Update: Here's a link to last week's interview.
Original post: Charlie Rose interviewed Bashar al-Assad last night -- his second conversation with the Syrian president, if I'm not mistaken.
PBS hasn't posted a video of the interview yet -- we'll update when they do -- but BusinessWeek posted a few excerpts. Most are predictable -- Assad denied that his government shipped Scuds to Hizballah, for example -- but two lines jumped out at me.
For basically as long as Lebanon has existed as a modern nation, foreign forces have found the country a useful proxy to assert their regional interests in the Middle East, so it's not exactly breaking from script for the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress to assert an extremely self-interested agenda during Prime Minister Saad Hariri's first visit to Washington since coming to power last summer. (Nor is it strange for America to be self-interested, but I digress.)
Hariri met with Obama on Monday; he spent Tuesday with Vice President Joe Biden and members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Looking at the reporting that has emerged in the past two days, those meetings have been dominated by topics of American concern: the alleged transfer of Scud missiles from Syria to Hizballah, the disarming of Hizballah, and Lebanon's role in the U.S.-led effort to sanction Iran. Shelved, for the most part: Discussion of America's mired attempt to kick-start Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Another roadblock for Robert Stephen Ford's long-delayed nomination as U.S. ambassador to Syria: Senate Republicans voted yesterday to block his confirmation.
Democrats tried to confirm him through a procedure called "unanimous consent," which is exactly what it sounds like: If the entire Senate agrees, the nomination is approved; if even one senator objects, the process stalls.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, did the honors and objected to Ford's confirmation.
This doesn't mean that Ford's nomination was rejected, though -- just that Democrats need to call a formal vote, rather than a unanimous consent motion. No word on when they'll do that.
It didn't come as much of a surprise yesterday when the White House announced it was renewing economic sanctions against Syria.
Syria's "continuing support for terrorist organisations and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and missile programmes, continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," President Obama wrote in a message to Congress.
Obama praised the Syrian government for its efforts to reduce the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq (efforts which, you might remember, the Washington Post editorial page recently insisted Syria hadn't undertaken). But Obama said Syria would have to take a number of other steps before Washington would lift its sanctions.
It's been a few days since we checked in on the "Scud crisis" in Lebanon, where prime minister Saad Hariri is now launching a major diplomatic offensive (عربي) to push back against the reports that Hizballah received Scuds from Syria.
Hariri held telephone conversations today with a number of world leaders, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. He also spoke with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Hariri assured all of them that Hizballah hasn't received any Scuds, and warned of the broader consequences of a new Israeli-Lebanese war.
Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri says Hizballah has not received Scud missiles from Syria, and likens that report to the weapons of mass destruction claims that preceded the Iraq war.
Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hizballah's deputy leader, refuses to confirm or deny reports that his organization received Scud missiles from Syria. In an interview with Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Qassem said Hizballah is "satisfied" with its current position, and called the Scud reports an Israeli ploy (عربي) to distract attention from their own nuclear program.
His visit tomorrow will be his second trip in two-and-a-half weeks. At this rate he might as well rent a pied-a-terre in Abu Roumaneh...
The Jerusalem Post reports today that Hizballah admitted receiving Scud missiles from Syria, but insists the missiles are "old and unusable."
The sources added, "Our organization has many surface-to-surface missiles spread across all of Lebanon, in case Israel attacks the country again."
The Jerusalem Post's report is sourced to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai. The original report is available here (عربي); it's attributed to unnamed sources in Hizballah's military wing, who say the group only received a few old, decommissioned missiles. The sourcing is vague, though, and it's a Kuwaiti newspaper (often the Arabic media equivalent of supermarket tabloids).
Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party, had his long-awaited meeting today (عربي) with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. No real word on what they discussed; Syria's state-run SANA news agency says they talked about boosting Syrian-Lebanese ties. The meeting comes two weeks after Jumblatt apologized for calling Assad a "savage" and "an Israeli product."
Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri is expected to make his second trip to Damascus early next month.
