Monday, April 09, 2007

Did Bush Pressure Olmert to Deny Pelosi’s Statement about Syria?

Did Bush Pressure Olmert to Deny Pelosi’s Statement about Syria?

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi left Israel last week, her delegation announced she was bearing a message from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Bashar al-Assad, the president-for-life of Syria.

This suggests that the Bush White House may have also tried to “order” the speaker not to meet with Assad, only to find itself tripped up again by the inconvenience of the separation of powers in the Constitution. Since they couldn’t stop Pelosi’s visit, the next best option was to ruin it, which was likely accomplished with a single phone call.

In Syria, Pelosi’s meeting with Assad made good visuals: A Democratic leader was taking charge of putting Israel back on a path to negotiations with its Arab neighbors.

Commentators noted that the speaker was carrying out a key recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group — engaging governments in the Middle East in dialogue — that the Bush administration has stubbornly refused to do.

Within hours, however, the Israeli government issued a statement that essentially called the U.S. Speaker of the House a liar by flatly denying Olmert asked Pelosi to convey anything to Assad.

Yesterday, Pelosi was asked about the confusion:
PELOSI: There was no confusion. There was absolutely no confusion. The message that we carried from Prime Minister Olmert was the exact message that he gave us. He is a man of peace, and he expressed to us that we should express to the president of Syria his interest in going to the negotiating table, but not until Syria took steps to stop its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. And that is exactly the message that we conveyed.

Q: But the prime minister of Israel’s office issued a clarification, a denial, in effect, because according to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz the other day, the statement from the prime minister’s office, from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office, said that Olmert had told Pelosi that Israel continued to regard Syria, quote, “as part of the axis of evil and a party encouraging terrorism in the entire Middle East.” If I heard you, you didn’t — you don’t recall him saying that in you conversation.
Pelosi: No. What he told us was that the thrust of his statement is that Israel is prepared to go to the negotiating table; we are not preparing for war — that was the important part of it — we are not preparing for war; we’re prepared to go to negotiation when Syria takes steps to stop its support of Hamas and Hezbollah.
In light of this, former Pres. Jimmy Carter announced yesterday the Bush White House ordered him not to meet with Assad, whom Pres. Carter has known for nearly 30 years.
This suggests that the Bush White House may have also tried to “order” the speaker not to meet with Assad, only to find itself tripped up again by the inconvenience of the separation of powers in the Constitution. Since they couldn’t stop Pelosi’s visit, the next best option was to ruin it, which was likely accomplished with a single phone call to Tel Aviv.

Interestingly, the White House responded with little more than a pro forma complaint about Rep. Darrell Issa’s meeting with Pres. Assad yesterday. Issa is a Republican from San Diego County.
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