In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [9]
We left the waiting room and ascended the stairs toward Daniel’s office in the embassy’s chancery, the formal offices of the ambassador. A long row of eight-by-ten-inch photos of past US ambassadors to Syria lined the stairwell’s left-hand wall. Along the way, Daniel casually pointed his finger at the photo of ambassador Edward Djerejian. In 1988 President Reagan prepared the groundwork for engaging Syria to help solve the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where fighting raged out of control and US hostages languished in captivity. To carry out this difficult task, he assigned Djerejian, an American of Armenian descent, as ambassador to Damascus with strict orders to gain Hafez al-Assad’s trust.4
When we arrived in Daniel’s office, we stood in front of a yellowed wall-size topographical map of “Greater Syria” that stood to the right of the door. It had been rescued from the US consulate building in Aleppo after a mob torched the building following the 1967 War, abruptly shutting down America’s oldest consulate in the Middle East. Pointing at Syria’s long eastern border with Iraq, Daniel explained that Djerejian’s talks with Assad bore fruit in the autumn of 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Syria sealed its border with Iraq and participated in the US-led alliance to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait the following January. While Daniel didn’t make the link, I remembered that, around the same time, Washington gave its tacit approval for Syrian troops to end Lebanon’s civil war, based on the Ta’if Accord. Washington had subsequently referred to Syrian troops in Lebanon not as an occupation, but as a “presence.”
As Syrian troops took control of Lebanon and US forces withdrew from Kuwait, Washington called for Middle East peace talks to take place in Madrid, Spain. Getting Assad to attend the talks was not easy, however. Secretary of state James Baker traveled to Damascus sixteen times for talks with Assad, finally earning the president’s trust and approval. Direct negotiations between Syria and Israel under American auspices began in 1994 in Washington, DC.
I knew this part of Daniel’s story pretty well, as my first job at the Middle East Times’s Cairo bureau focused on the peace process. The talks made substantial progress, most notably with agreements over security guarantees, water rights, and “normalization” of relations. The major area of division was over the extent of Israel’s withdrawal from the Golan. When Israel captured the plateau in June 1967, Syrian territory began at the northeast shore of the Sea of Galilee. Extensive irrigation projects in Israel and surrounding countries had caused the lake’s water level to recede substantially, however. Israel offered to return the Golan up to the lake’s 1967 waterline, which was now several hundred meters east of the water’s edge. Syria demanded that the border be set at the current waterline. Reports circulated widely that Assad wanted to put his feet in the Sea of Galilee like he did when he was a boy.
The talks ended without agreement after the assassination of the Labour Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995 and the coming to power of the Likud Party’s Benjamin Netanyahu the following year. After further years with little progress in talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Labour returned to power in May 1999, pledging progress on the peace process. Labour leader Ehud Barak sought progress on talks with Syria to offset limited gains in the negotiations with the Palestinians. Direct negotiations between Israel and Syria began in December 1999, leading to a summit in Geneva between Assad and president Bill Clinton in March 2000. In the end, Assad rejected