In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [1]
After I left Syria, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy provided me with a platform in Washington to write about the country. Special thanks go to Robert Satloff, Patrick Clawson, David Makovsky, David Schenker, Simon Henderson, Matt Levitt, Dina Guirguis, Michael Jacobson, Michael Singh, Mike Eisenstadt, Steve Borko, and Larisa Baste, whose input on my work has helped me expand from journalism into policy research. Thanks also go to Kathy Gockel and the Stanley Foundation, who first helped get my ideas into Washington policy circles, and Foreign Policy’s David Kenner.
My biggest appreciation goes to those who took the time to read and comment on the book’s draft. They include Andrew Abell, Syria desk officer, US Department of State; Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States and former representative in peace talks with Syria; and Levant experts Amr al-Azm, Jon Alterman, Nicholas Blanford, Steven Heydemann, and David Schenker. I would also like to thank my friends in government who have shared their thoughts with me about the Levant, including the State Department’s Ruth Citrin and Matt Irwin and the National Security Council’s director for Lebanon and Syria, Hagar Hajjar. Thanks also go to Susan Betz and Kelly Wilson of Lawrence Hill Books, who edited the manuscript, and Mary Kravenas and Meaghan Miller, who aided me in the book’s promotion. Last but not least, I thank my fantastic research assistant, Andrew Engel, and my intern, Maya Gebeily. Together their comments and hard work made this a much better book.
INTRODUCTION
I only planned to work in Damascus for a few months and engage an Arab country I didn’t know. Instead, I stayed seven years and got an unexpected front-row seat to a fight.
This book is a firsthand account of the confrontation between the administration of US president George W. Bush and the regime of Syrian president Bashar al Assad. The Bush administration called its Syria policy “isolation,” while the Assad regime portrayed it as an American plot to overthrow Syria’s leadership and remake the Middle East in America’s image.
No attempt will be made in this book to argue either way, as details of decision makers’ plans and intentions have yet to emerge. (Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair writes in his book, A Journey: My Political Life, that Bush and former vice president Dick Cheney had machinations to remake the Middle East, using “hard power” to take down the regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. While certain members of the Bush administration may have advocated using military force against Syria, I have been unable to find any formal US government plans to bring down the Assad regime.) Nevertheless, much of this story is part of the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq—America’s largest-ever military adventure in the Middle East.
I saw the conflict between Washington and Damascus—which I generally refer to as a “cold war”—from an unusual and privileged vantage point. I lived and worked in Damascus between 2001 and 2008, served as a media adviser for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) under the patronage of President Assad’s wife, Asma, and had the honor to cofound Syria’s first—and still best—English-language magazine, Syria Today. By virtue of my work, I had a rare journalist multiple-entry visa that allowed me to travel back and forth to Lebanon—often on a weekly basis—to cover the dramatic events leading up to and following the February 2005 murder of the late Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri by car bomb in Beirut. I was able to travel freely in and out of Syria