Word: assad
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...Saddam Hussein's half-brother had just been arrested, perhaps with Syrian cooperation, and Assad had to decide whether he wanted to take credit for helping...
...spent a few hours with Assad last week at his private office in the hills overlooking Damascus and found the singular-or-plural question unanswerable. It was a terrible day for Syria's President. Thousands of people were in the streets of Lebanon demanding that his troops withdraw from the country they have occupied since the mid-'70s. A few hours after our meeting, the pro-Syrian Lebanese government resigned. Damascus-based leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad had taken credit for a Tel Aviv nightclub bombing that had killed five...
...Assad greeted me at the door, a tall but unassuming man with clear blue eyes. We sat down and I tried a joke: "Mr. President, you've done the impossible. You've brought the United States and France together against you in Lebanon." He laughed. "It's not me, actually," he said, then added ruefully, "but that's what people think." His tone was easy, conversational. He did not bellow or lecture, not even when he attempted to dispense patently ridiculous propaganda. But it was an odd conversation nonetheless, reflecting the jittery uncertainty of the Syrian regime in the face...
...about compliance with the 1989 Taif Agreement ending Lebanon's long civil war. This wasn't the first time the Syrian government retracted or corrected or denied things that the President had said. In the days after last month's assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, Assad told Arab League President Amr Moussa that he was planning to withdraw from Lebanon, only to have the Syrian Information Minister later say that Moussa had got it wrong-Syria was only redeploying its troops to the Bekaa Valley. The tap dance continued all week, culminating in Assad's speech...
...Unfortunately, Assad seems unable to make them. In our interview, he evaded the question of closing Palestinian "rejectionist" group offices in Damascus. "If you're an American and I don't want you here, should I send you to Africa or to the U.S., your country...