AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk speaking to us from his home in Beirut. On Tuesday, we broadcast an interview with Syrian President Bashar Al-Asad, and I asked Robert Fisk about this. But I want to play for you just an excerpt of that interview that we played yesterday, done by independent journalist Reese Erlich in Damascus. Erlich asked President Asad about whether Syria plans to demarcate its borders with Lebanon or open embassies between the two.

PRESIDENT BASHAR AL-ASAD: The first part about the borders, we had a letter, formal letter, from the Lebanese prime minister, and we sent him a reply, formal reply, that we are ready to demarcate the borders. We don't have any problem, because we had such a problem with Jordan a few years ago, and we solved it.

About the embassies, as a concept, we cannot say we don't want to have an embassy in another country, as a concept, but that needs normal relation. Now, we don't have this normal relation with the Lebanese, so it needs better relation to discuss this issue.

REESE ERLICH: What kinds of issues would have to be resolved in order to have a normal relation?

PRESIDENT BASHAR AL-ASAD: First of all, not to have a government that works against your country. This is first of all. And second of all, you need the Syrians to feel that they have real neighbors, not cradle for or not a hub for terrorists to come and do such terrorist acts in Syria.

REESE ERLICH: One last question, what would it take to improve relations between the United States and Syria now? Are there any steps that could be taken that would improve them?

PRESIDENT BASHAR AL-ASAD: Definitely by the United States, not by Syria, because we did a lot, and we couldn't get any result, because they don't have the will. So first of all, they should know and they should understand the situation in the region. They should appreciate the role of Syria in the region. They should know that we have common interests that they don't see. And I think they should be neutral in dealing with our causes. That's how we can get back our relation to normal.

AMY GOODMAN: Syrian President Bashar Al-Asad speaking with independent journalist Reese Erlich last month in Damascus. The full interview is available on our website at democracynow.org. Well, during our conversation yesterday with journalist Robert Fisk, I asked him about what role he thinks Syria and Iran are playing in the current crisis.

ROBERT FISK: They are behind all of it. Look, last year under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, Bashar Al-Asad, the President of Syria, was forced to make a very humiliating military withdrawal of his army from Lebanon. Since then, he's been constantly condemned by the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House, Israel, of course, as a bastion of evil, as helping the insurgents of Iraq, which up to a point I think he probably does.

And Lebanon has been allowed to believe, especially by the U.S. ambassador here, Feltman, who is now mutely and pusillanimously silent, that it was a democracy, that it won its freedom in “Cedar’s Revolution,” remember, from last year, which is actually a fake one, in quotation. It wasn't made up by the Lebanese.

And now, suddenly this democracy counts for nothing, because, of course, what President Asad has done effectively is say, “Look, you may think you have your little seat of democracy over there, but I control events.” Syria is the chief supporter politically of the Hezbollah. And Iran is the chief supporter military of the Hezbollah. And this is Syria’s work. This is Syria saying, “We're back. We control events. Negotiate over the occupied Golan Heights.” And as usual, poor old Lebanon and the poor old Lebanese are paying the price for it.

But you need to realize this was planned a long time ago. No one suddenly got up in the morning and ate their hummus and had some coffee and said, “Let’s fire a missile at a warship.” The tele-guided missile attack on a major Israeli naval vessel had been planned a long time in advance. And militarily for the Hezbollah, it was an enormous success. It set the vessel on -- the ship set on fire for hours, and four sailors were blown overboard. And since then, I have to tell you, I’ve only seen one gunboat off the coast of Lebanon, and that was miles away. They don't come in close anymore, not at least during daylight hours.

There’s another point which the Israelis have not talked about, because it's under strict censorship in Israel, that the Hezbollah, who had weeks earlier sent a pilot-less reconnaissance drone over Israel, made, of course, in Iran, taking pictures, they had identified the headquarters of Israel's top secret military air traffic control center at Miron in Northern Israel. This is basically where the military scientists are based. It’s like caves in a mountain. They're untouchable. But the drone identified the antenna on the top of the mountain and put missiles onto it. Israel has a secret code name of Operation Apollo. Now, this was an extraordinary breech of Israeli security. Never, insofar as I know, since the ’73 war, has it been breeched like this.

And now, of course, now we're having these constant flurries of Zalzal-2 missiles onto Haifa, an amazing situation, which, of course, is frightening, or not frightening, but is deeply concerning, worrying to the Israeli security people.

AMY GOODMAN: I went on to ask Robert Fisk about Hezbollah and the reaction in Lebanon to their capturing the two Israeli soldiers, which sparked the current crisis. Hezbollah has called for a prisoner swap with Israel, and many in the Arab world see their act as having been in solidarity with Hamas taking a soldier hostage in Gaza last month. I asked Robert Fisk to respond.

ROBERT FISK: Obviously, Hezbollah knew when they carried out this attack across the border on Wednesday that the soldier had been captured and taken into the Gaza Strip. But I think it's expecting a bit much in terms of coordination to assume that this was some massive plot by both Hamas and Hezbollah. I don't believe so for a moment. No, initially the Lebanese reaction was great fury at Hezbollah, because they realized that all of these enormous forward movements of the country, the infrastructure, the money, the security, the safety, had had all been thrown away.

But the Hezbollah, as I said, had obviously relied upon the cruelty of the Israeli response, the extent of the cruelty of it, to make sure that at the end no one was going criticize Hezbollah. And as I say, the Israelis obliged. Their response has been outrageous. It has been obscene. And, you know, this is -- we've now got more dead than we had in ’96, when the Qana massacre happened, many more dead than in ’93. Now, it's not the same as, for example, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, where 17,500 people were killed. We're only talking about just over almost 250.

But, nonetheless, many Lebanese now, you see, don't have an experience of that civil war and that area of invasion. They're young. Many Lebanese during the civil war were sent away to be educated in Harvard, New York, London, Geneva, Paris. And they came back believing in a new world, in the West. And they're suddenly seeing what Israel is doing, and it is shattering. And when they look around and ask what the Americans are doing, well, the Americans are evacuating their precious American citizens, and the British are evacuating their precious English British citizens, and the French -- and so on. We're more concerned about the lives of our beautiful blue-eyed white people than we are about the poor old Lebanese. And this is a big problem, you know, because the Lebanese are a very sophisticated people. They look like us. They feel like us. They speak foreign languages. They’re much more better educated than most Westerners. And we don't care about them. We don’t care about them.