U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry will visit the Golan Heights next week to scout out the region where U.S. troops could be called upon to enforce peace between Israel and Syria.
The visit, which will include meetings with top officials in Israel and Egypt, will be the first to the Middle East by a secretary of defense in three years, according to a senior Defense Department official.
“We’re essentially interested in reaffirming that both these countries are integral to our strategy in the region,” the official said of the trip on Wednesday, referring to Israel and Syria.
“We do not expect this to be a controversial visit,” he added.
However the official confirmed that Perry and his Israeli hosts are slated to discuss the possibility of stationing U.S. troops on the Golan if Israel and Syria reach a peace agreement and request a U.S. peacekeeping presence.
“It would be premature to get into any detail,” the official said because “we’re not at a point in the peace process where decisions have been made about how many troops, [their] position and so forth.”
But Perry will discuss “in principle” some of the possibilities for U.S. troops on the Golan, the official added.
“We are going to be going and taking a look at the area,” he said. “But it’s not going to be a plan in the sense of anything concrete.”
Perry’s trip comes in the wake of secret Israeli-Syrian talks in Washington. Chiefs of staff from both the Israeli and Syrian armies recently joined the negotiations between Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich and Syrian Ambassador Walid al-Moualem.
The most recent talks, held last week, included a 40-minute private meeting with President Clinton, according to a State Department official.
The official said Clinton wanted to ensure that Israel and Syria were not passing on “an historic opportunity” to make peace.
“There’s a limited window of opportunity, and the president, like (Secretary of State Warren) Christopher, wants to do everything he can to seize on it,” the official said.
The possibility of stationing U.S. forces on the Golan has been under increasing scrutiny over the past six months as both American and Israeli opponents of territorial compromise on the Golan and of U.S. peacekeeping missions have lobbied to stop any future deployment.
Perry plans to begin his eight-day trip Friday with a visit to South Asia.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
