Gambling On Geneva
A six-day diplomatic mission to India and Pakistan is enough to tire out even the most stalwart adventurer. So why did the President adding to the crushing fatigue by stopping in Geneva for talks with Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad?
It's because this may have been the last, best chance for Mr. Clinton to craft what would be the centerpiece of his foreign policy legacy. A comprehensive peace in a land that has known religious and ethnic strife as long as anyone can remember.
Time is running out — for all sides. Mr. Clinton has only nine months left to cut a deal. A year into his term, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak will soon find support for a peace deal dwindling among his coalition partners as they begin to posture for the next election. Assad, ill and with his successor uncertain, needs the psychological victory of winning back the same Golan Heights he lost as defense minister in 1967.
So Mr. Clinton met with Assad Sunday in Geneva in hopes that the Syrian president would commit to reopening talks that have been essentially stalled since the two sides stared icily across the table from each other on those January days in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Senior Administration officials played down the potential results, cautioning that a breakthrough in Geneva was very unlikely.
But they were hoping that a face-to-face meeting might begin the process to get the ball rolling. The President has had plenty of contact with Israel and Syria in the past eight weeks, but only occasionally with Assad (foreign minister Shara'a is the point person for Syria) and always through an interpreter. There was still an interpreter at Sunday's meeting, but the President was hoping that a one-on-one with the man who will ultimately make the decision would do what a dozen phone calls could not.
The President's National Security Adviser, Samuel (Sandy) Berger, says the gulf between Israel and Syria on the issues is not wide, but it is deep. They both want peace, but it will be a tricky negotiation and neither side can afford to lose face. Their differences, he said, may be reconcilable and they may not.
In 1994, President Clinton met Assad in the same Geneva hotel with the heady optimism that peace between Israel and Syria might be at hand. Six years later, he is still trying to just get them to the table.
By John Roberts
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