00:00With regards to the U.S. public, and again, as Dr. Ali said, bringing somebody in who has formerly been a foe of the nation is not overly unusual for this administration, but what is unusual is that we're now seeing this palsy-walsy connection between both Syria and the U.S. that we haven't seen before.
00:15How have the U.S. public kind of reacted to that? Is there trepidation about al-Sharan, his history?
00:21So I just want to say in that Fox interview, when he talked about that was in the past, let's remind everyone that it was less than a year ago that he had a $10 million bounty on his head by the U.S. government.
00:32He didn't say how far in the past, to be fair.
00:34He did not. You're absolutely right.
00:35I think that the White House, if they wanted this to receive as little attention as possible, they got lucky because the U.S. government shutdown was coming to an end, and that took over a lot of what the media were covering.
00:51Also because the Syrian leader went into the White House through the side door.
00:56There wasn't the traditional press spray, as there often is where Donald Trump takes questions.
01:02It was photographs that were released after the fact.
01:04These were all working to the White House's advantage, if they didn't want the American people to question it too much.
01:13But I also don't believe that the American people would have been too fussed about this,
01:18because I don't know that they would necessarily have known a lot of the more controversial aspects to his past.
01:26But what the U.S. is doing is, to Dr. Eli's point, I think, exactly what leaders in the GCC want,
01:35which is they would like Syria to be embraced by the international community.
01:39And to his credit, the Syrian leader is, in fact, doing everything that he can.
01:45But the international community and the U.S. has to, they have to take that trust-but-verify approach,
01:52which is trust him, but then they have to make sure that they're verifying everything that it is he says he will do,
01:58so that they can, in fact, make sure that they repeal the Caesar Act, for instance,
02:02so that then there can be U.S. investment in Syria, which is what everybody wants,
02:06so that the country becomes much more successful than it has been over 14 years of civil war,
02:14and then, of course, the 53 years under the Assads.
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