Introduction

Is the Middle East haunted by the spectre of a dark alliance between the Lion and the Turban? Syria and Iran may indeed, as the above quotation from Walid Phares suggests, be the foremost remaining centres of power challenging the American-sponsored ‘New World Order’ in the Middle East. The two states are perhaps the chief self-proclaimed standard bearers of the contemporary world’s remaining revisionist ideologies, pan-Arabism and pan-Islam. They are arguably the two remaining states in the region (after the defeat of Iraq) which have been most insistent on maintaining their autonomy and on pursuing agendas not necessarily to the liking of the dominant Western world powers. Their alliance, maintained for a decade and a half, forms an axis balancing pro-Western regimes in the region. Certainly, the US government, obsessed with the supposed threat from Iran, appears to believe that breaking the alliance through a Syrian-Israeli peace is a key to isolating radical forces in the Middle East (Speech of Anthony Lake, US National Security Advisor in MEM 19 May 1994). But are the foreign policies of Syria and Iran, and their alliance, best interpreted as revisionist or-as the Hizbollah broadcast would have it-as attempts to defend their autonomy against intensive Western penetration of the

Middle East? The alliance, after all, originated in mutual aid that Syria and Iran gave each other against aggression-the Iraqi invasion of Iran and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.