Top Democrats recently home from a Mideast peace mission returned fire at the loudly disapproving White House.
At a Tuesday, April 10 press conference at San Francisco’s Federal Building, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) lashed back at White House allegations that, in recently visiting Syrian President Bashar Assad, the largely Democratic congressional delegation had undermined and misrepresented both United States and Israeli foreign policy.
“I want to say a word about the criticism leveled at this trip. I do not know whether it was more pathetic or more hypocritical to have criticism for opening a dialogue when two days prior to our visit, three Republicans visited with Assad,” said Lantos.
“I was appalled by the attempt by the administration to minimize and mischaracterize the nature of the mission.”
Both Lantos and Pelosi stated — unequivocally — that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had requested they pass messages to Assad.
“At the time we spoke with Prime Minister Olmert, he asked us to carry a message to Syria that Israel would be ready to resume negotiations if and when Syria stopped its support for terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah,” Pelosi said.
Lantos added that Israeli newspapers were running stories speculating about a possible war in the summer with Syria, and Olmert “underscored Israel’s peaceful intentions … and requested us to convey this [to Assad] and the speaker very precisely and forcefully did that.”
Olmert’s subsequent “clarification” in which he distanced himself from claims he was passing messages via the Americans angered the Democrats. Earlier this week, Lantos accused the White House of pulling the Israeli prime minister’s strings in order to generate “some phony criticism of the speaker’s trip, even though it was a bipartisan trip.”
Allegations of such back-door statecraft between the White House and Olmert are far from unprecedented.
Last year, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief. But within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice’s surprise and anger. Olmert had received a call, apparently from Vice President Cheney’s office, telling him to ignore Rice.
The White House had no comment on the accusations by Lantos that it pressured Olmert to pull the red carpet out from under Pelosi. David Akov, the San Francisco-based consul general of Israel, declined to comment as well.
Olmert and Pelosi spoke on the phone Monday; the conversation was described as polite, but Olmert did not clarify his clarification.
Cheney recently lambasted Pelosi on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, referring to her Damascus trip as “bad behavior on her part. I wish she hadn’t done it.”
At the press conference, Pelosi rolled her eyes over the “bad behavior” quip, noting that the vice president’s language was awfully paternalistic. Lantos questioned whether Cheney would be more comfortable if Pelosi had stayed “in the kitchen.”
“It’s quite a remark and I think it’s indicative of the poverty of ideas of this administration to bring peace to the region,” said Pelosi.
“While we were there, we praised [Rice’s] idea that Olmert and [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas should stay in frequent communication with each other. We delivered President Bush’s message to Assad. I feel sad for [the White House]. I believe in dialogue.”
The delegation’s lone Republican, Rep. David Hobson (R-Ohio), sided with Pelosi on this issue.
“I think we played a useful role,” Hobson said in a phone call from Saudi Arabia to the Dayton Daily News last week.
“We reinforced the administration’s positions and at the same time we were trying to understand and maybe getting some voice to some things people wanted to say that maybe they were not comfortable saying to the administration. … This was not an anti-administration trip at all.”
In fact, according to those present, the bulk of the meeting with Assad was taken up with the plight of Israeli soldiers missing in clashes with Hezbollah or from forays into Syria dating back to the 1960s.
Pelosi presented Assad with duplicate dog tags of three soldiers missing from last summer — two nabbed by Hezbollah in the July 12 cross-border raid that launched the second Lebanon war, and one captured by Hamas-affiliated gunmen in a June 25 cross-border raid. She also delivered a message from the families of captured Israeli soldiers to Assad.
Palestinian spokesmen said Saturday, April 7 that a deal was close on the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the soldier captured by Hamas. It was unclear whether Pelosi’s entreaties had anything to do with the deal.
Lantos accused Bush of engaging in an “ostrich policy” in the Middle East in his refusal to engage in dialogue.
“I think it is important for all of us to understand that the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission called for dialogue with both Syria and Iran,” said Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who has been attempting to obtain a visa to Iran for more than a decade.
“Dialogue is not appeasement, it is the only avenue toward the eventual solution of these issues. If we refuse to dialogue with these countries, we will be frozen into this intolerable situation.”
Ron Kampeas of JTA contributed to this report.