Diplomacy hurting blogging schedule, Syrian ambassador complains
I think we can guess at the origins of this Newsweek interview with Imad Mustapha, Syria’s ambassador to the United States: The inked-up pages of Imad Moustapha’s date book have a story to tell. In the first four months of 2007, the Syrian ambassador to Washington has had more interaction with U.S. officials than in ...
I think we can guess at the origins of this Newsweek interview with Imad Mustapha, Syria's ambassador to the United States:
I think we can guess at the origins of this Newsweek interview with Imad Mustapha, Syria’s ambassador to the United States:
The inked-up pages of Imad Moustapha’s date book have a story to tell. In the first four months of 2007, the Syrian ambassador to Washington has had more interaction with U.S. officials than in all of 2005 and 2006. He has met with every single member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He coordinated the trips to Damascus of at least three congressional delegations, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s this month. He’s even had talks with a senior official in the State Department.
Look no further than Mustapha’s own blog, where most of his entries since he began blogging in April 2005 have been about art, his family, or meetings with friends. This entry is dated April 20, 2007:
I have never thought when I started my blog a couple of years ago that it might become physically impossible for me to squeeze-in any time, however short it may be, to write a new entry. Yet this was the situation I found myself in during the last month. I had to travel to Syria twice within 10 days while sustaining my crazy schedule of giving public speeches, and media interviews. Once back from Damascus, I had more appointments than ever before. Visiting Capitol Hill alone to meet with various congressional leaders can easily consume 23 hours a day. However, spending long hours in the plane crossing the Atlantic and Europe hence and forth carries with it one blessing: for hours and hours I put on my Bose noise reduction headphones attached to my iPod in the shuffle mode, delve into a book, and read, read, and read…
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