"... With Barack Obama’s election to the White House, the mood had changed and, apart from the 2009 Gaza War – which again saw Syria and Saudi Arabia take different sides on supporting Hamas – the regional atmosphere had shifted. Mr Obama pledged a sincere involvement in the search for Middle East peace and cautiously rebuilt contacts with Syria that had been shattered under the Bush administration. In return, Syria stayed out of last month’s Lebanese election that saw Hizbollah, lose out to the US and Saudi-backed bloc.
With growing American and Arab concern about Iran’s nuclear programme – Iran says it is peaceful and civilian, not a weapons project – the region’s attention has been fixed on Tehran. Even renewed peace efforts seem aimed less at ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as an end in itself than at weakening Iran’s leverage over the Middle East.
The US, loyally backed by Saudi Arabia, appears to be following a strategy to isolate Iran. And that means pulling Syria back into the Arab fold. The sudden announcement that Riyadh will return an ambassador to its large Damascus embassy, a short walk from the US Embassy, is part of the gambit; the beginning of a new chapter in which Tehran is cut down to size and Riyadh reconfirmed as the region’s powerhouse.
What remains to be seen is whether or not these more positive regional atmospherics, and talk of peace, will result in real change, a change of the fundamental problems that have plagued the Middle East; a cleansing of the bad blood that stains its soil.
For decades Syria has doggedly insisted that the underlying situation can be solved only with a comprehensive regional peace agreement that sees it regain the Golan Heights. Regardless of American or Saudi ambassadors being posted to Damascus, or efforts to weaken the Syrian-Iranian alliance, if that does not happen, any new chapter is doomed to have the same old ending."
In the NATIONAL, here
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