Homs, Syria

Homs is Syria's third-largest city, a mid-sized industrial town along the Aleppo-Damascus highway best known for its oil refineries and as the home of Baath University. I watched George W. Bush's inaugural address here last month at the house of my friend Abu Darwish, a programmer who lives in a modest middle-class neighborhood with his wife and three young children, all studying English at their father's insistence. "He loves the USA," his wife told me. The children laughed when she rolled her eyes behind their father's back as he was blowing kisses at Bush's image on TV. She doesn't love America right now and thinks that Bush hates Muslims and Arabs. "No," Abu Darwish argued gently with his wife, "he's talking about freedom for Muslims and Arabs. God bless you, Bush."

Abu Darwish believes that there aren't many Syrians like him, and while it's true his is hardly the mainstream opinion in the last stronghold of Arab nationalism, during my recent trip to Syria I found that there are more like him than he knows.

"The ripple effect that the White House wanted in the Middle East is actually starting to happen," says Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian writer and rights activist who has just returned to Damascus after spending the last six months in Washington as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Since coming back, Abdulhamid has been put under a travel ban by the Syrian government for his sharp criticism of the regime in the Western and Arab press, and has been repeatedly interrogated by several security branches. Nonetheless, he believes things are beginning to change. "The presence of U.S. forces in the region," he told me, "and the pressure brought to bear on the Syrian regime has begun to create a new political climate."

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad seems to understand this, which is why he is fighting back. The White House, angry that Syria has continued to support Hezbollah and Palestinian terror groups and has done nothing to stem the flow of cash and fighters into Iraq, has used Syria's occupation of Lebanon to flog Damascus. Along with sanctions, tough talk, and threats of military operations, Washington joined with France to support a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon.

Last week, Damascus tested the White House's resolve by assassinating former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, with a massive car-bomb attack in Beirut on the onetime Syrian ally who had become Lebanon's highest-ranking opposition figure. The next move belongs to Washington, which has already recalled the U.S. ambassador to Syria. If the administration fails to respond forcefully, this will signal to the entire region that it is dangerous to side with an ally who cannot be counted on for protection. Syria has calculated that the Bush White House has neither the troops nor the political credibility to do anything about it.

Perhaps the best way to understand Syria's foreign policy--especially in Iraq and Lebanon right now--is as an expression of the regime's keening anxiety over its own lack of domestic credibility. The most serious taboo in Syrian political discourse is the subject of minorities. Like Iraq's former Sunni-dominated regime, Syria's ruling cadre is made up of a minority, the Alawites, adherents of a somewhat gnostic variation of Shia Islam. In Syria, the Sunnis are a majority, but to date, many are so taken with the "heroic resistance" to the occupation in Iraq that they have not even noticed how free elections might serve their interests. The idea that Syria's Sunnis might soon put two and two together terrifies the Alawite regime at least as much as the threat of a missile strike.