How far is Syria ready to go to appease the US?

In the JPOst, here

"...... But it has yet to show signs of a real policy shift vis a vis its ally Iran or its leading proxies. And just how far Syria, which wants to be acknowledged as a key player in the region, is willing to go to appease the United States has yet to be seen.

In fact, the anti-US Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is very close to Iran, visited Damascus last week reportedly to strengthen relations with Iraqi resistance groups.

"I don't see any major changes on Bashar's part," Andrew Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Jerusalem Post last week. "And whatever changes there are, [they] are very incremental and very hard for the US to pick up."

Others, however, argue that Syria's recent behavior can be considered an attempt to keep some distance from the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Syrian regime, for example, did not interfere in Lebanon's hotly contested June 7 elections, which resulted in a victory for the Western-backed March 14 coalition over the Hizbullah-led opposition, says Abdel Monem Said Aly, director of the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. ... "Certainly, some of it can be seen as a distance from Teheran, not a big distance, but a distance [nonetheless] can be noticed," Said Aly said.

As part of its approach to cautious, critical engagement with Syria, Obama's administration announced in June that it will restore an ambassador to Damascus after a four year hiatus following the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. But despite last month's announcement, the US has yet to name an ambassador. Security arrangements involving foreign fighters in Iraq have yet to be adhered to. And in neighboring Lebanon, where Syria still wields influence, the March 14 coalition and the Hizbullah-led opposition have yet to form a government more than six weeks after the country's general elections.

"This all indicates to me that there are still a lot of bones of contention between Syria and the US," and even within the US administration on how to best deal with Syria, said Prof. Joshua Landis, co-director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma....

"What I think is they want to be able to get the Golan [Heights] back in exchange for some sort of change in their relationship with Iran, which is not described, and where they can politically support Hizbullah and Hamas but perhaps without supplying them" militarily, Tabler said.

This strategy, however, is complicated by parliamentary moves in Israel that would require a referendum to withdraw from the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in the Six Day War.

"The question is: Are Israelis the kind of people that will give back the Golan [in a peace agreement] for a maybe?" Tabler said. "Probably not. I can't see it."