Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [344]
For decades, Syria has been considered a prized quarry for optimistic American diplomats. After my efforts to engage the Syrians in the early 1980s, George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, traveled to Damascus no fewer than twelve times. Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright made more than forty trips between them during the Clinton administration. American secretaries of state spent hours in the Syrian president’s waiting room cooling their heels as they awaited an audience. The Syrian state press played up these meetings with foreign officials, especially from the United States, as signs of Syria’s clout in the world. Although for some time After 9/11, President Bush had carefully denied Syria such injections of prestige, the State Department’s eagerness for engagement eventually resurfaced, with Powell and Armitage both making trips there, hoping for a diplomatic breakthrough that never came.
That hope was not solely the province of diplomats, however. CENTCOM military commander John Abizaid was a proponent of trying to peel off Syria from Iran, encouraging them to forge a historic peace with israel and thus help to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many in our military as well as in the State Department had long thought the stalemate over the Palestinian territories to be an underlying cause of violence in the region. I was skeptical, and even more skeptical of bringing in Syria from the cold. Nonetheless, I forwarded Abizaid’s arguments to the President, thinking it was important that he know his CENTCOM commander’s views on the matter.26
Peace with israel and an accommodation with the United States were not high on the priority list of the Syrian regime—not unless there was something major in it for them. Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar (who took the reins After his father’s death in June 2000) hailed from a small Muslim sect, the Alawites. To maintain power in a nation with a Sunni majority, they burnished their pan-Arab credentials by working against Israel and making a not too hidden effort to oppose American forces in Iraq; they became the hub for gathering suicide bombers and jihadists to travel south across their border.
Throughout the 1990s, Syria built increasingly close ties with Iran and was heavily reliant on it for arms and funding. This alliance was more than just a marriage of convenience, as some have characterized it. The two nations had fashioned a de facto Hezbollah state in southern Lebanon. In exchange for funding and supplies, the terrorist organization Hezbollah worked to advance Syrian and Iranian policies in the region. With weekly flights from Tehran and Damascus shuttling in thousands of small arms and rockets, Hezbollah had amassed a military force to be reckoned with.
In February 2005, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a massive car bomb in front of the St. George Hotel in Beirut. Hariri was a symbol of Lebanese independence, and as such a threat to the Syria-Hezbollah occupation of his country. Unsurprisingly, evidence that Syria and Hezbollah had their hands in the assassination was abundant, though both denied the claims.27
President Bush announced that America supported an international investigation of the murder and would advocate enforcement of UN resolutions calling for the withdrawal of Syria’s nearly fifteen thousand troops from Lebanon, as well as its many hundreds of intelligence officials. He recalled our ambassador to Syria.
Hariri’s death helped spark the so-called Cedar Revolution, a Lebanese popular movement against Syrian occupation and meddling, changing the