Today’s Middle East is evidently beyond the comprehension of the luminaries of the Iraq Study Group. In the region’s interlocking crises, the focus of change is not currently in Baghdad, still less in Jerusalem or Gaza, but in Beirut. What happens in Beirut in the coming months will determine the future of the Lebanese and Syrian regimes, which will determine the future of America’s primary Middle Eastern adversary — the Iran/Syria/Hezbollah alignment — and the whole pattern of regional power, including within Iraq.

On the one hand, if Cedar Revolution pluralism perseveres in Beirut, and assuming that international investigation of the murders of Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and other Lebanese personalities culminates in prosecution of top Syrians, Iran and Hezbollah will suffer a decisive reverse. This will improve the environment for the U.S. to counteract its disastrous mismanagement of Iraq. It will render “engaging” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad redundant. On the other hand, if Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran commandeer Beirut, the U.S. had best “cut and run” from Baghdad without delay. Iran’s supreme guide, Ali Khamenei, knew what Iraq Study Group chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton apparently don’t when he recently defined Lebanon rather than Iraq as the decisive arena of “America’s defeat.”

How does this scene square with the Baker/Hamilton recommendations to “engage” Syria and Iran to help “stabilize” Iraq? It doesn’t. Baathist Syria is the central cog of an alignment implacably hostile to the U.S. project in Iraq. To suppose that an America that has already declared defeat in Iraq has the slightest chance of detaching Syria’s ruling clique from its symbiosis with Hezbollah, Hamas, and triumphant imperial Iran, is to live in fairy land. James Baker talks airily of “flipping Syria” as if it were a turtle on a beach. In the real universe that most of us inhabit the only way to “flip Syria” is to flip out the present Syrian leadership. Reacting to the Iraq Study Group report, the Syrian government mouthpiece Tishrin promptly decreed that “the hour of truth and the payment of accounts for mistakes” has arrived, while Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki declared that the Iraqi problem will be solved with American departure, “which does not require any negotiation with Iran.” The casual arrogance is reminiscent of the movie Independence Day, when the humans ask the captive alien “what should we do,” and the alien responds: “Die!”

For those for whom principles still matter, the Iraq Study Group exhibits clear moral turpitude in recommending that the U.S. commune with Syria’s leaders, considering that top Syrian officials were in late 2005 defined as suspects in the U.N.’s first ever murder inquiry. Principles aside, little in the Baker/Hamilton text about Baathist Syria relates to the real world. For example, the U.S. is to “encourage and persuade Syria of the merit” of controlling its border with Iraq as if “the flow of funding, insurgents, and terrorists” from Syria has had no connection with the Syrian authorities. The alchemists of the Iraq Study Group have even managed to transmute the damning accumulated evidence of Syrian mischief making into evidence of the “given” of Syria’s “interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq.”

In phantasmagoric style, the report recommends that Israel “should return the Golan Heights” to Syria, and that Syria should “cooperate with all investigations into political assassinations in Lebanon” and stop undermining the Lebanese government. The authors, like the rest of us, know very well that the Syrian regime’s overriding priority in any deal is not the distant prospect of receiving the Golan Heights, but to be above and beyond international justice and to have renewed command of Beirut. The Iraq Study Group’s glowing reference to the U.S.-Syrian arrangements that “worked effectively in the early 1990s,” and which prominently included U.S. approval of Syrian control of Lebanon, has a sinister resonance. The Lebanese newspaper al-Nahar has reported reassurances to senior Lebanese officials from James Baker, but such talk may be cheap from a Baker who still looks back so fondly to his trade-offs with Bashar Assad’s father.

The most pernicious feature of the Iraq Study Group report is that its recommendations cut across the most promising avenue to relief and dignity for the U.S. Rather than “engaging” Syria and Iran, the U.S. should steadfastly guard the international investigative and judicial process that will consolidate democracy in Lebanon and probably bring regime change in Syria in 2007. This is not compatible with the deal making involved in engagement.

Any international indictments of senior Syrian officials for the Hariri assassination or the other murders of Lebanese critics of Syria included by the mandate of the U.N. investigating commission will bring the collapse of Iran’s allies in Damascus. The Syrian chain of command means that the summoning of heads of intelligence agencies to an international court is effectively the summoning of Bashar Assad. Stalling will lead to Syria formally becoming an outlaw state subject to Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, authorizing military action and the draconian sanctions. It is worth remembering that every step of the international investigative process has involved unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions, and Russia and China therefore have little wriggle room.

Under such pressure the most likely scenario in Damascus would be a move from within the army and the intelligence services to displace the present ruling clique, followed by establishment of a new regime incorporating opposition elements, including the Sunni “Muslim Brotherhood.” Contrary to self-serving scaremongering by the present Syrian regime, there is little chance that religious fanatics would take power in Syria. The Baathist dictatorship has fragmented all opposition. Indeed, the new ruling clique, apart from being friendly to the West and cooperative on the Iraqi border, would doubtless roll back the current Iranian presence in Syria and hunt down militant Islamist splinters co-opted by the present regime.

Regime change in Syria will mean Iran losing its main ally in the Arab world and its conduit to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The fall of the Iran/Syria/Hezbollah alignment would reverberate in Iraq far more deeply than would any engagement of Bashar Assad or the Iranian leadership, given that the former cannot and the latter will not significantly ease Iraq’s agony.

Which brings us back to the struggle around the Grand Serail in central Beirut, where Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has been under siege by opposition crowds for almost two weeks. Since the U.N. draft protocol for a mixed international/Lebanese tribunal to try Hariri murder-suspects arrived in Beirut on November 12, Siniora has faced resignations of six pro-Syrian ministers, the killing of a seventh minister who was a critic of Syria, and demonstrations clamoring for a “national unity government” in which Hezbollah would effectively supervise official business. This has frustrated Lebanese approval of the tribunal. Conveniently for the Syrian regime, the Hariri murder affair has become mixed up with division in Lebanon over Hezbollah’s armed “state within the state” and resentment toward the bourgeois elite, especially from Shia and a substantial number of Maronite Christians. Sunni Muslims, Druze, and many Christians back Prime Minister Siniora against the mainly Shia upsurge led by Hezbollah secretary-general Hasan Nasrallah. The prominent Maronite politician General Michel Aoun, alienated from Siniora, gives Hezbollah crucial cross-sectarian support. Nasrallah looks favorably on Arab League proposals pandering to Damascus that require Siniora’s agreement to a “national unity government” with a blocking one-third minority for Hezbollah in the parliament and suggest delaying approval of the tribunal to allow for “dialogue.”

Syria’s Bashar Assad and his Lebanese partner in the old Syrian/Lebanese security machine, President Emile Lahoud, together with Iran and Hezbollah, look ahead to a prolonged campaign to keep their Lebanese opponents and the international community off balance. The Iraq Study Group has given them new heart, and more political murders may be expected. The U.S. must play its part in ensuring that an international court is established, if necessary without Lebanese participation, ready to issue indictments directly following on findings issued by U.N. murder-inquiry chief Serge Brammertz. Only then might we hope for an end to the politics of murder in Lebanon, the political reform that can come only after apprehension of the murderers, and transformation in Syria, in turn bringing strategic change in the wider Middle East.

— William Harris is a professor in the department of political studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand.