In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [3]
In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria is organized into two parts. In part 1, I use my personal story in Syria to talk about the country itself, its relations with the United States and the West, and its economic and social problems. I take a step back in part 2 and tell the story of the confrontation between the United States and Syria as it appeared from my desk at Syria Today. In this section, I describe in detail Assad’s defiant response to the allegations of his regime’s involvement in Hariri’s murder; his outreach to the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, and Sunni Muslims and their institutions in Syria; and his crackdown on the country’s domestic opposition. I also describe the Assad regime’s skillful political use of sectarian chaos in US-occupied Iraq, the civilian deaths of the 2006 Lebanon War, and the mysterious February 2008 assassination in Damascus of Hezbollah operative Imad Mughniyeh—perhaps the world’s most-wanted terrorist prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
In the epilogue, I enter into the Washington policy debate over Syria. I describe the “expectations gap” between the kind of engagement Syria sought and ultimately received from the United States following the passing of the presidential baton from Bush to Obama, the advent of the Arab Spring, and the approach that I believe would be most effective in the future.
PART I
1
THE ARAB WORLD’S TWILIGHT ZONE
I had no idea where to start. That morning in July 2001, Oxford Business Group (OBG), at that time a publishing company start-up, had sent me from my base in Cairo to Damascus to carry out “the most comprehensive study of Syria ever compiled.” Getting projects of that magnitude off the ground in an Arab country was always hard, but after eight years of study and journalism in the Middle East, I understood this better than most. Many Arab countries had local independent English-language publications of reasonable quality that were softly critical of the state and society. So it was normally just a matter of taking the editor out to lunch or buying a few drinks and asking for a few names of people with whom to speak. The ball would then soon start rolling, and six to eight months later, we would somehow manage to publish our report.
This wasn’t going to work in Syria, however. The state’s virtual monopoly on media ownership, as well as its tight control of access by foreign journalists, meant that no such publication existed. A colleague from OBG gave me the number of Leila Hourani—a young Syrian woman with whom he had once worked, and who, he said, knew her way around. I had given her a call that morning, and, to my surprise, she agreed to meet me for lunch at Gemini, an upmarket restaurant in Damascus’s Abou Roumaneh district.
Leila turned the head of every man as she entered the restaurant’s front door. Her doll-like face, curly brown hair in the bouffant style, form-fitting clothes, and five-inch heels made it easy to understand why many Arabs regarded Syrian women as the region’s most beautiful. What I learned that lazy afternoon in Damascus, however, was that Leila’s best quality was her candor, a rare attribute to be found under a dictatorship where most people are afraid to speak their mind.
Leila got right down to business and gave me a summary of the biggest unfolding story of the year: President Bashar al-Assad’s promise to reform Syria. The thirty-four-year-old ophthalmologist had taken the reigns of control in Syria exactly one year ago that day