Middle East: Why Assad Saw the Light

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Syrian President Hafez Assad ordinarily is no one's idea of a cooperative statesman, not with his record as a bloodily repressive dictator. But Assad is shrewd enough to sense which way the winds of world power are blowing. So last week he accepted the American formula for a Middle East peace conference. That, in effect, made him the first Arab leader since Egypt's Anwar Sadat to agree to public, direct peace talks with Israel: that is what the conference is supposed to lead to, after a brief ceremonial opening.

None of which necessarily means that a conference will meet anytime soon. At least one of Assad's motives was to put the onus of blocking peace squarely upon Israel, should Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's government balk at accepting the same terms. Shamir is alert to that danger, but he is far from avid for a peace conference.

So, as U.S. Secretary of State James Baker toured the region, the betting was that the Israeli leader would stall, if not turn Baker down flat. Defense Minister Moshe Arens predicted to the newspaper Yediot Aharonot that Baker would leave without any agreement that "will bring about the meeting he wants to organize." Even if Shamir accepted, right-wing parties would almost certainly leave his coalition and topple the government. New elections would then delay a peace conference further.

Even so, Assad's move underlines the extent to which once unfriendly countries are concluding that it is prudent to please the U.S., the world's sole remaining superpower. The Syrian President had long been a client of the Soviet Union and a leader of the rejectionist Arab states that opposed any dealing with Israel. But, American analysts believe, at the end of the gulf war Assad realized he had reached a turning point: he could become the unrivaled leader of Arab radicals -- or he could bid for status among the moderates. Assad decided, as one American diplomat puts it, that "the future is with the U.S. and with the Cairo-Riyadh-Damascus axis" -- and that only the U.S. could help Syria recover the Golan Heights from Israel.

In a letter to George Bush last week, Assad accepted two U.S. ideas: that the United Nations send only an observer to the peace conference (Syria had originally wanted the U.N. to play a major role) and that, after the conference had broken up into bilateral talks between Israel and individual Arab states, it reconvene only if the participants agree. Israel in effect could veto resumption of the full conference.

Shamir and his advisers, however, do not want U.N. participation in any form. They see the U.N. as being implacably anti-Israel. One official further scents a propaganda trap in the proposal to give Israel a veto over reconvening a multisided conference. The purpose, he fears, is to enable Syria and other states to put all the blame on Israel if the bilateral talks deadlock and Jerusalem does not let the full conference meet again.

The deeper problem is the government's fear that any kind of peace talks will turn into a gang-up by the U.S. and Arab nations to force Israel to give up the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza. Shamir is determined not to yield a square inch. Thus the talk in Jerusalem is less about how to get talks started than how to fend them off. Currently, Israeli officials are longing for the U.S. presidential campaign to start in earnest. Once the campaign is in full swing, they reason, no candidate will risk putting pressure on Israel to yield to Arab demands.

With reporting by Christopher Ogden with Baker and Robert Slater/Jerusalem