Word: assad
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...treaty ceremony in the desert Wednesday, Clinton stopped briefly in Amman, where he told the Jordanian parliament, "You have sent a signal to the entire Arab world that peace is unstoppable." A test of that prediction came the next day in Damascus. Clinton was taking a chance on Assad, rewarding him up front with a telegenic official visit by a U.S. President, even though Syria is still listed by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism. For his part, Clinton wanted to hear Assad offer public assurances that he opposes the kind of terror Hamas has been inflicting...
Senior members of the U.S. delegation even thought they had figured out how to elicit such statements. They invited onto the press plane an Israeli journalist who, at the news conference scheduled to be held in Assad's marble palace, could be expected to ask a leading question. The ploy backfired. When the journalist asked Assad whether he might ease Israeli fears by opening direct talks or visiting the country, Assad coldly turned aside the chance to offer reassurance, saying instead that one country's security concerns were no excuse for holding on to another country's territory...
...Assad was referring to the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 war. He had told Clinton, he said, that Syria was ready to establish "peaceful, normal relations with Israel in return for Israel's full withdrawal from the Golan," as spelled out in several U.N. Security Council resolutions. That sounds like a simple swap, but Israel has not agreed to withdraw completely. Rabin wants to pull back in stages over several years, testing in the process whether Syria's idea of peace includes diplomatic relations, open borders, free trade and tourism...
...Syrian leader also apparently outfoxed Clinton on the terrorism issue. U.S. officials say that in private talks Assad not only deplored terror attacks but twice promised to repeat his condemnation at the press conference, with specific reference to last month's bus bombing in Tel Aviv, which killed 23 people. But he failed to do so and even denied that terrorism had been discussed "as a separate topic." That forced the White House into a scramble to revise the impression. Flying out of Damascus, Clinton told reporters he regretted Assad did not "take the opportunity to say in public what...
...Clinton headed home by way of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Israeli and American officials were also busy recalibrating their messages about progress in the Golan negotiations. To keep the tone positive, Israel's officials said they were encouraged by Assad's use at one point in his press conference of the formulation "full withdrawal for full peace." Clinton, meanwhile, was worried that he might have oversold his accomplishment. In what one of his aides called an effort to "modulate," Clinton began speaking of the possibility of progress, rather than actual progress...