Human Rights Watch -- which everyone knows is hopelessly obsessed with Israel and unwilling to criticize Arab autocrats -- issued a statement today that slammed the Syrian government for its "grow[ing] repression" of activists and journalists and urged Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief, to press the issue with Syrian officials during her visit there next week.
Another voice in Washington -- actually, another eight voices -- urging President Obama not to appoint an ambassador to Syria.
This time it's a group of Republican senators, who sent a letter yesterday to secretary of state Hillary Clinton that basically dubbed the nomination a concession to Bashar al-Assad. The letter asked if the Obama administration will sanction Syria for failing to meet its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations, and argued that the recent Assad-Hassan Nasrallah-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meeting should spike the nomination.
Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moallem, in Cairo this week for an Arab League meeting, did an interview with Al-Sharq Al-Awsat and partially walked back his comments (عربي) about allowing Israel to return the Golan Heights in stages.
"This is not true. What we are interested in doing is recovering every inch of the Golan, up to the June 1967 borders, because this is Syrian land, and this is a matter of our national honor... any dialogue with the Israelis must begin with this objective -- the full return of the Golan, up to 1967 borders -- and the details will be discussed later."
I don't want to read too much into Moallem's wording, but that last part -- "the details will be discussed later" -- is carefully phrased. Moallem seems to leave the door open for the Israeli government to return the Golan in stages, as long as Israel commits up front to eventually returning the whole thing.
He seems to split the difference, in other words, between the historic Syrian position -- the full return of the Golan is a precondition for talks -- and his phased-return comments in December.
The Arab League -- meeting today in Cairo -- voted to endorse "proximity talks" between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. American mediators, presumably led by George Mitchell, will shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
Can the U.S. stop Israel from attacking its neighbors? Sen. John Kerry thinks the Israeli government wouldn't bomb Iran without American approval.
Kerry's actual remarks are a little more caveated than the Ha'aretz headline suggests, but my interpretation is that he doesn't think Israel will attack Iran unless Obama admits diplomacy has failed and gives Netanyahu the green light.
Evan mentioned on Wednesday that there's slowly-mounting opposition in Washington to President Obama's decision to name Robert Stephen Ford as the new U.S. ambassador to Syria.
Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reports this morning (عربي) that the Israeli government is also lobbying against Ford's nomination (or against Obama naming any ambassador to Syria; this isn't about Ford personally). Defense minister Ehud Barak made that request during a visit to Washington this week; so did an unnamed envoy from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Now that President Obama has nominated Robert Stephen Ford to be the next U.S. ambassador to Syria -- the first since relations deteriorated in 2005 -- all eyes turn toward the confirmation process.
Senators don't make a habit of turning ambassadorial nominations into blood baths, but there is bipartisan distrust of Syria, and one Democratic lawmaker has already signaled his disapproval of Ford' nomination.
In an interview with the Jerusalem Post while on a trip to Israel, Congressman Eliot Engel (D-New York) called Ford's nomination a "mistake."
In the department of "things that should have been done a long time ago," the U.S. State Department has finally lifted its Syria travel warning.
I was never entirely clear on why Syria fell under a travel warning in the first place: The State Department's warning (which has since been removed from the Internet) never referenced any specific threats -- just some ominous language about "large-scale demonstrations" in Damascus, and the fact that Hamas and Hizballah have offices in the country. It always struck me as a product of politics, not legitimate security concerns.
In any event, glad to see it has been lifted. The State Department's full announcement is after the jump.
The Washington Post has 600 words of hand-wringing conventional wisdom on its editorial page this morning: Syria is bad, Syria will always be bad, and engagement with Damascus is pointless.
I don't agree with the overall conclusion -- I agree with Andrew Tabler that engagement could bring a meaningful change in U.S.-Syrian relations (though I take issue with many other points in his essay) -- and the editorial also plays loose with the facts. Here's the most egregious example, referring to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
He has promised to check suicide bombers bound for Iraq but has never done so.
I guess Fred Hiatt and the gang over at WaPo don't have access to Lexis-Nexis? Or Google?
A bit of unequivocally good news: The White House today nominated Robert Stephen Ford as the next U.S. ambassador to Syria.
