Syria, the US and Iran

Towards the middle of February, President Obama moved to repair relations with Syria after five years of interruption. He announced his decision to appoint Robert Ford as US ambassador to Syria and sent US Undersecretary of State, William Burns, to Damascus. There the diplomat held talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on several security issues in the region. The American move has been perceived as being part of a large diplomatic push to isolate Syria’s ally, Iran. If that was the intended purpose, it did not seem to obtain the expected results as just one week after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in Damascus. There he had meetings with al-Assad in which they both said that the relations between the two countries were “deeply rooted”. The Syrian president went further by defending the “right of Iran” to go on with his civil nuclear program, and in a defiant way he said they hoped others would not give them advice or lessons about their region or history because “we know more than they do.” This appear to be directed to the US, after the recent comments of the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Damascus should keep a distance from its ‘deeply troubling” relationship with Tehran.