In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [79]
While Syrians were now free to resist Israel, Assad, like Nasser, was clear that political reform would remain on the back burner until the enemy was defeated and dignity restored. “We have made steps [toward greater freedoms], and we have a vision,” Assad said. “But we don’t want freedoms that are exploited from the outside, which is happening…. [We do not want to] enter into the framework of chaos or dependency and cheat our domestic situation. Loyalty to the country means not accepting foreign interference from any embassy…. Work continues on a new parties law, but we must have more room to accomplish it under the circumstances.”
After two weeks of surveying Israel’s destruction in Lebanon, I took the Damascus Road over the Lebanon mountains and across the Bekaa Valley back to Syria’s Al-Jdeida border crossing. A Syrian border guard whom I knew smiled when he took my passport, sat down at his computer terminal, and typed in my name and passport number. I had made the crossing hundreds of times, so stamping in and out was a formality.
He suddenly frowned and repeatedly hit a key on the keyboard, like he was scrolling down my file. Then he stood up, threw back his shoulders, and thrust my passport back at me. “You are forbidden from entry,” he said. When I tried to ask him what the computer said or what the problem was, he just brushed me aside with his hand.
“You will never get back into Syria.”
While Leila tried to sort out what was behind my ban and figure out how to get me back in the country (which eventually did happen), events in Washington and Beirut did not bode well for the Bush administration’s Syria policy. With sectarian violence spiraling in Iraq throughout 2006 and no end to the war in sight, Republicans and Democrats began openly questioning President Bush’s Iraq policy. The Iraq Study Group (ISG)—a bipartisan commission established in March 2006 to assess the situation in Iraq—had spent the better part of the year evaluating the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, with the goal of proposing a way out of the chaos. Its co-chairs, former secretary of state James Baker and former US representative Lee H. Hamilton, promised that, in order to keep the report nonpartisan, its findings would not be released until after the US general election on November 4.
In reaction to the Iraq chaos as well as the summer war in Lebanon, Americans voted en masse for Democratic Party candidates, wresting the House of Representatives and the Senate away from Republican control. The following day, President Bush announced the resignation of secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. In the days that followed, the international media reported that the ISG report would recommend engaging Syria and Iran over Iraq and the Middle East. Baker began appearing on national television openly advocating “hard-nosed” engagement with Damascus, based on his experience negotiating with Hafez al-Assad to get Syria to attend the 1991 peace conference in Madrid.
A few days later, on November 11, 2006, one day before a key vote in the Lebanese cabinet concerning the establishment of an international tribunal into the assassination of Rafik Hariri, Shiite ministers, led by Hezbollah, plus a Christian ally, walked out of the cabinet. While Lebanese premier Fouad Siniora technically had enough ministers to continue to hold cabinet sessions, the Hezbollah-led pullout from the cabinet left it with no representatives from the country’s Shiite community, essentially breaking the long-standing practice of communal shared participation in