WASHINGTON — It’s the season for peace talks in the Middle East, as the region watches the clock and waits for the departure of the Bush administration. Some of what’s going on is real, some of it is illusion, but to a student of diplomatic intrigue, all of it is interesting. So here’s a brief guide to the Syrian and Iranian negotiating tracks:
First, the Syrians. Though they are technically in a state of war with Israel, these two bosom enemies (to borrow a phrase from journalist Barbara
Slavin) have been conducting a surprisingly robust round of negotiations through Turkish intermediaries. We Americans like to think that people should either talk or fight, but the wily politicians in Damascus and Jerusalem understand that in real life, nations often pursue a combination of the two. They need each other, the way the Joker needs Batman.
So the Syrians have kept up a dialogue even as the Israelis destroyed what they claimed was a secret nuclear reactor. Welcome to the Middle East.
The first surprise about this diplomacy is that it has been under way for so long: Contacts through the Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan began in the early 2000s. They became serious during the Lebanon war in the summer of 2006, when the Syrians and Israelis used Turkey to pass crucial messages about “red lines” that must be preserved to avoid a wider conflict. Despite American misgivings, the dialogue continued in September 2006, after the war ended.
Syrian and Israeli negotiators have explored issues in four categories — borders, water rights, security and normalization of relations. A breakthrough came early this year, after the Syrians attended the Annapolis peace conference: Both sides accepted as starting points for their discussions the agreements that had been reached in these four areas during intensive bilateral negotiations brokered by the Clinton administration.
According to Syrian sources, agreement is close in three areas: On water rights, both sides tentatively endorse a suggestion made by then-President Clinton to delineate a common water basin used by Syria, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon; on borders, the Syrians insist they must regain the Golan Heights, but they recognize that the Sea of Galilee, a crucial marker of the old border, has shrunk over the past 40 years. Thus, compromises are possible that maintain Syrian sovereignty but allow Israeli access.
Similarly, on security matters, the tentative agreements reached in the late 1990s would resolve most of the remaining outstanding disputes. On normalization, the icing on the cake, little progress has yet been made.
The Syrians have shown no interest in discussing the disputed territory known as Shebaa Farms, since a withdrawal of the Israelis from this area would remove the last pretext for Hezbollah’s role as a “resistance” that fights to recover Israeli-occupied land. Hezbollah is a hornet’s next, so the Syrians want to postpone this issue for later.
Ask a Syrian how to describe the negotiating style of President Bashar al-Assad and he answers with an Arabic expression, “shaarat Muawiyah,”
which literally means the hair of Muawiyah, the first Umayyad caliph of Damascus. Muawiyah, it’s said, understood that if you pull the hair too hard, you lose it, and if you’re too gentle, you lose it as well. So he’s in the middle — cunning, cautious, between hard and soft.
As for the Iranians, a Lebanese friend speaks of their recent cocky behavior by using an Arabic expression that translates roughly as “steam in the head.” They are floating on a sense of their own power; they are luxuriating in a Persian hammam.
In this frame of mind, the Iranians attended a ballyhooed meeting last Saturday in Geneva that, some analysts hoped, might launch a “freeze for freeze” package that would allow “pre-negotiations” between Iran and the permanent representatives of the U.N. Security Council, to be followed by actual negotiations in which Iran would suspend enrichment of uranium.
Did Iran respond with a clear yes or no answer? Of course not. Instead it brought a two-page “non paper” that called for three sets of consultative meetings, to be followed perhaps by six weeks of preliminary talks, to be followed in theory (but almost surely not in fact) by actual negotiations.
What’s the Iranian position? With “steam in its head,” Tehran wants to convey the appearance of flexibility, but isn’t yet ready to negotiate seriously. Their watchword remains a guarded “maybe.” Meanwhile, the Iranians watch the clock ticking away, and wonder what kind of games they can play with Barack Obama.
David Ignatius is a Washington Post columnist. His e-mail address is davidignatius@washpost.com.
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