Damascus – Presidents, important US senators, senior officials from the Arab League – lately it seems everyone is courting Syria.

In recent months Damascus has been the centre of a flurry of international diplomatic activity.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited. So did a delegation of European Union officials and foreign ministers. Arab League chief Amr Mussa, who hails from Egypt, a country with increasingly fraught relations with Syria, seeks Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s counsel.

But al-Assad’s separate meetings with US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry and a second congressional delegation in Damascus on Saturday were what really made headlines.

Some Arab observers are wondering if Syria really can be pried from its uneasy alliance with Iran, as some in Washington hope, or how serious US President Barack Obama is about renewing ties with Arab world.

Al-Assad told Kerry that “dialogue is the only way” to solve problems and that “the policy of dictation has proven useless,” Syria’s SANA news agency reported on Saturday.

Kerry, on the other hand, told reporters that “unlike the Bush administration … we believe you have to engage in a discussion.”

Fine words, some Arab observers say, but will they translate into a real rapprochement?

Emad Gad, a Middle East expert at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that both sides “are merely testing the waters to see what the other side could offer.”

Many thorny issues remain between the two countries.

The United States accuses Syria of supporting terrorism by providing a safe haven for such organizations as the Islamist Palestinian Hamas movement and Islamic Jihad. The US objects to Syria’s strategic partnership with Iran and the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement. US officials remain suspicious of Syria’s nuclear programme, and the US State Department routinely blasts Syria over its human rights record.

“Syria will not change its alliances in the region for the sake of mere promises,” Gad told dpa. “They will wait to hear specific and concrete offers to begin weighing a compromise.”

Among the key offers Syria would want to hear is active US support for the return of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to Syrian control. It also wants economic and political incentives, including an end to unilateral US economic sanctions imposed in 2004.

The problem is that even if the US were willing to make concessions on these scores, it is not the only player in the region.

“With the Israeli government leaning further to the right as Benjamin Netanyahu takes power, peace talks will become even more difficult than before. Syria is thus skeptical that the US can have a great influence in peace talks,” he said.

And al-Assad has said that Syria will not stop supporting groups the US lists as terrorist organizations.

In an exclusive interview with Hezbollah-run al-Manar television in August, al-Assad said, “We do not see any interest in abandoning the resistance. Our position toward resistance against any occupation in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine is firm and has not changed.”

Lebanese analyst Hussein Abdel-Hussein, however, believes that the new US administration would be wrong to abandon the previous administration’s policy of pressuring Syria through isolating it.

“US lawmakers should realize that if America’s isolation of Syria failed, a successful policy does not entail a reversal of whatever (former) president (George W) Bush did,” Abdel-Hussein told dpa.

Rather, he said, al-Assad manipulates democracies with his foreign policy by “playing by words.”

According to Abdel-Hussein, al-Assad gave “false impressions that he had opened an embassy in Beirut, to the joy of the amateurish French diplomatic corps.”

“Yet the embassy remains without an ambassador, a step which Assad hopes he can trade for something new, maybe this time with the Americans,” the analyst concluded.

In an interview published recently in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, al-Assad acknowledged that Syria and the US were “still in the period of gestures and signals.”

Yet the “gestures and signals” do suggest the two countries are moving closer together.

Al-Assad told the paper that he expected the US to send a full- fledged ambassador to Damascus soon, and he said that there was “no substitute” for Washington as “the main arbiter” in the Middle East peace process.

Bush withdrew his ambassador to Syria after Damascus was accused of complicity in a massive bomb in Beirut that killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005.

“An ambassador is important … Sending these delegations is important. This number of congressmen coming to Syria is a good gesture. It shows that this (US) administration wants to see dialogue with Syria,” al-Assad said. (dpa)