In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [104]
When the group returned to Damascus, they brought with them a notable sense of triumphalism. The US-Syria Working Group had traveled to Houston, Texas, where they were hosted by Edward P. Djerejian, head of the James L. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University and the former ambassador to Syria who had helped build the last period of “constructive engagement” during the 1990s. Djerejian told his visitors an anecdote about his discussion with the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin about the highlight of his career: his appointment as US ambassador to Syria. Rabin wished Djerejian luck and warned him to be careful of “loopholes” in what the United States was offering Syria, as “Hafez al-Assad will drive a truck through it.”
Picking up on Djerejian’s theme, Moubayed penned an op-ed entitled “Driving Trucks Through US Loopholes,” which outlined how Bashar had “driven a truck” through US policy in the Middle East. On Iraq, Moubayed said that the United States had failed to bring security to Iraq and that Syria could offer to help the United States with exiled Iraqi Baathists in Syria “through dialogue, or aggressively, by threatening … to return many busloads of Iraqis to [prime minister Nouri] al-Maliki’s Iraq.”
Concerning Iran, Moubayed said that US isolation had driven Damascus into the arms of Tehran but that the United States could now capitalize on that by using Syria as a broker with Tehran to convince it to stop enriching uranium. On peace with Israel, Moubayed said that isolation hadn’t worked and that a peace accord between Syria and Israel would be a “complete strategic package that would redefine the balance of power” in the region.
Echoing al-Taqi’s comments in Washington, Moubayed said Syria would not break its ties with Hamas and Hezbollah but would instead play the role of “back-channel to people like Hamas’ exiled leader Khaled Meshaal and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.” Moubayed also warned Israel not to drag its feet, as “non-state players may work hard at changing the mood in either Israel or Syria to drown the peace treaty…. The Syrians aren’t suffering if peace is not signed; it is Israel that suffers.”
On Lebanon, Moubayed declared complete victory, calling the Doha Accord ending the standoff “tailor-made for the Syrians,” as they had got all they were asking for and “pro-Syrian figures were brought back to government and Michel Suleiman, a pro-Syrian general, was made president.”
Concluding his story, Moubayed used a quote from the comment section of Syria Comment. A Syrian who lived abroad had recently returned to Damascus and wrote about what he saw: “I found people going about their daily lives as they did before, but this time with a strong sense of Syrian pride of standing together and surviving the storm that was hatched in the dark alleys of the White House. The feeling was that the whole world conspired against them and the Syrians finally won.”28
EPILOGUE
THE EXPECTATIONS GAP AND THE ADVENT OF THE ARAB SPRING
As the sun prepared to set on October 26, 2008, over the farms of Al-Sukkariya, a Syrian enclave five miles west of the Iraqi frontier city of Qaim, three US helicopters hovered over a group of buildings. According to reports by Syria’s state news agency, a number of US troops descended “from helicopters and attacked a civilian building under construction and opened fire on workers inside—including the wife of the building guard—leading to [the deaths] of eight civilians…. The helicopters then left Syrian territory towards Iraqi territory.”1 One witness in the area, who was somehow able to log onto the BBC website despite the regime’s close monitoring of Internet traffic in the country, said that those killed were from the al-Mashada