In an interview with a Lebanese newspaper about a year ago, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad asserted that major countries, most prominently the United States and France, took in 2003, with the start of the US invasion of Iraq, the decision to drive Syria out of Lebanon, before UN Resolution 1559 was issued in 2004 and before the assassination of Rafic Hariri in 2005. He admitted in the same interview that his country had committed mistakes in that country, which made many Lebanese hopeful about the future of relations between the two countries, as they considered such a confession to be the prelude to correcting these relations and to avoiding repeating the same mistakes. Such optimism had started as Damascus's international isolation was gradually being relaxed and as relations between it and several European countries, especially France, were returning to a state of semi-normalcy. Indeed, this had reflected positively on the situation in Lebanon, where the wave of violence and assassinations had receded. Then came the decision of exchanging diplomatic relations and establishing embassies in Beirut and in Damascus after the Doha Agreement, reinforcing the positive direction taken by the reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Syria, Prime Minister's Saad Hariri's visit to Damascus and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt's expected visit of there. Today the US is also opening up to Syria and wishes to “engage” with it, as represented by the decision to return the ambassador, despite both parties asserting that a return to normal relations between Washington and Damascus would require time and meeting mutual conditions. However, the development of Syrian-Lebanese relations as a whole has shown that the basic condition for “calm” relations between the two is for third parties to recognize and commend Syria's role in Lebanon. This means that the relationship between the two countries has always gone through and continues to go through an external “mediator”, regardless of strong or tense relations between Syria and particular Lebanese parties. It is well-known that Syria first entered Lebanon militarily in 1976 under shared Arab and international consensus, and that it remained in Lebanon for thirty years under such a cover, until the latter was lifted, according to Assad himself, in 2003. Indeed, Syria and Lebanon have not since their independence been able to lay down solid bases for normal relations, such as between any two neighboring countries, bases that would withstand regional and international changes, even if it were affected by them. Relations that would ensure the security of both and establish a broad margin of shared interests within the boundaries of sovereignty, and that would allow each country to express its opinion on the issues of the region and the world, far from concordance and identification, without this turning into an object of conflict or tension or a cause for interference in politics and security. The reason for this does not merely reside in what most Syrians, implicitly or publicly, consider to be a “historical mistake” that requires correction, by which a piece of Mother Syria was “split off” and turned into an independent country, but also and fundamentally in the nature of the system that arose in Lebanon and which was intended to be a copy of Western democracies in an environment that prefers a different formula for governance, one where being different becomes a cause for suspicion and where diversity is synonymous with distrust. And if Syria feels today that it has emerged from its isolation strong enough to attempt once again to impose its political choices on Lebanon through its allies, as took place in the tripartite meeting in Damascus with Iran and Hezbollah last month, to encourage campaigns targeting this post or that party with the aim of subjugating the country, or to succeed at obtaining concessions from some of its politicians, this means that the correction it applied to its past experience did not reach the conclusion that the “mediator” was no longer necessary between itself and Lebanon.
