The announcement Wednesday by the Future Movement that it is endorsing General Michel Sleiman’s candidacy for president took the country by surprise, but it is an initiative that has been negotiated in secret for more than a week and was not influenced by Washington's apparent decision to reengage with Damascus, according to senior March 14 advisors, MPs and ministers.

In a series of conversations with NOW Lebanon to explain the initiative and its background, the sources said that pushing the Sleiman candidacy is not a mere maneuver but a serious bid to end the presidential vacuum which, they claim, the pro-Syrian opposition wishes to prolong.

The Sleiman initiative comes amid hardening indications that the administration of US President George W. Bush has decided to begin a dialogue with Syria, ending a diplomatic isolation of nearly four years.

This major US policy shift has caused dismay among March 14 members, leaving them convinced that they have been abandoned by the Bush administration.

"Ultimately, we are a small number in the equation," said one senior March14 politician.

The plan behind Sleiman

According to the sources, the decision to negotiate Sleiman as the next head of state began more than a week ago, prior to the postponed parliamentary session on November 23 to elect a new president and before Syria announced it would attend the Annapolis Conference.

"Most of the March 14 MPs have come to the conclusion that Syria's goal is to create a void at the level of the presidency," said one source.

The source said that events since the onset of the Sleiman initiative confirm that fear. He cited Tuesday's deadly gun battle in Tripoli between Future Movement supporters and members of the Islamic Tawhid, and Michel Aoun's threats of street demonstrations and his comments that the government had "stolen the presidency," which the source said was aimed at creating a Christian-Sunni rift.

The "architect of the proposal," according to these sources, is former minister MP Michel al-Murr, who is in the process of breaking away from Aoun's Change and Reform parliamentary bloc. Since last week, Murr, along with several foreign ambassadors, has been mediating the Sleiman deal between March 14 and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri. Berri, apparently, did not believe March 14 was serious about the offer, and was surprised when it became public on Wednesday afternoon.

The question on everyone's lips, of course, is why the March 14 bloc is expressing support for a candidate who is widely seen as being close to Hezbollah and Syria. Indeed, he is possibly the opposition's favorite – if undeclared – candidate.

According to the March 14 sources, however, Sleiman's actions since the assassination of Rafik Hariri have "shown he can keep a positive neutrality."

Examples offered by the sources include the army's even-handed treatment of protestors during the "independence intifada" demonstrations following Hariri's murder, Sleiman's instant readiness to fulfill the government's order to deploy 15,000 troops to South Lebanon after the July 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, and his decision to break the taboo of assaulting a Palestinian refugee camp in the battle against Fatah al-Islam this summer, a move that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had previously described as a "red line."

"All this indicates that he is not a candidate for Nasrallah and the Syrians," one March 14 politician said.

Furthermore, if Sleiman becomes president, his allies will fill a number of seats in the next government along with ministers drawn from March 14 and the opposition. The Sleiman seats, according to this scenario, will effectively hold the balance of power within the cabinet, denying the opposition a veto-wielding share. That does not mean that March 14 will always get its way in the government, the sources acknowledged, but it would break the paralysis to which the Siniora government was prone prior to the walkout in November last year by six ministers, including all five Shia.

The opposition has yet to respond clearly to the Sleiman initiative, although Aoun has said he is not against the army commander becoming president. For March 14, the initiative, whether it succeeds or not, has finessed Aoun's threat of launching widespread street demonstrations against the government.

"The main trump is that the Syrians were about to use Aoun's popular uprising against the Siniora government, saying that the Sunnis have taken the presidential prerogative. This is no longer valid," said a senior Future Movement source.

Sold out by the States?

Since the Sleiman proposal was made public, the assumption among many analysts is that it is a result of a thaw in relations between the US and Syria due to Damascus' attendance at the Annapolis Conference. However, senior March 14 politicians and ministers insist that the initiative is independent of a possible US-Syrian dialogue. Instead, they assert that Washington has "sold out" its Lebanese allies to revive its relationship with Damascus.

Walid Jumblatt's recent U-turn over the presidency and Hezbollah's arms is a reflection, the sources said, of March 14's belief that the US "has flushed us down the drain."

"The main message the Americans are sending is that Syria can have a veto on every major decision in Lebanon. They [the Syrians] achieved that by killing us without any consequences," said one March 14 source.

Although the US move toward Syria is in its early stages, the principle motivation appears to be to lull Damascus away from Iran, thus strengthening the alliance of moderate Arab states and weakening Tehran's influence in the Arab world through its allies, Hezbollah and Hamas. The policy shift signals that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has won the White House power struggle with Vice President Dick Cheney's office and now has a firm grasp over US Mideast policy.

That has left a palpable bitterness among March 14 politicians, who complain about US "naiveté" in engaging with Syria, arguing that Damascus will not break its "partnership" with Tehran.

"The Americans will always do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives," said one senior March 14 MP, quoting Winston Churchill.