February 5, 2007
Diane Sawyer's interview with Bashar al-Asad
This evening I watched Diane Sawyer’s interview with Bashar al-Asad, the President of Syria. (Ms. Sawyer is in Syria throughout this week, doing a series of reports about the country.) After the interview was over, I had a bit of hope that the Syrian president might be worth talking to (not that I expect the Bush Administration to take such a step).
Compared to some of the other leaders in Middle East, Bashar al-Asad could be possibly be---dare I say--- a moderate. I couldn’t agree with every statement that al-Asad made during his interview. Nevertheless, there was none of the over-the-top, outlandish rhetoric that is now par-for-the-course with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example. Al-Asad did not make a single reference to wiping Israel off the map. (Though one suspects that Bashar would not shed any tears if the Jewish state were to suddenly slide off its moorings and sink into the Mediterranean Sea.)
Moreover, we need to remember that President Bush’s father, Bush 41, successfully cooperated with Hafez al-Asad (Bashar al-Asad’s own father) during the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. Bush 41 got Syria on board for the first war against Iraq, using good-old-fashioned diplomatic perspicacity---a quality sorely lacking in the younger President Bush.
Now----I am by no means naïve about Bashar al-Asad. He is no liberal democrat (democrat with a small “d”). But liberal democrats aren’t what the Middle East is about at this particular moment in history. Therefore, we have to work with what we have in the region. If given the choice between talking to Bashar al-Asad or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I say we sit down for a heart-to-heart with Bashar.
Bashar al-Asad was educated in Great Britain. Having spent some time in the West, he seems to have absorbed at least an inkling of what we might call Western values---even if he doesn’t agree with them. He speaks fluent English, making it easier for him to understand Western media reports and opinions without the filter of translation. If Bush can look into Putin’s ex-KGB soul, then why not Bashar al-Asad’s Ba’athist immortal essence? American Presidents have been wheeling and dealing with fundamentally bad guys for decades to accomplish larger geopolitical aims: remember Roosevelt and Stalin, Nixon and Mao, etc. etc. So why not talk to Bashar al-Asad? It's worth a try.
When Diane Sawyer asked al-Asad why Iraq is such a mess, al-Asad naturally blamed America. Did Sawyer---or anyone else---actually expect al-Asad to refer to 1,400 years of wrong-headed thinking in the Muslim Middle East, or more than 60 years of constant political violence within Iraq itself? “America did it!” is a much simpler answer, and it plays better to the home crowd.
We shouldn’t hold al-Asad’s simplistic assessment of Iraq’s problems against him too much. He did correctly note that Iraq is fundamentally a political mess rather than just a military one. I also had to give al-Asad a point when Diane Sawyer asked him about control of the border between Syria and Iraq. (The border has become an expressway for foreign terrorist insurgents who want to do the jihad thing in Iraq.) Al-Asad mentioned that America, despite being the most powerful country in the world, is demonstrably incapable of controlling its own border with Mexico.
Touché, Mr. President.