In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [73]
President Bush thought otherwise. On July 17, as Putin openly teased Bush about Washington’s “democracy agenda” at that week’s G8 Summit in Moscow, a microphone that was inadvertently left on recorded a muffled and candid conversation between Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair that would shed light on Washington’s idea of how to end the crisis. “What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit,” Bush blurted out to Blair over the lunch table.1 The question was how.
As journalists in the West transcribed the candid Bush-Blair lunch exchange, the US embassy in Damascus held a leaving party for deputy chief of mission Stephen Seche, the de facto ambassador to Syria after Margaret Scobey was withdrawn following Hariri’s murder. When I arrived at the US ambassador’s residence—the recent remodeling of which was a bit ironic, given the historically low relations between Damascus and Washington—Seche greeted me at the garden’s entrance along with Bill Roebuck, the embassy’s political officer. After about five minutes of discussion, arms folded, looking down at the ground, I said how, despite their hard-line rhetoric, I thought that I heard some conciliatory gestures in Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s TV address as well as in Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s hard-line speech from earlier in the day. Perhaps the situation would calm down soon, I added.
“Are you kidding?” one of the diplomats said. “We wrote that hard-line speech!” And with that, he turned away to greet the garden’s next visitor. Seche’s message toed the diplomatic line on US support for Israel—but there was something about the way he spoke that told me that something big was up and that he wasn’t totally happy about it.
That “something” turned out to be the proxy war in Lebanon between Israel and its regional nemesis, the nuclear-hungry Islamic Republic of Iran. From the first days of the 2006 Lebanon War, stories reported how Israeli generals had, before the war, briefed US officials about a military response to an expected Hezbollah attempt to capture an Israeli soldier. These expectations were based on the fact that Hezbollah had attempted to capture two Israeli soldiers the previous January. Hamas, the Islamic resistance organization with a parliamentary majority in the Palestinian Authority, did successfully capture Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June, leading to an Israeli military rescue attempt.
So when Hezbollah used a tunnel under the “blue line”—the ceasefire line of 1949 that demarcates the southern border of Lebanon—to kill four Israeli soldiers and abduct two others on July 12, it was no surprise that Israel struck back with a massive military response.
What was unexpected, however, was Hezbollah’s ability to fight back. A week after the beginning of the bombardment, which included strikes on civilian targets that Israel claimed Hezbollah was using as “human shields,” diplomats attending the garden party were expressing surprise that Hezbollah continued to fire hundreds of rockets into northern Israel every day. Syrians seemed surprised as well, but pleasantly so. Day by day, more Hezbollah flags appeared across the Syrian capital, and young people lined up at shops to buy yellow Nasrallah T-shirts. Homemade decals showing busts of Assad, Nasrallah, and Ahmadinejad arranged together suddenly appeared on professionally printed posters in shop windows.