Not one of the Arab leaders, however, offered any support for the bombing campaign.
<After meeting President Assad, Mr Blair travelled on to Saudi Arabia and Jordan for further talks, before heading to Israel and Gaza to see Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, and Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
Not one of the Arab leaders, however, offered any support for the bombing campaign. Mr Blair now recognises that even if they had wanted to help, their domestic political pressures would have made such a statement impossible. >
Why Bashar humiliated Blair.
<TONY BLAIR shifted uneasily on his feet as his eyes flicked across to the British journalists seated in front of him at the presidential palace in Damascus.
The Prime Minister has always had an intuitive grasp of how events will be interpreted and he knew immediately that his joint press conference with Bashar al-Assad was going very badly wrong.
The Syrian President, standing just a few feet away from him, was warming to his task. He condemned the bombing of Afghanistan, which was causing “thousands” of civilian casualties.
Palestinian “freedom fighters” were not terrorists, he said, they were like the French resistance under Charles de Gaulle. It was Israel, not Syria, that was “prosecuting state terrorism”.
Somewhere on the road to Damascus, Mr Blair had chosen to dismiss Foreign Office warnings against holding a press conference with President Assad. The result was that for the first time in four trips and almost 40,000 air miles of shuttle diplomacy since September 11, the Prime Minister had hit real trouble as he came face to face with the hard, intractable reality of Middle East politics.
According to close aides, Mr Blair was uncertain how to react to his public dressing down. If he argued with his host, he risked diplomatic disaster and inevitable headlines about a public slanging match. If he let it go, the Prime Minister knew he would appear to have been humiliated at the hands of an Arab dictator. In the end, he bit the bullet — as well as his tongue — and chose the latter course. >
In light of above, one can imagine why I think Pakistani President did a great job... this is the reason I think that he s a man of vision unlike other in the Arab wrold who are despots and are willing and unwilling tools in the hands of destructive machines like AlQaeda and Hamas.
Iqbal Latif
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