Why Are We in League With a Dictator?

Douglas Feith, a partner in D.C.’s Feith & Zell, served as deputy assistant
secretary of defense and as a Middle East specialist on the National Security
Council staff in the Reagan administration.

Advancing individual human rights needs no justification. As a form of virtue,
it is its own reward. But morality aside, policies that take due account of
human rights can serve important, practical national security purposes.

American interests in political freedom, physical security, peace, trade, travel,
and technological progress are advanced when there is expansion of the community
of states that, recognizing law as a constraint on politics rather than a tool
of politics, respect the human rights of their people. A government that exercises
only limited power at home — one bound by its own law — is more likely than
a dictatorship to honor international law, including principles of respect for
the territorial and political integrity of other states. To appreciate this
is to recognize the lack of wisdom in the Bush administration’s developing relationship
with Syria and its president, Hafez al-Assad.

The administration’s courtship of the Assad regime has included a series of
top-level meetings in which President George Bush and Secretary of State James
Baker III have made a show of consulting with Assad, seeking his views, and
respectfully requesting him to join in Arab-Israeli "peace" diplomacy.
Having solicited Syria’s participation in the coalition force against Iraq,
the administration paved the way for the resumption of large-scale financial
aid for Syria from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states. The first billion
dollars of aid went straight to theSyrian military for the purchase of such
items enhanced Scud missiles made in North Korea.

The factors that made Saddam Hussein a threat to world order and U.S. interests
— the factors that compelled us to treat him as an outlaw rather than a fellow
member of the community of law-abiding nations — apply also in the case of
Hafez al-Assad. In dealing with Saddam, we were able to recognize the limits
of diplomacy because we knew that he is a man who exercises absolute power and
submits to no constraints other than those imposed by force. Assad is altogether
as tyrannical, belligerent, and absolute a dictator as Saddam. If he has the
means to succeed, he can be counted on to use force or with Lebanon but with
Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey.

Saddam’s development of weapons of mass destruction and long-range delivery
capabilities and his regime’s history of brutality at home and aggression abroad
compelled us to view him as a regional or even a global threat. Thus, the United
States could not dismiss the invasion of Kuwait as a merely local problem. There
was every reason to believe that the attack, which was not Saddam’s first aggression,
would not be his last either.

Warmongering

The same considerations argue for our condemning, pressuring, and isolating
Assad. Assad, too, has launched aggressive wars — against both Lebanon and
Israel. He has mobilized his armed forces threateningly against Jordan. He has
squeezed out of his country’s poor economy enormous sums of money to create
an army of over half a million men equipped with more than 4,000 tanks and 500
fighter aircraft, a chemical and biological weapons capability, and a variety
of ballistic missiles with ranges ample to coverall of Israel and much of Turkey.

Assad is one of the principal supporters of international terrorism. He gives
a home to a number of Palestinian terrorist groups, including the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which was responsible for the
1988 bombing of Pan Am 103, and to the PKK (the communist Kurdish Workers Party)
and Dev Sol,terrorist groups that operate against Turkey. Terrorists in regions
he controls in Lebanon continue to hold American citizens hostage. The near
absence of terrorist attacks against Americans during recent months reflects
the degree of control Syria exercises in this field, a fact that should make
us disapproving and wary rather than grateful.

Through military action, assassination, and terrorism, Syria has since 1975
established its dominance throughout most of Lebanon. In October 1990, Assad
eliminated his last Lebanese challenger, Gen. Michel Aoun, whose forces he crushed
while the Untied States and the other Western powers were preoccupied with Desert
Shield and intent on fortifying the anti-Saddam coalition that Assad was enlisted
to join.

Incongruous Response

In a December television interview, David Frost asked President Bush about
the price paid for putting the coalition together and alluded to the lack of
U.S. condemnation of Assad’s successful attack on Aoun. The president replied
incongruously that despite his differences with Assad over many issues, they
stood together in the gulf crisis on the principle that big states should not
gobble up their small neighbors.

Assad attacks his own domestic opponents as cruelly and fatally as he has eliminated
his foes in Lebanon. Like Saddam, Assad has used artillery and tanks against
his domestic opposition. In responding to the 1982 uprising in the Syrian city
of Hama, Assad’s troops are estimated to have killed 5,000 to 10,000 Syrians.

Assad’s diplomacy has been powerfully antagonistic to the United States and
to Israel and, throughout the Cold War years, consistently favorable to the
Soviet Union. Syria was one of the few states outside the Communist bloc to
support the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Assad led the Arab world’s condemnation
of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. Assad destroyed the 1983 Lebanese-Israeli
Agreement. And Assad continues to refuse to negotiate peace with Israel, in
violation of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

Assad has made all his neighbors antagonists. It is fair then to ask why the
Bush administration wants to relieve Assad’s relative isolation, enhance his
prestige, and open the way for him to receive greater subsidies from the Arab
oil states and possibly arms from the West.

The administration’s conciliatory policies toward Syria — its high-level,
high-visibility consultations with Assad, acquiescence in Syrian domination
of Lebanon, and failure to make an issue of Assad’s despotism, support of terrorism,
and anti-Israel rejectionism — send signals that conflict with the most important
messages that Desert Storm was supposed to convey.

Our action against Iraq announced to the world that it is important to take
seriously key principles of international order: the right of states to live
unthreatened in peace, the paramountcy of law, the accountability of wrongdoers.
Our embrace of Assad — the man who stole Lebanon, threatens Israel, and relies
on terrorism as a foreign policy tool — mocks these principles.

© 2004 ALM Properties, Inc. All rights reserved. This article is reprinted
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