In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [83]
On the surface, Bilal looked like any wealthy Westernized Arab, the cuffs of his fitted shirt flaring ever so slightly out of the sleeves of his expensive Italian suit. However, as he spoke, Bilal betrayed a deep distain for the West. He told the audience that the West had sat on their hands as Israel bombed Lebanon, killing untold numbers of civilian Lebanese. As the journalists struggled to jot down Bilal’s comments, he seemed to really get into his stride, his chest puffed out proudly like a rooster calling his mate. “You know, an Arab diplomat once asked me while I served in Paris, ‘Hey, how can a guy like you not like the United States?’;” Bilal said, pausing to add a bit of suspense. “Do you know what I told him? ‘I can’t name one good thing about the United States!’”
Suddenly the journalists stopped writing and looked over to the corner table where Andrew and I sat. Akhtari looked as well, a sorry look spreading across his face as he could tell from my grimace that I understood the ambassador’s words. My friend Ibrahim Hamidi, Al Hayat’s correspondent in Damascus, leaned over and said, “I don’t think he knows you are here.”
After a few more bombastic lines, Bilal concluded his talk, shook Akhtari’s hand, and exited the room. As I gathered my things, I thought how ironic it was that Bilal—a man who dressed like a Westerner, spoke several foreign languages, and had lived in a number of European countries—used vitriolic language that most Americans would more readily expect from an Iranian official. The Iranian ambassador, however, spoke carefully and seemed a person from a culture and country that was confident enough in itself to allow the faculty of reason to flourish. As I shook Akhtari’s hand good-bye, I saw in his eye that he was the kind of person who thought things through. While his clothes looked nothing like mine, he seemed a reasonable diplomat, and his self-assurance reminded me of many American officials I had met over the years.
Such ceremonies demonstrated that Syrian-Iranian ties were moving from strength to strength, but trying to assess to what degree Iranian influence was spreading in Syria was difficult. Throughout the spring, there were increasing reports of conversions of Syrian Sunnis to Shiite Islam—an issue particularly sensitive to Syria’s majority Sunni population and Washington’s Sunni allies. I had first come across the rumors on a trip the previous September to the Jazeera—the section of eastern Syria between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. A local notable there told me in a hushed voice over dinner that Iranian Shiite clerics were converting poor Sunnis in the dry riverbeds of eastern Syria to Shiite Islam in return for money or “a few bags of macaroni.”4
When I started asking around about Iranian-sponsored Shiitization upon my return to Damascus, I immediately ran into some kind of imaginary barrier and a great deal of obfuscation. First, Othaina took me to see Syrian parliamentarian Mohammed Habash, the head of Damascus’s Islamic Studies Center whom I had interviewed the previous year on Islam in Syria. Habash said that talk of conversions was “Wahhabi propaganda”—a reference to the conservative version of Sunni Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival and America’s chief ally. A little later in the interview, however, Habash added that Shiitization was a “phenomena, especially