Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [14]
Known as the Sphinx of Damascus, Assad was a man of studied discipline and ruthless calculation. He once ordered the leveling of the entire Syrian town of Hama, murdering an estimated ten thousand to forty thousand of his own people in the process.
Assad received me in his villa south of Damascus, where he had been recovering from a heart ailment. In our three-and-a-half-hour meeting (not long by Assad standards), he plied me with a steady stream of coffee. I tried to point out the strength of America’s position. I presented Assad with an overhead satellite photo of his capital city, including his presidential palace. In 1984, satellite photography was not as well known or accessible as it is today, with anyone able to use Google Earth. Back then overhead imagery was the exclusive purview of only a few technologically advanced governments, particularly ours. I gave Assad the photograph less to acknowledge his hospitality than to remind him that we were watching from above.
When our discussion turned to the business at hand, Assad was intractable. He was critical of our policy in Lebanon and in the Middle East generally. Assad expressed little sympathy for our concerns about terrorism in the region. He recited the trope that “one man’s terrorist was another man’s revolutionary.” The American revolutionaries I had grown up admiring hadn’t made a practice of killing civilians or paying suicide bombers.
In the case of Lebanon, the supposedly indecipherable Sphinx of Damascus was anything but. Time was on his side, and he knew it. What’s more, he knew we knew it. My meeting with Assad underscored the folly of democratic countries trying to face off with a dictator unless that country is resolved and unified, with the firm purpose to see the mission through to the end.
When I later met with our coalition partners to report on our efforts, none suggested that they had that kind of staying power. Only France, which had a longstanding relationship with Lebanon, had an interest in continuing to try to stabilize the country.
When I met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she made it clear as only she could that when it came to U.S. policy on Lebanon, she was at best a reluctant team player. I had long been a fan of “the Iron Lady,” as the Soviets called her. I found that her stern reputation masked a dispassionate realism—which was certainly visible in her approach to the Middle East. In our meeting, she bore to the heart of the issue with crisp, unforgiving precision. She was skeptical of Lebanese President Gemayel’s ability to expand his coalition and, in a break from the American position, equally skeptical of Israel’s role in the standoff. She believed that our coalition lacked a clear mandate. She did not favor taking a tough stance with Syria because she believed that we needed them for a successful Middle East peace effort.12 She noted that even when the United States challenged Syria, some American officials behaved in a way that signaled to the Syrians that we lacked the will or cohesion to actually follow through. A mixed message was the worst kind to send to an authoritarian regime, she noted. In that, as in many things, she was absolutely correct. If anyone left our meeting with an impression other than that the Prime Minister would be happy to be done with the whole business at the soonest possible opportunity, they hadn’t been listening. In her public statements Thatcher was more diplomatic, offering words of solidarity with her political soul mate, President