Moustapha was a writer and academic with a doctorate in computer science before becoming ambassador to the U.S. in March of 2004, his first diplomatic post. "I was concerned, a bit worried," he said. He consulted friends who had worked as diplomats who joked about the difference between a camel and a diplomat: a camel can work for days and days without eating, but diplomats can eat for days and days without working.
He discovered something very different working a country that had vilified Syria as a sponsor of terror and "most eligible nation to join the axis of evil."
"Being the ambassador of Syria to the United States is not an easy job," he said. "It's been an uphill battle."
In the past, he said that the U.S. and Syria have wrestled with difficult issues, particularly with regard to Israel.
"We are so bitterly disappointed with the U.S. policies in the Middle East," Moustapha said, adding, "The Arab-Israeli conflict is the cornerstone of all conflicts in the Middle East." He blames that intractable conflict partly on America's "unqualified support for Israel," both political and military. But he also said the U.S. has lots of power to broker peace in the region and he said that all the Arab nations and Israel have been willing to arrive at a land for peace settlement.
"The only country that can broker peace in our part of the world is the United States of America," he said. He also noted that after 9/11, Syria was very sympathetic to the U.S. -- having fought extremism in its own borders for generations -- and offered to help the U.S. fight terrorism, just as it had fought side-by-side with Americans against Iraq during the first Gulf War. "We provided the U.S. with information on al Qaeda, which Secretary Powell described at the time as actionable intelligence that saved lives."
But that all changed when the Bush Administration decided to unilaterally invade Iraq, despite Syrian assurances that Iraq had no WMDs, no ties to al Qaeda, was not a danger to its neighbors, and that an invasion would destabilize the entire region. "We said that if you go there, you would be unleashing forces whose nature you don't understand." But the neocons ridiculed the Syrians, telling them that they didn't know what they were talking about, that the Iraqis would greet them as liberators and a stable democracy would flourish there within two months.
Instead, a bloody conflict has raged for almost five years with no end in sight and 1.6 million Iraqi refugees have flooded into Syria, a small country, which Moustapha noted would be comparable to 30 million refugees coming into the U.S.
"This is causing problems for everyone in the Middle East," he said.
Asked about human rights abuses in Syria, he admitted his country is "not an ideal place," but he said that no country is -- including the U.S., which has seen a major deterioration of human rights protections since 9/11 -- but that they've made considerable progress over the last five years. "We are a small country under extreme pressures," he said.
But instead of acknowledging that, the Bush Administration and the mainstream media have sought to isolate Syria, criticize its good relations with Iran ("Why shouldn't we have the best relations we can with our neighbors who have never attacked us," he noted), and make public unproven speculations about its nuclear ambitions, just as the U.S. politicians and media did with Iraq. (for the record, Moustapha said Syria has never pursued the nuclear bomb and doesn't intend to, knowing that it would be pretext for the U.S. to attack).
"Just be humble, modest, and careful," he advised. "Let democracy evolve in our country from within. It cannot be imported from without."