Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton send envoys to Syria

Wednesday, March 4. When George Bush was President, Syria was a "rouge nation" accused of sponsoring terrorism. But in his latest effort to engage with America's erstwhile adversaries Barack Obama is sending two senior US envoys to the Syrian capital, Damascus, this weekend. Speaking yesterday from Israel, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that Jeffrey Feltman, the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and Dan Shapiro of the White House's National Security Council will make the trip to the Middle Eastern country.

"We have no way to predict what the future with our relations concerning Syria might be," said Clinton. "We don't engage in discussions for the sake of having a conversation. There has to be a purpose to them, there has to be some perceived benefit accruing to the United States and our allies."

That purpose could be threefold, says Mark Landler in the New York Times. "The overture suggests how the Obama administration intends to tackle three interlocking challenges in the Middle East: the nuclear threat posed by Iran; long-simmering tensions between Israel and Syria; and the grinding conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Syria, regional experts say, could be the key to alleviating all three."

The particular hope is that any thaw in relations between the US and Syria could lead to a resumption of the peace talks between Israel and Syria that were being held through Turkish mediators last year - the main sticking point being ownership of the Golan Heights.

According to Andrew Lee Butters in Time magazine, the Bush administration largely ignored Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad. "The flurry of diplomatic excitement caused by Clinton's public handshake with [Syrian foreign minister Walid] Moallem, followed by Tuesday's announcement that Washington will soon send two high-level envoys to Damascus for talks, is both a welcome sign of thaw and a reminder of how little common ground currently exists between the two countries.

"The Obama people seem to believe they can bring Syria in from the cold, possibly in exchange for a full package of aid and first-class membership in the country club of international diplomacy. And if that could be achieved, of course, it would deprive Iran of one of its most important allies in its confrontation with the West." That's easier said than done though, says Butters, and Israel has so far shown little sign of wanting to return the Golan Heights to Syria.

But Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post says the choice of personnel to make the trip to Damascus is questionable. "As ambassador to Lebanon during the 2005 Cedar Revolution, [Jeffrey Feltman's] efforts to foster a government independent of Syrian influence so angered the Syrian government that at one point, State Department security officials were concerned that Damascus had ordered his assassination," Kessler recalls. "Shortly before he returned to Washington, in January 2008, an embassy convoy was attacked in a car bombing that killed three Lebanese civilians and injured dozens of people; Feltman was travelling in another convoy and was not injured."

FIRST POSTED MARCH 4, 2009