http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13904410/site/newsweek/Caught on Candid Camera
What Bush's overheard remarks tell us about his views on Mideast diplomacy—and why he should be engaging Syria rather than criticizing it.
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
<snip>
As he munched on a roll, Bush told the British prime minister, with whom he is very familiar terms: "See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbullah to stop doing this s--t and it's over." Bush added that he felt like telling U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who visited the gathered leaders, to get on the phone with Syrian President Bashar Assad to "make something happen."
We don't have Blair's answer to that remark. But another question might be: why doesn't Bush himself make something happen? And to whom was Bush referring when he told Blair that "they" need to pressure Syria? If "they" meant Annan and the U.N., it is true that under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, the world body has officially demanded that Syria stop its interference in Lebanon, including its support of Hizbullah. But the U.N. Security Council generally has little capacity to act on its own, and certainly no enforcement ability. The Council is mainly a tool of the major powers. It is prime ministers and presidents like Bush who are the ones who generally put teeth into those U.N. resolutions.
...
U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed to NEWSWEEK that a Syrian tip led to Sabawi's capture. Indeed, in the last few years before contacts were cut off, says one intelligence expert who works on contract with the Pentagon, Syrian intelligence helped avert two major attacks on U.S. targets-the U.S. embassy in Ottawa, Canada, and a Navy base in Bahrain. "There was a lot of wonderful cooperation," he says. That started to sour when U.S. occupation officials at first were angered by Assad's alleged support of the Iraq insurgency (the finger-pointing at Damascus stopped more than a year ago, even though the attacks continue unabated). And Washington began to attack Assad publicly in earnest after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, although a U.N. investigation has not drawn any definite conclusions yet about Assad's alleged personal complicity. While Syrian intelligence was almost certainly involved in the Hariri killing, the investigating judge, Serge Brammertz, recently praised the Damascus's cooperation with the probe.
No one doubts that Syria has an anti-American agenda, certainly an anti-Israeli one, or that Assad is harboring hardliners like Hamas leader Khalid Meshel in Damascus. But Bush seems to have made Syria, bit by bit, a charter member of his "axis of evil" rogues gallery-regimes he will not deal with on any level because they support terror and are anti-democratic. If the U.S. president is still harboring hopes of regime change in Damascus, in the middle of a conflagration that has radicalized many parts of the Arab Middle East, he might want to think again. Were Assad's regime to be toppled, the mosaic of competing sects and ethnicities that makes up Syria could explode into conflict, and some Islamist GROUPS that are natural allies for Hamas and Hizbullah-and possibly Al Qaeda-are already gaining in influence. One U.S. official says that that American pressure on Syria, which includes limited financial sanctions imposed in 2004, may be "radicalizing the country."
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