When John McCain visited Hafez al-Assad

In 1984, John McCain came to Syria with a Congressional delegation and met with President Hafez al-Assad. He described the 75-minute interview in an article in the Arizona Republic (April 3, 1984), saying that Assad was an “outwardly attractive man” who “projected an aura of confidence and the satisfaction of a general who had just achieved a decisive victory.”

Earlier in 1974, a striking description of the Syrian leader had been made by President Richard Nixon, who said in his memoirs that Assad was a “tough negotiator (who has) a great deal of mystique, tremendous stamina, and a lot of charm. All in all he is a man of substance, and at his age (then 44), he will be a leader to be reckoned with in this part of the world. This man really has elements of genius—without any question!” When Jimmy Carter came to Syria, he wrote, “little was known about his (Assad’s) personal or family life, but former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and others who knew Assad had described him to me as very intelligent, eloquent, and frank in discussing the most sensitive issues. I invited the Syrian leader to come and visit me in Washington, but he replied that he had no desire ever to visit the United States. Despite this firm but polite rebuff, I learned what I could about him and his nation before meeting him.” Carter then added, “During subsequent trips to Syria, I spent hours debating with Assad and listening to his analysis of events in the Middle East…he seemed to speak like a modern Saladin—as though it was his obligation to rid the region of foreign presence while preserving Damascus as the focal point of modern Arab unity.”

When Bill Clinton met Assad in 1994, he added, “I was impressed by his (Assad’s) intelligence and almost total recall for detailed events going back more than twenty years.” Ambassador Edward Djerejian recalled a similar story, when he was notified that he had become US ambassador to Syria in 1989, and happened to be in Israel. He informed prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who said, «You will be dealing with the smartest man in the Middle East.” Rabin then warned against what he called a «loophole» in what the Americans were offering to Syria, because if there were any, «Hafez al-Assad will drive a truck through it!»
These words kept coming to mind last month, as I visited the United States with an unofficial Syrian delegation, aimed at promoting Syria’s views on the Middle East to academics, journalists, congressmen, and think-tanks in the US. The trip made headlines in the Arab press, arousing the anger of certain elements in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, who did not want Syria to overcome or to achieve any breakthroughs in Washington DC. These elements, along with the Bush White House, lobbied to cancel a meeting between the Syrian delegation and David Welch, the Undersecretary of State. What’s worse than the pressure is the fact that the “mighty” State Department bended to the pressure, and canceled the meeting with the Syrians.

Welch was never a priority on our list; he was among a long list of Americans we met in Washington, Houston, and Los Angeles. We did not ask for a meeting with the US officicalwwv. We knew that Welch had already started his long march into history, and would be out-of-office as of January 2009. We concentrated on people who were likely to become decision-makers, in the post-Bush Addministration. The fact that Welch refused to talk to the Syrians, yet would dabble for hours with a convicted criminal like Samir Gagegea, for example, disgusted me. The attitude of the White House sounded, looked, and smelled, autocratic. “No talks. Period.” This was something I would have expected from Saddam Hussein, not the United States.

Was Syria anti-American to start out with? Only briefly, in 1963-1970, can the Syrian government be described as anti-American. After a tug-of-war between the US and Great Britain in 1949-1954, carried out by proxy through allies like Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Syria began charting its own course, with real democracy, in 1954. During the elections of 1955, the ballots brought a communist into the Syrian Parliament. Terror overtook the US Department of State. It expressed fear “at the drift towards a leftist, anti-US position in Syria.” The US Ambassador to Syria added, “If the present trend continues, there is strong possibility that a communist-dominated Syria will emerge, threatening the peace and stability of the area, and endangering the achievement of our objectives in the Near East.” The US began talking of regime change in Damascus, and even financed two failed coups in the late 1950s, prompting the Syrians to expel a number of US diplomats from Damascus. The US responded by expelling the Syrian Ambassador Farid Zayn al-Din, from Washington DC. As a result, anti-Americanism soured and demonstrators stormed the US Embassy and the home of the Ambassador.
Why would Syria—in the 1950s and today—support a superpower that was relentlessly trying to bring down its government? On the other hand, why would it turn down the friendship of another superpower—the USSR in the 1950s and Iran today—that was expressing unconditional military, political, and economic support to the Syrians? As early as 1956, the USSR gave Syria 400 million SP for oil extraction, and oversaw the supply of arms worth 20 million GBP, through Egypt. Trade with the Eastern bloc back then was at $19 million. The US commented, while watching Syria snuggle up to the Russians, “internal medicine will not do; surgery is required for the cancerous growth (of communism) in Syria.”

The US began to accuse Syria of meddling in the affairs of its neighbors, and destabilizing Lebanon. The parallel between the 1955-1958 and 2005-2008 is haunting; bombs would explode in Beirut, and everybody would blame it on the Syrians. The US encouraged its regional allies to take action against Syria, saying that it would support any covert or overt anti-Syrian activity under Article 51 of the UN Charter: self-defense. Turkey moved its troops to the Syrian border, with US encouragement, and repeatedly violated Syrian airspace. The result? Instead of a U-turn, more Syrian-Soviet friendship. The formal US policy became: to minimize contact with the Syrian government, now that the US Ambassador was out of Damascus, and to support and fund the Syrian opposition. US records put the amount paid to ambitious officers wanting to overthrow the regime at $3 million.
The Aleppo deputy in parliament, and former Prime Minister Maarouf al-Dawalibi, threatened to hold a plebiscite in Syria to show the US that the Russians were more popular than the Americans, because the latter were held responsible “for the Palestine tragedy.” The New York Times retaliated by describing him as “the most outspoken anti-American leader in the Arab World.” At this stage, President Shukri al-Quwatli came out, for the first time in Syrian history, and described the US as “an enemy,” in July 1957. It was the Americans who had removed him from office in 1949, promoting, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said many years later in Egypt in 2005, “stability over democracy.” What else could Quwatli do? The Americans were financing revolution in Syria. They were calling on Syria’s neighbors to invade and topple the regime. They were levying accusations of regional adventurism against the Syrians. All of this was being done to a country that was never—in principal—anti-American. Concerning the dilemma in Syrian-US relations, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles wrote in late 1957: “Efforts to persuade moderate Arab leaders to take an overt hard line towards Syria have failed. What alternatives do we have? Force is ruled out. Clandestine activity would not succeed. A hard line from the West would only drive Syria closer to the Soviet Bloc.”   

John McCain was in his 20s back then, studying at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. He was busy practicing as a lightweight boxer, earning a reputation for himself as someone who loved history and literature, hated mathemtics, and more importantly, stood up for people who were bullied. Syria was being bulled in 1955-1958 but it is doubtful if McCain had ever heard of the small Mediterannean country back then. Given all of the above, McCain should visit Damascus—again—with an open mind, as he did in 1984, to see that both good things and bad things don’t change that quickly in the Middle East. Neither has America’s attitude changed. Nor have the traits of the Syrian president.