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By Lachlan Carmichael, Agence France-Presse
WASHINGTON: The Bush administration’s campaign
to isolate Iran and Syria has backfired as the two Middle East
hardliners ended up this week sidelining the United States, analysts
said.
Supported by Iran and Syria, Hezbollah bolstered
recent military gains in a deal with Lebanon’s pro-western
government while Syria emerged from the shadows with the
announcement of indirect talks with Israel, they contend.
For Brookings Institution analyst Ammar
Abdulhamid, a Syrian scholar and dissident, both events flow from a
broader plan orchestrated by “puppet master” Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.
“You end up realizing there is a strategy
being worked out between Hezbollah, Syria and Iran, and they have
actually managed to make quite strong headway in the last few
days,” Abdulhamid told Agence France-Presse.
“The Iranians are running the show right
now,” he added.
Though President George W. Bush’s
administration may disagree with that, US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice late last month mentioned Iran as a threat to
Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Iraq and even in Afghanistan.
Few would dispute that Iran’s regional
influence has risen since 2003 when US-led forces invaded Iraq,
overthrew Sunni leader Saddam Hussein and empowered once downtrodden
Shiite Muslims close to Iran.
Some analysts disagreed with Abdulhamid and
argued that Iran might ultimately find itself isolated over
Syria’s talks with Israel, but they all insisted that President
George W. Bush’s policies have backfired.
“The president spoke in Jerusalem a week ago
about standing up to dictators and not appeasing those who used
force,” said Bruce Riedel, a former National Security Council
staff quoted by The Washington Post.
“He isn’t home a week, and the dictators and
the forces of violence have triumphed,” Riedel was quoted as
saying.
And despite Rice’s contention that Hezbollah
was dealt a “setback” in Lebanon, the analysts insist it is the
other way around: the US-backed government of Fuad Siniora suffered
the reversal.
Under Arab League auspices, rival Lebanese
leaders clinched a deal on Wednesday to end an 18-month political
feud that exploded into deadly sectarian fighting two weeks ago and
nearly drove the country into a new civil war.
The agreement will see the election of a
president for Lebanon within days and the creation of a unity
government in which the Hezbollah-led opposition will have the power
of veto.
“What we have is not a complete win or loss,
but a new accommodation, certainly with more influence for Hezbollah.
So it’s a nuanced outcome, but still it is a setback for the
government,” said Paul Salem, an analyst with the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.
In accepting a mixed picture, Salem, Abdulhamid
and others give some credence to administration arguments that
Hezbollah has lost popular support by turning its guns on fellow
Lebanese rather than its traditional enemy Israel.
“Whether it has, in fact, suffered a strategic
loss, in many ways we will only know with the result of the next
parliamentary election,” said Marina Ottaway, the director of the
Carnegie Middle East program.
On the Syria-Israel front, Ottaway argued that
Syria has put its own interests ahead of its alliance with Iran in a
bid to recover the Golan Heights, which the Jewish state captured in
the 1967 Middle East war.
However, Abdulhamid contends the Syrians will
try to preserve the alliance with Iran, saying Israel is deluding
itself if it thinks Damascus would cut ties not only with Tehran,
but also Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas.
“The idea that they will give up on all of
that in order to get the Golan is ludicrous,” Abdulhamid said.
He said the best the Bush administration can do
is to admit its losses, stabilize the situation and avoid doing
“something crazy to balance things out” like launching a
military strike against Iran.
It should be up to the next administration to
devise a more realistic and effective policy.
But Abdulhamid also had words of warnings for
Iran and Syria:
“They’ll make a mistake if they got into the
hubris themselves, and began saying ‘oh we got our way,’ because
the reality is none of the problems have been solved.”
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