Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was highly popular in Syria, and a group of Syrian writers and other intellectuals took the almost unprecedented step of issuing a public protest over Syria`s involvement in the war.
Any dissent from government policies has been a distinctly unhealthy activity since President Hafez Assad came to power 21 years ago and established one of the most ruthless regimes in the Middle East.
The intellectuals apparently escaped arrest-and worse-but their protest was a measure of the depth of public feeling.
The resentment has not entirely died down, according to Western diplomats, but it has moderated: Syrians are beginning to realize that the war has paid dividends.
A year ago Syria, which always has aspired to a leadership role in Arab affairs, was isolated and resented by most of its neighbors. Now it has forged an alliance with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and has joined with Egypt in providing the bulk of the troops for a new Arab peacekeeping force in the Persian Gulf region.
It has received about $2.5 billion in assistance from the gulf states and Japan, and its role in the peacekeeping force promises another sizable windfall.
Although serious concerns about Syria`s record on terrorism and human rights continue to trouble the relationship with Washington, Assad finds himself courted by the Bush administration.
President Bush met with him in Geneva in November, and Secretary of State James A. Baker III arrives Wednesday in Damascus for his third visit since the gulf crisis erupted in August.
The Bush administration credits Syria with helping to restrain terrorist groups that might have targeted U.S. and other Western interests during the war with Iraq.
The newly forged relationship with the U.S. provides a balance in Syrian foreign policy that had been lacking.
For years Assad maintained a hostile view of the U.S. and put all his eggs in the Soviet basket. The Soviet Union was his principal arms supplier and closest ally.
As one Western diplomat observed, superpower relations with Syria were a zero-sum game: Any gain for Syria was a Soviet gain, and any gain for Israel was an American gain.
But Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev`s refusal to supply Syria with sophisticated weaponry, and his decision to allow a mass migration of Soviet Jews to Israel, caused Assad to rethink his position and to begin cultivating the West-especially the U.S.
Even before the Iraqi war, this shift began to pay dividends, in the American view.
The U.S. and Syria have consulted closely on implementation of a 1989 agreement among Arab states aimed at ending the Lebanese civil war and restoring normality there.
The plan calls, among other things, for Syria eventually to redeploy its 40,000 troops in Lebanon to the Bekaa Valley with a view to withdrawing them as the Lebanese army regains control over security.
Read: Afghanistan in Gulf War I
The U.S.-Syrian rapprochment is controversial in the U.S.
Many Americans remember Assad as the ``butcher of Hama,`` the leader who laid siege to the city of Hama in 1982 and killed at least 10,000 residents in his bid to wipe out the Muslim Brotherhood that opposed him.
Syria also is suspected of having harbored Palestinian terrorists implicated in planting a bomb that blew up a Pan American World Airways plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, late in 1988.
And Assad`s record on human rights is one of the worst in the Arab world. Hundreds of political prisoners languish in his jails without trial, and torture has been well documented, diplomats say.
U.S. hopes in the relationship rest on the possibility that Washington may be able to persuade Assad to adopt more moderate and humane policies, and to play a more constructive role in the region-particularly in settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute, which is now at the top of Washington`s foreign policy agenda.
German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, on a recent visit to Damascus, suggested Syria might recognize Israel in exchange for a return of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East war.
But Syria firmly rejected that suggestion, and Western diplomats say there is no chance Assad would make a separate peace with Israel.
He is committed, they say, to a comprehensive solution in which Israel exchanges land for peace with the Palestinians.
More