Time Out Damascus

With Lebanon's leaders making an effort to reign in the sectarian strife that erupted last month, it seemed as good a time as any to take a quick trip to Syria. The journey is easy enough. The road trip from Beirut to Damascus takes less than three hours by car, despite passing over two mountain ranges and detouring around bridges that have yet to be rebuilt since they were destroyed by the Israeli air force this summer.

Besides writing for TIME, I also train journalists here in Damascus for a local, independent English-language monthly magazine, Syria Today. The arrangement works well for all of us: Syria Today helps get me a journalist visa from the Ministry of Information (without which I would be unable to visit this country) and in return I pass along whatever pearls of wisdom I still remember from my professors at journalism school.

The magazine's title -- Syria Today -- used to make me chuckle, because so much of life in Syria seems not be be taking place today, but in some different historical moment than that inhabited by the rest of us. The country is like a living museum -- one of the world's last centralized Soviet-style economies and one of the last capitals of secular pan-Arabism amid a rising tide of Islamism. The country is also littered with the architectural monuments of the rise and demise of many an empire. Enter the Great Mosque of Damascus, which was once a Roman Temple, then a Byzantine Cathedral, and now one of the holiest sites in the Muslim world, and one instantly loses ones bearings amid the mosaics and the mullahs and the sweep of time.

And yet, the Ba'athist government of President Bashar al-Assad, a one party state in all but name, is struggling to place itself at the center of this particular Middle East moment. Syria is a card-carrying member of what's now being called the Rejectionist Crescent -- the alignment of states and non-state actors from the Islamic Republic of Iran to the radical Shia militias in Iraq and Lebanon to Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank -- who are resisting the American and Israeli project for a so-called New Middle East. Syria stands accused of supporting terrorism against Israel, of a string of assassinations and bombings in Lebanon, and of facilitating jihadi fighters who cross the Syrian border into Iraq.

But one of the big questions in the Middle East today is how happy Syria is with the company it keeps. The US refuses to engage Syria in active diplomacy for help in stabilizing Iraq, restarting the peace-process with Israel, or cleaning up the Lebanese mess. To do so would reward those who support terrorism, say Syria critics in the Bush Administration. But other analysts say that the regime wants most is acknowledgment from the United States that it has a role to play in the region, and that it could be lured away from Iran with a policy of carrots and sticks.

The Syrian government keeps its own counsel. The presidential palace sits on a hill above Damascus and looks down on the city through a dark glass facade that resembles a blank computer screen or an unblinking eye.

I'll return to Beirut next week, in time for Valentine's Day. Not for a date, but for a demonstration: a memorial for the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister who died in a car bombing that some accuse Syria of planning.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus