Bush, Assad Meet on ‘Common Goal’ : Gulf crisis: Syria has been labeled by the U.S. a major supporter of international terrorism. But the President says he will ‘work closely with’ those opposing Baghdad.

Proclaiming that he will “work closely with” any country willing to oppose Iraq, President Bush met here Friday with President Hafez Assad of Syria, a country the Administration has publicly labeled a major supporter of international terrorism.

The meeting with Assad, in a Holiday Inn just outside the airport here, was Bush’s last, and most controversial, stop on an eight-day, six-nation, 17,000-mile trek through Europe and the Middle East that was dominated by the President’s efforts to solidify international support for his campaign against Iraq.

“As long as I have one American troop, one man, one woman left there in the armed forces in this gulf, I will continue to work closely with all those who stand up against (Iraq’s) aggression,” Bush said in a press conference in Cairo several hours before meeting Assad.

“Everybody knows” that there are “differences between the United States and Syria on a wide array of questions,” Bush said. But, he added, “we do have a common goal.”

The reference to unspecified “differences” was the closest Bush came to publicly mentioning the Administration’s previously stated conclusions that Syria has been implicated in some of the most devastating terrorist acts of the last decade, including the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland two years ago.

At the Cairo press conference, which he held jointly with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Bush also announced that he is “hoping to” meet with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir when Shamir visits the United States early next month.

That announcement could defuse some of the opposition to the Assad meeting.

Relations between the United States and Israel have been strained in recent months, particularly since the United States joined in a U.N. Security Council resolution criticizing Israel over the killing of 20 Palestinians by police during fighting on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

Bush also predicted that he is “very, very close now” to getting Security Council approval of a resolution approving the use of force against Iraq.

“We’re tired of the status quo, and so is the rest of the world,” Bush said. “I have confidence that we will be successful in the Security Council.”

Bush’s two-hour meeting with Mubarak in Cairo and his three hours of talks with Assad here had virtually identical subjects but vastly different overtones.

Mubarak has been one of the strongest U.S. allies in the Arab world, and his nation has had a strongly positive image in the United States ever since his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, signed a peace treaty with Israel.

By contrast, the Administration and its predecessors have placed Syria on the official list of countries involved in “state-supported terrorism.”

Not surprisingly, given that contrast, the White House took pains to minimize public view of Bush’s talks with Assad while maximizing exposure of the Mubarak meeting. Bush’s meeting with Mubarak was publicized weeks in advance, while the Assad meeting was announced only Wednesday. And Bush held an extensive televised press conference with Mubarak, but left here with no public comment.

His staff later issued a written “readout,” saying that Bush and Assad had undertaken a “full and frank” discussion that included “an extended conversation of the question of terrorism.” Bush, according to the statement, also urged Assad to help win the release of American hostages held in Lebanon.

As Bush completed his frenetic diplomatic travels, the gulf crisis continued to occupy the attention of world officials.

In London, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd predicted that the Security Council would meet sometime next week to vote on a resolution on force. But in China, where Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze met with his Chinese counterpart, Qian Qichen, the Foreign Ministry issued an equivocal statement on the issue.

“Both sides stand for a political solution to the gulf crisis on the basis of relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions,” the official New China News Agency quoted the Foreign Ministry as saying after the 90-minute meeting between the two ministers.

“They hold that so far as there is still hope for a peaceful solution, the international community should continue to work to that end and try its best to avoid a war,” the statement continued.

Because China and the Soviet Union--along with Britain, France and the United States--have the power to veto Security Council resolutions, Washington must win at least the other four nations’ abstentions to gain the resolution Bush has been seeking. And in reality, abstentions probably would not suffice. The Administration badly wants explicit Soviet approval of any military action against Iraq. Officials believe that if the Soviets agree, the Chinese will go along to avoid being isolated on the council.

Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III have been eagerly seeking approval of a resolution on force against Iraq by the end of this month, when the U.S. term as head of the Security Council ends. The next nation holding the council’s rotating monthly presidency is Yemen, which has tended to support Iraq in the current crisis.

The need to hold together the international coalition against Iraq is at the heart of Bush’s decision to hold the controversial meeting with Assad.

Mubarak, who met with Bush for about two hours Friday morning, said at the joint press conference that Syria “is one of the key countries” in the anti-Iraq coalition. “We shouldn’t neglect it,” Mubarak said.

Syria has had angry relations with its neighbor Iraq for years and currently has 7,500 ground troops in the gulf as part of the U.S.-led multinational force lined up against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Assad has pledged to at least double that force. Egypt has 15,000 troops in Saudi Arabia and has pledged another 10,000.

But while Syria’s help may be a military asset, it has also been a political problem for Bush. Because of Syria’s involvement in terrorism in the past, U.S. officials avoided high-level meetings with Syrian officials throughout the 1980s. The last President to meet Assad was Jimmy Carter in 1977.

In addition, any meetings between U.S. and Syrian officials tend to further strain relations between the United States and Israel, which regards Syria as one of its most dangerous enemies.

In Israel on Thursday, Defense Minister Moshe Arens criticized the meeting, saying that “in the Middle East, the meeting is the message.”

“Misunderstandings could arise when (Bush meets) Assad but prefers not to visit Israel,” Arens said.

And the Jerusalem Post said the summit sent a signal that “radicalism, fanaticism, terrorism and anti-Americanism pays.”

Shamir, however, issued a considerably milder statement saying that Bush’s meeting with Assad must be seen “against the backdrop of President Bush’s major effort to form and maintain the coalition against Saddam Hussein.”

During his press conference, Bush rejected suggestions that the talks constituted any threat to Israel, saying that ending Iraq’s occupation of the gulf is in the best interests of all nations in the region, including Israel.

“I am focusing now on . . . this gulf coalition; Syria’s a part of it,” Bush said. “Nobody should read more into it or less into it.”

The President also stepped around the delicate subject of Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians, saying only that “the United States remains determined to be helpful, to be a catalyst in bringing peace to the West Bank question.”

Mubarak, too, was cautious on the issue. The “plight of the Palestinian people must be brought under focus. Their inherent rights to self-determination should be exercised,” he said, adding that the current international coalition “shall address other problems with the same zeal and commitment” displayed in the struggle against Iraq.

But Mubarak qualified his remarks by saying the Palestinian issue should be taken up “in the right context.” He did not insist on any specific linkage between Arab support for the United States in the gulf and U.S. support for Arab claims against Israel.

Bush repeatedly has hinted that a defeat of Iraq could open the way for a peace settlement between Israel and the Arabs. But he has resisted linking the two issues explicitly.

The connection between the two Middle Eastern conflicts remains among the most delicate international issues Bush faces in managing the effort against Iraq. And the issue has been highlighted by Bush’s meeting with Assad, who has long been one of Israel’s most implacable enemies.

In fact, the long-standing enmity between Israel and Syria is precisely one of the reasons that makes U.S. officials consider Assad such an important ally in the gulf conflict. As a strident Arab nationalist, Assad has credibility with many Arabs who consider other leaders, including Mubarak and the royal families of the gulf, too conservative and too close to Western interests. Assad’s involvement, therefore, helps blunt claims by Iraq’s Hussein that the coalition against him is merely an attempt to restore Western colonial domination of the region.

In addition, Syria has a long border with Iraq, and its military presence on Iraq’s border helps tie down Iraqi troops who otherwise would be free to confront U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia. Assad, however, has not yet said whether he would actually be willing to use his troops in a war against Iraq.

BACKGROUND

Hafez Assad seized Syria’s presidency in a 1970 coup. Assad met with President Carter in 1977 in what was the high point of U.S.-Syria ties. But the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that Carter brokered in 1979 and the Reagan Administration’s efforts to arrange a Lebanese-Israeli accord in 1983 turned Syria against U.S. efforts in the Mideast. In 1984, U.S. warplanes attacked Syrian positions in Lebanon. In 1986, the State Department put Syria on its terrorism list because of the role of Syrian officials in an attempt to blow up an El Al flight.