The Hariri investigation is hanging over the Syrian government's head like a sword of Damocles, said one Western diplomat in Damascus. The European Union, for example, is unlikely to take action on signing the important trade, social and cultural Association Agreement with Syria until the results of the Hariri investigation are known, several diplomats said. The agreement is important because it would allow the government to show that it is not isolated internationally. The United States has reportedly asked the EU not to go ahead with the deal for now, but a European diplomat in Damascus said that the EU has its own reasons not to sign the deal.

Another direct challenge to the implementation of resolution 1559 is Hezbollah's defiant stance. The "party of God" was bolstered by a solid election victory in its southern fiefdom last Sunday. Hezbollah itself, as well as Lebanese newspapers and analysts, explained the result as an emphatic rejection by voters in the south of the demand to disarm. "They gave a clear message to the foreigners, particularly to the Americans, that the people of Lebanon are unified over the resistance and the independence," said Hezbollah's second in command, Naim Qassem. Even though most political groups in Lebanon publicly deny that they will push for the disarmament of Hezbollah, the movement and its allies fear that this is about to happen following the recent departure of its Syrian allies from the country. "The Americans and the French and others will push the expanded anti-Syrian bloc in the next Parliament to disarm Hezbollah. And that will lead to disaster," said pro-Syrian member of Parliament Adnan Arakji.

The White House has already made clear that it regards the victory of Hezbollah, which it regards as a terrorist group, with unease. "These elections are ongoing and in terms of Hezbollah, I think our views are well known and they remain unchanged," said press secretary Scott McClellan. "You have a Security Council resolution that calls for the disarming of groups like Hezbollah, and that remains our view. Hezbollah, as you are well aware, is a terrorist organization." The State Department, too, said it viewed Hezbollah's continued strength with concern. "There should be no role for an armed militia" in a democratic government, said one official. (Not surprisingly, the U.S. official said nothing about the recent statement by Iraqi president Talabani defending the Kurdish peshmerga and the Shiite Badr Brigade militias.) So there seems very little chance that the United States will let up on the pressure to implement resolution 1559. Lebanese and Syrian supporters of Hezbollah hope that the Europeans, who have not put Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organizations, will be less focused on disarming the group. But Western diplomats in Damascus say there is very little that divides the U.S. and the EU at the moment on 1559 and that there is little prospect that international pressure on Syria will ease.

In fact, one analyst in Damascus said he had indications that the Bush administration, which has long wanted to topple the Syrian regime, is readying an "Iraq scenario" for the country. The United States is hoping to use the Kurds as it has done in northern Iraq. Tensions in the northeastern region of Syria have reportedly reached the boiling point after Kurds blamed the killing of Mohammed Mashouq al-Khaznawi, one of their important sheiks, on the Syrian authorities. The government emphatically denies the charge and has arrested "criminals" who it says are responsible. But clashes have already taken place in the main town, Qamishli, and people who have visited the area expect worse to come. The Kurds are certainly furious, judging by statements issued by their banned political parties. Earlier this week in Damascus, one Kurdish taxi driver even dared shout, "Come in Bush, please come in," with his windows closed.

If the situation in the Kurdish region gets out of hand, said the analyst in Damascus, the United States may impose a no-fly zone over the region, just as it did after the 1990 Gulf War in northern and southern Iraq. The U.S. is also trying to unite the fractured opposition by encouraging the Kurds, the Muslim Brotherhood and the liberals to work together. This is supposed to address the perceived lack of an alternative to the Baath government.

If this is true, it raises the obvious question of how the Bush administration could seriously contemplate another Iraq-type adventure when Iraq is in worsening chaos, with U.S. troops and Iraqis dying daily and no end in sight. Bush strategists may dream that regime change in Syria would magically solve all the region's problems at once. In fact, it might make them worse.

Toppling the Assad regime will not solve the problem of Iraq, because even if Syria is substantially involved in the fighting there, which is doubtful, the basic fuel for the insurgency remains the internal Iraqi situation. The majority of insurgents are Sunnis, mostly former Baathists, with access to the huge stockpiles of weapons that the Americans failed to safeguard after the invasion. It may be true that most of the suicide bombers are foreign, and that a new regime would be able to secure the long Syria-Iraq border across which many foreign jihadis slip into Iraq. But it is highly unlikely that a stable new regime would emerge in Syria -- or that if it did, it would be friendly to the United States. The political and social structures in Syria and Iraq are quite similar: What did not work in Iraq will almost certainly not work in Syria, either.

Nor would toppling the Syrian regime make the Palestinians cry uncle. A major reason that Bush administration neocons have long pushed for regime change in Syria, Iraq and Iran is their enmity to Israel. It's true that the backing of the "rejectionist states" gave the Palestinians some strategic depth -- support for the families of suicide bombers, for Hamas, for arms shipments. But the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is within Palestine: What happens at a regional level is secondary. In any case, any new regime in Syria (or any other Arab state, for that matter) would almost certainly have a hostile stance toward Israel until the Palestinian issue is resolved. In the case of Syria, there is the added issue of the Golan Heights: No Syrian government will normalize relations with Israel until it returns the Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 war.

As for Lebanon, it was chaotic and venal long before the Syrians started meddling. A U.S-backed regime in Syria might upset the delicate power balance in Lebanon and make things even worse. (It could also have a spillover into Iraq: The Shiites in Iraq would not take happily to a U.S. campaign to marginalize the Hezbollah-supporting Shiite majority in Lebanon.)

Above all, a U.S.-backed campaign to remove the Syrian regime would be folly because especially post-Iraq, any stamp of American approval means a death knell for opposition parties in the Middle East. The United States thus faces a paradoxical situation: In order to encourage reform, it cannot appear to back it.

An analyst who is not given to idle talk and has contacts at the highest levels of the U.S. administration agreed that the idea of U.S.-backed regime change was a bad one. "Yes, the Americans are stupid," the analyst said. "Unfortunately the Syrians are even more stupid."

Under these circumstances, the tepid call for a "constructive dialogue with the U.S. and the EU" by delegates at the Baath Party's 10th congress, which ended earlier this week in Damascus, looks laughably out of touch. One reformist-minded Baathist, Ayman Abdel Nour, said after the congress finished that more reforms were soon to follow, because the leadership realized that "we don't have time to go slow-motion because of the international and regional situation." But many observers and analysts in the Syrian capital say that the leadership is merely trying to toss the international community a few bones now and then to see if it can be placated. If one doesn't work, it will try tossing another. Many in Damascus fear the United States will run out of patience before the leadership runs out of bones.

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