Reply #43: The Syrian President: Bashar Al-Assad was on the tele with Christine

[mzmolly]

Amanpour two days ago. He did not mention this. He said that Bush was ratcheting up support for aggression against Syria under false pretense, but he denies any invasion.

Here is the text of the interview:

http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/051013/2005101306.html

Amanpour: Well, what they want is for the insurgency to be closed down. Can I ask you: there is a lot of talk about potentially the United State bombing safehavens and insurgent strongholds inside Syria. Has that happened?

Al-Assad: Never.

Amanpour: If it does happen, would you consider that a hostile act and would you retaliate?

Al-Assad: We will deal with each case when it happens. We cannot say now how we are going to deal with every case. It is difficult for me to answer a hypothetical question now. But they will not find such a stronghold in Syria to bomb. We don't have any camps and we have been fighting such terrorism since the 1970s, and recently we had incidents, clashes between security forces and these terrorists in Syria. This is a general situation caused by the chaos in Iraq.

another interesting snip ...

The Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said if not regime change then behavior change. They want you to change the behavior of the Syrian government. One of these issues is the Iraq insurgency and she wondered whether the Syrian government is smart enough to take that course.

Al-Assad: They didn't say in what direction should we change our behavior, to do what? They only talk about the border which is not true. Can you sum the behavior of a country in a border issue which is trivial, which is not the real problem. The real problem is: what about the peace process in our region? This is the problem. We are interested in making peace and they are not interested. This administration is not interested in making peace. We are interested in a more stable Iraq. They only talk about a stable Iraq but the mistakes they make everyday give the opposite result. This is the difference between Syria and the United States. So should we support more mistakes? This is the question. They should be more specific.


This man is very soft spoken, intelligent and seemingly quite reasonable.