In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [98]
When Lahoud’s term ended on November 23, he left the powers of the Lebanese presidency in the hands of the Suleiman-commanded Lebanese Army. After a number of attempts to reach a negotiated settlement, Sarkozy broke off talks with Damascus at the end of December.
Those advocating the “wedge theory”—engaging Syria and promoting peace with Israel to cut Syria off from Iran and Hezbollah—saw Mughniyeh’s assassination and its aftermath as a sign that Syria was preparing to back away from Iran. Back in November, the United States had invited Syria to attend the Annapolis peace conference, and Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad, attended the meeting. Since then, however, there seemed to have been few signs that Syria was preparing to bury the hatchet with its old foe, Israel.
Information on Syria quickly became a source of great contention. At an event hosted at Washington’s Henry L. Stimson Center on April 23, 2008, I delivered a presentation opposite Daniel Levy, an advocate for peace negotiations between Israel and Syria, and Emile El-Hokayem, who put forward a tough line on Damascus. My presentation outlined recent events that showed Damascus was pushing back on Iranian influence in Syria. When it came to US policy, however, I said that US sanctions were having mixed effects. On the one hand, more US consumer goods, such as iPhones, software, and computers, were available from reexporters in Dubai and Lebanon, significantly watering down the effect of the US trade ban on Damascus. On the other, Washington’s recent move to sanction President Assad’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf, for “regime corruption” had made significant waves in Damascus, especially among the country’s business elite.7
The next day, a version of my comments made it into the pages of the Kuwaiti Arabic daily Al Rai. While covering my comments on Syria’s relationship with Iran was fine, the paper quoted me on the United States’s sanctioning of Assad’s cousin—it was “very smart, as the regime relies on him a lot”—which was going to get me in trouble. Making matters worse, I didn’t even remember saying those words.
Later that same afternoon, I attended a hearing on Capitol Hill for the Syrian opposition in exile. As I walked up to the hearing room, an Arabic television channel was interviewing Ammar Abdulhamid, my former colleague from MAWRED who had moved to Washington and headed the MEPI-funded Tharwa project. He had recently met President Bush at the White House as part of a delegation from the Syrian opposition. His wife, Khawla Yusuf, ran up to me, pointed her finger in my face, and shouted, “You! You! Why did you say you bought an iPhone in Damascus?” When I answered that I had and it was simply the truth, she shouted, “It doesn’t matter! Everyone is talking about it!” It seemed that no matter what I said about Syria, I was taking flak from both the regime and its opponents.
Other news on Syria that day would eclipse the conference, however. The CIA had briefed Congress on the site that Israel bombed in eastern Syria the previous September. A six-minute video showed that the site, located near the Syrian town of Al Kibar, was similar in structure to a North Korean–designed, gas-cooled, graphite-moderated nuclear reactor—the same model that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors were trying to shut down outside Pyongyang. Only North Korea had constructed such nuclear reactors in the past thirty-five years.
The video included not only satellite photography—common to presentations on North Korea and Iraq’s WMD programs—but detailed still photos of the