Bill Clinton: “Rabin had watched it live. And I couldn't tell whether Mubarak did or not. I think he did, but we had kind of a staticy…”

“Rabin had watched it live. And I couldn't tell whether Mubarak did or not. I think he did, but we had kind of a staticy connection, so I couldn't be sure. But everybody seemed to be pretty positive about it. Anyway, looking back over the trip, I can say without any hesitation that it certainly met all of our objectives when we went on the trip. Everything that we hoped would happen did. And I think there were basically three big elements to it. The first was the prospect of really uniting Europe for the first time since nations have been on the landscape there. I'm very encouraged by the initial reaction to the Partnership For Peace. All the Central and Eastern European countries and the Visegrad nations have said they want to join. Russia, Ukraine expressed an interest. We've now heard some interest from Romania. So I'm feeling quite good about that. Even the Swiss said they wanted to think about whether there was some way they could support it even if they didn't join, given their historic neutrality. I feel very good about it. The second important thing, of course, was the nuclear breakthrough, the agreement with Ukraine following the agreement that had been reached earlier in the year with Belarus and Kazakhstan, not having our nuclear weapons targeted at anybody, not having their nuclear weapons targeted at us. It's a really important next step. And we also had some important discussions with the Russians about going in and making sure that START I is completely ratified and implemented and that START II is ratified and implemented and that we keep thinking about what further steps there ought to be. So this was a very good meeting--trip in that respect. And then the third aspect of the trip was the whole movement toward not only uniting Europe economically and politically but kind of getting growth back into the system. I met with the leaders of the European Union. We talked about how to implement the GATT agreement, how to follow up on it, how important it was to get the growth rates up in Europe again, how important it was to open new markets to Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union. And then, of course, I talked about economics in Prague and then spent a lot of time dealing with it in Russia. And I must say, even though they've had a really tough time, I think they're on the verge of having some good things happen economically. For all the criticism of the pace of reform in Russia, one of the little-known facts about it is that in terms of privatizing companies, Russia's actually running ahead of the pace of the other former Communist economies. There's some other problems they have to deal with, their inflation problems and just having a legal framework that will attract more investment, but I feel quite good about that. Just from my experience in Moscow, I really think that while there are, as you would imagine, uncertainties among the people there because of all the hardships and the difficulty of sort of visualizing the future, I think there's a lot of emotion to the idea that the people ought to rule the country. I didn't get much sense in anybody that they wanted a more authoritarian government. I think they like the fact that the voters are in the driver's seat, even though they're still trying to come to grips with exactly what that means and how to translate it into policies. So I would say on grounds of building a united Europe in terms of security, where all the neighbors agree to respect one another's borders, moving to continually reduce the nuclear threat to the world, and supporting economic and political reform in Europe and the former Communist countries, this was a very, very successful trip. And that's before we did the Middle East thing today. I went to this meeting hoping that we could get a signal from President Asad that was clear and unmistakable that he was ready to make a complete peace. Today was the first time he had ever explicitly said he wanted an end to the hostilities with Israel, willing to make peace with Israel as opposed to saying something like ``peace in the Middle East,'' and that peace to him meant normal peaceful relations, which is a general term that encompasses trade, tourism and travel, and embassies. So that was very significant. That sends a very clear signal now back to the Israelis. He also said that he didn't want just Syria alone to be resolved, he wanted to see the Jordanian peace completed, and he wanted to see the Lebanese peace completed. And he said something that everybody wanted to hear in the Middle East, which is that he wanted Lebanon to be an independent country with a peace with Israel. So I was quite pleased with that. So from now on, the question of the differences between Syria and the United States, which we spent about an hour on today, spent a significant portion of our meeting on it, because I thought it was important that neither one of us be under any illusions about the differences that are still there and because I think it's important in this peace negotiation that we both have absolute credibility with each other. So we thought we had to spend some time on it. We agreed to try to get beyond sort of a general and accusatory level by letting the Secretary of State and the Foreign Minister of Syria develop a process to specifically identify these things that trouble the United States so much and to give them a chance to specifically identify things about our policy toward them or the Middle East in general that trouble them and to try to set in motion a process for working through it. Because every report I've gotten over the years of the encounters--and you know, Asad's spent a lot of time talking to Westerners because of the Middle East issue--things always stop, in my judgment, at a level that is too general, where people are charging and countercharging and there's no real effort to lay the kind of factual basis that has to be laid if you're going to really argue that people should change their policies. So I feel pretty good about it. Pan Am 103 Bombing”