|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The New Odd Couple: Bush and Assad
| Article
# : |
18948 |
|
|
Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
2,438 Words |
| Author
: |
Robert E. Hunter
Robert E. Hunter is vice president for regional programs at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, D.C. During 1979-1981, he was director of Middle
East Affairs at the National Security Council. |
Last November 24, most of the world's newspapers featured a startling photograph of two presidents: America's George Bush and Syria's Hafez Assad. Only a few months earlier, these two men could literally not have been found in the same room together. Yet in Geneva they not only posed for pictures but smiled at the encounter. Thus, the Persian Gulf crisis turned upside down the hostile politics of two antagonists.
There was reason to be startled at this first meeting of a U.S. president with Syria's perennial strongman since the latter met with Jimmy Carter in the same city 13 years ago. In the interval, there has been reason for American leaders to keep their distance. Assad staunchly opposed U.S. diplomacy at Camp David to try settling the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1983 he reputedly betrayed an understanding with U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz that Syria would withdraw from Lebanon after Israel had signed an agreement with that beleaguered country.
Throughout the 1980s, Assad continued to provide a haven for various radical factions of the PLO. And he was certainly complicit--if not the instigator--in a number of terrorist acts that victimized Americans, not least the 242 U.S. servicemen who died in the rubble of the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport in October 1983, as well as those Americans and others who, two years ago, died in the wreckage of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Unconfessed, uncontrite, and unforgiven, this same Assad has become a strategic partner of the United States in the Middle East, for the oldest of reasons in statecraft: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." As in Winston Churchill's uneasy embrace of Josef Stalin after Adolf Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Bush was moved to make common cause with a man held responsible for the suffering and death of Americans.
The argument is simple: At least during this moment in history, U.S. interests in the Middle East--as well as its standing in the world--have been menaced more by the actions of Iraq's Saddam Hussein than by failure to bring to book a man "charged but not proved" with terrorist crimes.
Syria, in fact, has been an important, though not critical, part of U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf crisis that began last August. Following the swift dispatch of the first U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia, the confrontation rapidly turned into a test of Iraqi and American wills and of competitive definitions of the crisis.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
