Word: assad
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Still on the sidelines in the Middle East peace fest, Syria's President Hafez Assad spurned Clinton and a chance to mend fences with Israel
...candidate Bill Clinton excoriated president George Bush for "coddling" dictators. Now forget about General Raoul Cedras and his golden Panamanian parachute. Consider only that President Clinton last week bestowed one of the highest presidential honors on one of the world's chief thugs, President Hafez Assad of Syria. The usual place for meeting the likes of him is some neutral site like Geneva. (One comes away less soiled that way.) Yet Clinton decided to pay court to Assad in Damascus. It was the first visit by a President to a nation on the U.S. list of terrorist states...
...cleared minefield on the Israeli-Jordanian border. Addressing, separately, the Jordanian and Israeli parliaments. Visiting U.S. troops in Kuwait. Hobnobbing in Cairo with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat, in Saudi Arabia with King Fahd and in Damascus with Syrian President Hafez Assad. Looking very presidential throughout, no doubt, and maybe winning more votes for Democratic candidates than he could have by campaigning at home...
Whether he can get very far is uncertain. Israel and Syria are stuck in a who-goes-first? impasse: Assad wants the Israelis locked into a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights before he will say precisely what kind of peace he will make, while Israel wants Assad to commit to full normal relations -- exchange of ambassadors, open borders, trade -- before it defines the extent of its withdrawal. Syrian and Israeli ambassadors have been meeting regularly in Washington, but the main contact between the two sides has been Christopher, who has made five trips to the region since April...
President Clinton, continuing his plunge as diplomat-in-chief on this week'sMiddle Easttour, said Syrian President Hafez Assad "went beyond anything he said before" on peace with Israel in a three-hour meeting. The president then raced from Damascus to Jerusalem, where he told lawmakers in the Knesset: "I went there convinced we needed to add new energy to the talks and I'm convinced now that we have."TIME correspondent Lara Marlowe, in the Syrian capital, says, however, that Assad's offer of "full peace" if Israel first withdraws from the disputed Golan Heights is something...