In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [15]
I do not know whether it was Syria’s new-found cooperation with Washington or my growing appreciation for Damascus’s secular lifestyle, but my research on Syria progressed extremely well from then onward. The Ministry of Information told me that the only “red lines”—issues that we were not allowed to write about, or we risked being banned from the country—in my coverage concerned the president and his family and the pipeline from Iraq to Syria, which the Syrian government insisted it was only “testing.”
Rola made arrangements with “new guard” reformers loyal to the president to write a number of opinion pieces for the report. These reformers included Ayman Abdel Nour, an Assyrian Christian engineer who served as an adviser to the president on finance, and Samir Seifan, a Christian economist trained in East Germany, who served as the Damascene representative of the oil company Petrofac. Both produced well-argued pieces on time.
By rubbing shoulders, I was able to attract some really talented people to the project. Abdul Kader I. Husrieh, a lawyer with the Arthur Andersen accounting office in Damascus, wrote the entire legal and accounting sections of the report himself. Husrieh loved Syria, but he also loved the power of the American education he had received at the American University in Beirut. Of all the Syrians writing for OBG’s first Syrian report, it was Husrieh who believed that only legal and tax reforms would eventually change the way the Assad regime ruled, essentially taming it by necessity.
When it came to finding a politics writer, I asked Ammar Abdulhamid, an SEBC translator and compiler of the organization’s newsletter, to participate. I first met Ammar when he served as my interpreter for an interview with his mother, the renowned Syrian actress Muna Wassef. Sporting a long blond bushy ponytail and baggy clothes, Ammar did not conform to the SEBC’s fashion code. In this instance, however, Ammar failed to write the section and instead subcontracted a friend to do it.
In the month before we went to press, I circulated drafts of each section to various local economists and diplomats as part of the fact-checking process. Daniel Rubinstein at the US embassy liked the draft and appreciated that we were critical of the country while outlining its strengths. He reminded me that Syria’s $534 million debt to the United States should be added into our section on Syria’s external accounts.
When the report was finally launched in February 2002, the Ministry of Information was pleased and passed the report through the country’s strict censorship bureau in one day. This was surprising, given that the report basically told the international community that while good things were going on in Syria, it was hardly a place to invest until much deeper reforms had taken root. Syrian TV covered the book’s launch at the Meridien Hotel as if it were the Academy Awards.
Sitting in the hotel bar with OBG senior staff after the launch, I realized that I had reached a tipping point. At first I thought it was just my desire for the Levant’s more secular lifestyle. But it was more than that. I had stumbled into what seemed to be a great story—the transformation of a brutal dictatorship into a developing country with great potential. I knew I already had access to Syria, but I couldn’t live there due to the country’s visa restrictions for foreign journalists. So I flew to Cairo the next day, said good-bye to my friends, and closed my apartment.13 I moved everything I owned to Syrian-controlled Beirut, where the liberal Western lifestyle was a welcome relief after seven years in an increasingly