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of Bashar Assad, there is no change in the position of his country regarding a possible peace process with Israel.” The op-ed added that “thanks to the speaker’s freelancing, Mr. Assad was getting mixed messages from the United States…. Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off UN charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister [Rafik Hariri].” Finally, the Washington Post accused Pelosi of “attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush’s military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.”12

However, it wasn’t just Democrats who sought engagement with Syria. The Iraq Study Group had recommended engaging Syria and Iran in order to stabilize Iraq. While the Bush administration was clearly reticent to publicly embrace Syria as Pelosi had, the White House decided to honor the ISG’s recommendations by engaging Syria solely on the issue of Iraq. Secretary of State Rice broke the Bush administration’s two-year isolation policy on May 4, 2007, when she met Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moallem on the sidelines of a fifty-nation summit in Sharm el-Sheikh dedicated to Iraqi reconstruction. The details of the meeting have not been made public, but the main American issue concerned the movement of foreign fighters into Iraq from Syria. According to interviews with US diplomats, Moallem’s main request concerned securing parts to repair Syria’s aging fleet of Boeing and Airbus commercial aircraft that had been blocked by US sanctions.13

This marked the first of many signals from the Assad regime that US sanctions were having a deeper impact than first thought. Both diplomats described the meeting as positive, with Rice calling the discussion “professional” and “businesslike,” and Moallem “frank” and “constructive.” Rice later told CNN, “We have no desire to have bad relations with Syria. Of course, we want to have better relations with Syria.”14 Whatever was agreed, a few days later US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell told reporters that Syria had acted recently against the flow of foreign fighters.15 What that actually meant was anyone’s guess.

As American diplomats waited to see what Syria might do regarding Iraq, the regime of Bashar al-Assad consolidated its authoritarian grip on power at home. On April 25, Anwar al-Bunni—the Syrian civil-society activist who was arrested a mere thirty minutes after the UN Security Council approved Resolution 1680 on demarcating the Lebanese border—was sentenced to five years on charges of “spreading false information.”

Activists saw this as a signal to Europe, as al-Bunni had tried to open a civil-society-awareness center with EU funding, only to see the center shut down a few days after its public opening (which had been attended by the EU’s representative to Syria). On May 11, 2007, Kamal Labwani—a civil-society activist and dissident who had been arrested on November 8, 2005, upon his arrival at Damascus’s international airport—was sentenced to twelve years’ hard labor. More than anyone, Labwani was associated with the Bush administration’s plans to topple the Syrian regime because of his meeting with officials from the White House the day after the announcement of the first Mehlis report into the murder of Rafik Hariri.

Finally, on May 13, the regime sentenced perhaps the country’s most prominent dissident and architect of the Damascus Declaration, Michel Kilo, to three years in prison on charges of “spreading false news, weakening national feeling, and inciting sectarian sentiments.”16 For years, Kilo had been tolerated by the Assad regime because he was a Christian from Latakia, the capital of the Alawite-dominated coast. His connections, combined with his insights on the regime’s problems and Syrian civil society, had made him a key resource for most foreign diplomats.

The sentences