Syria Gets the Cold Shoulder

By George Baghdadi, Scott MacLeod, Elaine Shannon, Adam Zagorin

Syrian President Bashar Assad had planned to attend the 2005 World Summit at the U.N. last week as part of a novel policy, in the words of a Syrian diplomat, of "dealing with international affairs and contacting world leaders." But without a word of explanation, Assad nixed his New York City trip. Diplomatic sources tell TIME that he failed in his attempts to arrange tete-`a-tetes with the Presidents of Russia and Turkey. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also pointedly left Assad out of a meeting with European and other Middle Eastern leaders. (The only one willing to meet with him, the sources say, was Iran's new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.) Assad's emerging status as a political leper comes amid an intensifying U.S. campaign against Syria--if not to oust the regime, then to muscle it into better behavior.

On the eve of his U.N. speech, George W. Bush blamed Syria for not doing enough to stop terrorists from entering Iraq and for "what they did in Lebanon"--an unsubtle reference to the Administration's belief that Damascus had a hand in the February assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. The Administration's Syria strategy, says a U.S. official, is to get "the international community to speak with one voice," perhaps via U.N. Security Council sanctions if a U.N. investigation implicates Assad's regime in Hariri's murder. When the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, warned Syria last week that "our patience is running out," Assad's Information Minister called the remark a "clear escalation in a chain of successive pressures on Syria." Sounds like somebody is getting the message. --By George Baghdadi, Scott MacLeod, Elaine Shannon and Adam Zagorin