CHARITABLE SOULS should spare a thought over the new year for Bob Tuttle, the hapless American Ambassador to the Court of St James’s. For a second week, he has had to retract his own pronouncements. First, he asserted that US forces in Iraq had not used white phosphorous grenades in Iraq, only for the Pentagon to contradict him.

Next, he declared that the US had never sent any terrorism suspects to Syria as part of its policy of “extraordinary rendition” — only for the embassy to issue a clarification, effectively admitting that at least one individual had been dispatched there.

True, Mr Tuttle, a multimillionaire car dealer, has not so far enjoyed dramatic success in promoting the Bush Administration’s policy. But as Alexander Haig used to say, we need to “context that”. Mr Tuttle is certainly no worse than large numbers of his forerunners.

William Farish, his horse-breeding predecessor, was invisible. Neither was the relatively articulate and sophisticated Philip Lader, President Clinton’s second ambassador, great shakes either when it came to public diplomacy. Then there are the career State Department “professionals” under Mr Tuttle. The trouble with too many of them is that they do not conceive their role as aggressively promoting the policy of any administration. Privately, precious few of this disproportionately liberal cadre have much good to say about the Bush agenda.

Certainly, there are many who do sterling work in the embassy’s specialist services, such as Customs. But when it comes to political warfare, American diplomats couldn’t organise panic on a doomed submarine. If Condoleezza Rice closed down that ugly whale of a building in Grosvenor Square, she would save American taxpayers a cartload of money — and Uncle Sam’s image would be little worse.

But there is a further extenuating circumstance for Mr Tuttle’s confusion. Isn’t Syria meant to be one of the leading sponsors of terrorism in Iraq — at least according to the State Department’s annual terrorism report? Well, times change. Back in 2001-02, wide swaths of the Administration still entertained fond hopes that the “secular” Baathist regime in Syria might become an ally in the war on the fundamentalists of al-Qaeda. Had it not brutally crushed the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama in 1982?

All that, of course, was before President Bashar Assad started to funnel jihadis through Syria and into Iraq to kill US servicemen — not to mention the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, that united the international community in condemnation of Damascus.

Administration sources indicate that “renditions” to Syria ended before Saddam Hussein was overthrown in 2003. But such twists and turns go much deeper than that. Unintentionally, Mr Tuttle has shed renewed light upon the enduring, unresolved contradictions in US grand strategy towards the region: whom has America really been at war with since 9/11?

Much of the career bureaucracy at the State Department and the CIA held that al-Qaeda was an autonomous entity, largely independent from control of any state. If so, the Administration would have enjoyed a relatively free hand to work with a broad range of partners when it suited mutual interests to do so — Syria, Libya, and even Iran.

These Washington traditionalists were happy enough to work with the grain of the existing regional order — partly because, in cases such as Syria, they believed in Hilaire Belloc’s admonition to “. . . keep a-hold of Nurse/ For fear of finding something worse”. By this they meant a Muslim Brotherhood takeover after premature regime collapse.

The loudest dissenters from this orthodoxy were the Administration neoconservatives. They charged that al-Qaeda could not flourish without substantial state sponsorship; moreover, they believed that the wretchedness of the Arab status quo, so impervious to the democratic and free market revolution across the world, resulted in the events of 9/11.

President Bush broadly accepted the neocons’ analysis and duly invaded Iraq. He also accepted that the old doctrine of “he may be a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch” was unviable. But when the costs of Iraq rose steeply, he turned back towards more traditional factions to “refine” the timing and implementation of his democratic revolution.

These contradictory impulses have never been resolved in the case of Syria. Has the Administration concluded that the regime is unreformable and must be replaced? Or does it just want it to “moderate” its behaviour — above all in Iraq and Lebanon? And if Syria ever moderated, would America abandon the emerging Syrian democracy movement — much as it did to Libyan dissidents when Muammar Gaddafi came in from the cold in 2003 and agreed to destroy his WMD?

Anyhow, President Assad now reckons that he stood up to the world and survived. Far from sweeping way his regime, the report of the UN special investigator into the Hariri murder proved a damp squib: there is no real threat of sanctions and no international tribunal.

President Assad has taken the measure of the inconsistencies in American policy and exploited them ruthlessly. Still, Mr Tuttle can’t be blamed for not getting it right when he has to explain a “strategy” that would have baffled even such antecedents as Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.

Dean Godson is research director of Policy Exchange

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