U.S., Syria Agree Arabs Must Take Lead in Solving the Crisis : Diplomacy: Baker meets with Assad in Damascus. The two also agree that U.S. troops must leave the region when Iraq leaves Kuwait.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III agreed Friday with Syrian President Hafez Assad that the Arab world must take the lead in rolling back Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait and that American ground troops must be withdrawn from the region as soon as the crisis ends.

“We talked about the importance of this being an Arab solution,” Baker told reporters after a 4 1/2-hour meeting with Assad. “One thing, I think, that is demonstrated by the fact of my presence here today is that this is, indeed, largely an Arab solution that we are trying to implement.”

Baker gave no hint of how an Arab solution could be achieved, but his remarks paralleled a speech by Assad on Tuesday that called for the removal of all foreign troops from the region after the Iraqis are out of Kuwait.

President Bush late last week ordered Baker to visit Damascus. Bush decided to take the step after two telephone conversations with Assad, but U.S. officials refused to say which of the two presidents proposed the trip.

Baker gave Bush an immediate report on his meeting, talking to him for about 15 minutes over a secure radio circuit from the Air Force plane that carried him from Damascus to Rome. The quick call to the White House was unusual but not unprecedented, a U.S. official said.

Although the United States and Syria find themselves on the same side in the gulf crisis, their overall relationship continues to be what a Western diplomat characterized as “adversarial.”

Despite his deference to Syria’s demand for an Arab solution, Baker left little doubt, at a joint news conference with Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh, that he had clashed sharply with Assad on the subject of terrorism. The United States has long accused Damascus of supporting international terrorism, and the Syrian government has been implicated in the still-unsolved bombing of Pan American Airways Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December, 1988.

Asked why Syria has not expelled Ahmed Jibril and his Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which has been widely accused of being responsible for the Pan Am bombing, Shareh said, “We don’t have evidence so far.” He said Syria would try to punish anyone linked to terrorism by “hard evidence.”

“There is . . . a disagreement between us on the sufficiency of the evidence,” Baker snapped. “This is a subject that is very important as far as the United States is concerned. We have had, indeed, an extensive discussion of the question of Pan Am 103.”

He provided no additional information.

Baker said the dispute over terrorism prevented his visit--the first to Damascus by a U.S. secretary of state in more than two years--from thawing the frozen relationship between the two nations.

“Our policy cannot and never will be amoral,” Baker said. “We can have close relations only with countries that share our fundamental values. That is not to say we cannot improve relations where we have a common goal and a common interest, as we have in this case. We can substantially improve our relationship if we can overcome these problems we have with terrorism.”

Assad has sent about 3,000 troops to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to join the U.S.-led multinational force in the gulf. He is expected to send an armored division, between 10,000 and 15,000 troops, as soon as he can find transportation for them. That would make Syria’s the largest Arab contingent in the force.

A Western diplomat said Assad expects to receive a substantial increase in aid payments from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as a result of the deployment.

In Jerusalem, an Israeli official said his government will not try to take advantage of the gap in Syria’s military position left by the armored division’s redeployment.

“We want Syria to feel safe from us,” the Israeli official said, “and we think the fact that they are prepared to move a division indicates that it does. We won’t do anything to take advantage of the military situation. There is a convergence of both our interests here.”

Although Washington and Damascus share the goal of getting the Iraqis out of Kuwait, their motivations are substantially different.

A diplomat who is not an American said Assad is an opportunist who expects to profit from the encounter both financially and by settling scores with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, a longtime rival. Also, Syria’s participation in the multinational force in Saudi Arabia will help repair its relations with Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

But it seems clear that Syria, which has long occupied areas of Lebanon that Damascus claims as part of “greater Syria,” cannot share Washington’s aversion to Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, which Baghdad claims as its own territory.

By endorsing Assad’s call for an Arab solution to the crisis, Baker moved far away from his earlier suggestion that only the United States could lead the campaign to force an end to the Iraqi occupation.

Baker said Sept. 4 in a statement to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “We remain the one nation that has the necessary political, military and economic instruments at our disposal to catalyze a successful collective response by the international community.”

In his joint appearance with Shareh, however, Baker said, “We have no intention or desire to establish a permanent military ground presence in this region, and as soon as this crisis will permit, our armed forces will be brought back to the United States.”

Baker has suggested creating some sort of regional security structure, probably with U.S. and Soviet participation, that would contain Iraqi ambitions if the present crisis ends peacefully, leaving Hussein’s powerful army undamaged.

But he has not yet spelled out the details of the idea. Asked Friday if such a structure would eventually include Israel, Baker said the Israeli government should not be rejected out of hand despite the aversion of most Arab governments to dealings with the Jewish state.