In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [103]
The chief of the Syrian delegation was Samir al-Taqi. In the year leading up to the meeting, the center’s previously humble offices along the Mezze highway in Damascus had more than doubled in size. Also on the delegation was Samir Seifan, a former economic adviser to President Assad and one of the country’s “new guard” reformers who were sidelined in the years after Bashar’s rise to power. Rounding out the delegation was Sami Moubayed, a historian at Syria’s Kalamoun University and the founder of the English-language magazine Forward.
Visitors from US think tanks and newspapers packed the hall at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy to hear what they had to say. While a number of Syrians or people closely associated with Syria had visited Washington during the Bush administration’s isolation of the regime, the Syrian participants’ close ties to their government meant that their visit signified not just Track II negotiations, but something closer to “Track 1.5.” In his opening remarks, Dine said that the visit was designed “to find ways to build trust, to find ways to overcome the very bad state of US-Syrian relations.”26
Al-Taqi laid out Syria’s position at the start: the Bush administration’s attempt to isolate the Syrian regime had failed, and its huge effort to destroy the regional state system had given rise to nonstate actors such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Al-Taqi added that the situation was getting “very, very, very risky” and that the region needed a “safety network” involving the United States “to hug it, to prevent it from collapsing.” He added that if the Bush administration’s “confrontational attitude is withdrawn vis-à-vis Syria,” which he added had been “very much fabricated,” then Syria was ready to be a “solution provider.”
During the question-and-answer session, various participants asked questions about what Syria believed that solution might look like. On the question of what Syria would do concerning the IAEA’s recent investigation into its alleged nuclear program, al-Taqi predicted that Syria would fully cooperate, as something about Israel’s bombing of the facility seemed “funny.” Using a metaphor, al-Taqi said that Israel had “killed a man, buried him, and then accused him,” and he compared the allegations to Colin Powell’s testimony before the Security Council on Iraq’s WMD program prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On Syria’s relationship with Hezbollah, al-Taqi refused to say if Syria would cut off arms to Hezbollah, but instead he said that Syria would be “cooperative” if Lebanon found that “it’s time to gradually integrate Hezbollah within the army.” Concerning Iraq, al-Taqi said that the Syrian government no longer saw its biggest danger from Lebanon but from a “federal confessional state in Baghdad, a weak confessional state.” In dealing with all these major issues, however, al-Taqi said, “Unless there is a real perspective towards peace, all the other elements of the conflict will continue to be there. There is no prepayment…. Syria will not close all, any of its opportunities just in case, you never know.”
After al-Taqi finished his talk, Sami Moubayed took the microphone. He described the problem between the United States and Syria as a “difference in perception. If the Bush administration has been saying we are agents of destabilization … if that is correct … that means, by default, we are agents of stability as well.” To prove his point, Moubayed said that Syria had “played a role” in setting free BBC reporter Alan Johnston, who had been kidnapped by Hamas, as well as the fifteen British sailors who had been captured by Iran in 2007. Echoing al-Taqi’s talk, Moubayed said that Syria