DAMASCUS: By meeting UN demands to pull out all its troops from Lebanon, Syria hopes to patch up its troubled relations with the West but the inglorious end to a costly three-decade-long deployment risks delivering a serious blow to the regime’s authority, analysts say.

“A humbling exit that could have been so different,” was how one dissident academic, political scientist Michel Kilo, described the withdrawal due to be completed on Tuesday.

He recalled how Syria had repeatedly declined to withdraw its troops when it had the opportunity to do so of its own free will.

By failing to withdraw after Israel’s 2000 pullout from the south under fire from the Syrian-backed Hezbollah militia, the regime had missed the chance of a hero’s send-off.

Now the government needed to accept the “sea change” in the politics of its smaller neighbour and undertake not just a troop withdrawal but a “complete disengagement” from Lebanon, said Kilo.

A “new vision” of relations was needed for the two countries, which have never exchanged embassies amid reluctance in Damascus to entirely abandon the claim of some nationalists to a Greater Syria.

The 1950s policy of “economic blockade” and the “military containment” of the past three decades had both been found wanting, he said.

To secure the hoped for improvement in its international standing, the regime needed to make its relations with the European Union and the United States its “top priority” and “make all efforts necessary”.

European leaders have said they will only go ahead with a planned association agreement with Syria on the model of others signed with Mediterranean littoral states, if the government allows free and fair elections to be held in Lebanon by the end of May.

Syria does finally appear to be relaxing its long grip on Lebanese affairs.

Not only have the long feared Syrian intelligence services closed their Beirut offices, but the Lebanese security apparatus they set up in their own image also appears to be crumbling.

Lebanese former prime minister Salim Hoss, a longtime Syrian ally, said Damascus had only itself to blame for meddling so intensely in its neighbour’s affairs in recent years.—AFP