafez Assad to
   upgrade the lethality of his arsenal. And yet, such a
   step would also be consistent with the Egypt-Israeli
   model. Generous sales of advanced U.S. weaponry,
   technology transfers, co-production arrangements and
   military training have flowed to Cairo in the wake of
   Camp David.

More recently, along with debt-relief, President
Clinton promised Jordan last October that “We will
meet Jordan’s legitimate defense requirements.” At a
minimum, given the fungibility of money, American cash
infusions to Syria will free up other resources. They
will, therefore, effectively help Assad continue his
efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and other
offensive arms.

In this regard, it is worth noting that Syrian Vice
President Abdul-Halim Khaddam said on 8 March: “We
have to make building our national shield a national
responsibility which we should approach without
hesitation. Despite the accords Israel has struck with
three Arab parties, it is going ahead with promoting its
fighting ability in spite of its current arms arsenal and
huge military industries.”

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy believes that those who hope
to promote a just and durable peace between Israel and Syria have
a responsibility to ensure that an agreement between the parties
is not based on an unsustainable foundation. If the foregoing
commitments — undertakings that are apparently being made by
President Clinton on behalf of the United States to secure Syrian
agreement to a deal with Israel — will not enjoy congressional
support, all the parties are better off knowing that now.
That reality can then be taken into account in the negotiations
and alternative security and other arrangements made accordingly,
with minimum disruption caused to the peace process.

Unfortunately, apart from a few legislators like Sen. Helms
and Rep. Callahan, the Congress has not yet been heard from
concerning Mr. Clinton’s Syrian initiatives. Before any more time
elapses and any more insupportable commitments are made to Hafez
Assad, the rest of the congressional leadership must become
engaged in two respects: 1) by holding hearings at once to ensure
an informed public and congressional debate on these commitments;
and 2) by objecting formally to the Administration’s approach, at
a minimum by dispatching the sort of letter Sen. Dole and his
colleagues sent the President last week opposing the ABM
negotiations now underway.

(1) See the Center for Security Policy’s
recent Decision Brief entitled, Warning:
Congress Must Spike U.S. Commitments on Dollars, Troops for Syria
Now or Invite Peace Process Melt-Down ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=95-D_13″>No. 95-D 13, 3 March 1995).

(2) Although the Clinton Administration
sought to put the best face on Syrian involvement in the
international drug trade in a recent report to Congress on such
trafficking, it was obliged nonetheless to note that
“Neither the Syrian nor the [Syrian-controlled] Lebanese
authorities moved successfully against cocaine or heroin
laboratories operating in either country.”

(3) On 15 March, the Jerusalem Post
reported that an unnamed “senior U.S. official” said in
Damascus: “When Saud Faisal arrived on a rare visit to
Damascus, he did not nor does he have to say ‘If you make peace
with Israel, we will give you this set amount of money.’ Rather,
it is sufficient for him to say, ‘We support the direction of
making peace with Israel.’ The Syrians get the message. This is
what the Saudi foreign minister did.”

(4) For a detailed analysis of these
potential dangers, see the Center for Security Policy’s href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=00-golan94″>blue-ribbon study entitled U.S.
Forces on the Golan Heights: An Assessment of Benefits and Risks
(24 October 1994).