Speaker's Syria trip 'helping terror sponsor' - Bush

US president George Bush condemned the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, saying Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria was encouraging a terror sponsor.

As the speaker donned a headscarf and mingled with Syrians at a mosque and a market in Damascus’ Old City, preparing for meetings with Syrian president Bashar Assad today, Bush said she was sending dangerous signals.

State-run newspapers in Syria published news of the visit on their front pages. One daily published a photograph of Pelosi beside the headline: “Welcome Dialogue.”

Syria is one of six nations on the US State Department’s list of terror-exporting countries.

Bush said meetings with many top-level Americans had done nothing to persuade Assad to control violent elements of the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah, who have offices in Syria, halt efforts to destabilise Lebanon, or to stop allowing “foreign fighters” from flowing over Syria’s border into Iraq.

“Photo opportunities and-or meetings with President Assad lead the Assad government to believe they’re part of the mainstream of the international community when, in fact, they’re a state sponsor of terror,” he said at his Washington news conference.

When Pelosi visited Lebanon on Monday, she noted that Republican politicians had met Assad on Sunday without comment from the Bush administration.

“I think that it was an excellent idea for them to go,” she said. “And I think it’s an excellent idea for us to go as well.”

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group recommended in its report last year that the US begin direct and extensive talks about Iraq with Syria and Iran, on the other side of embattled Iraq. The Bush administration has long rejected that idea but recently agreed to allow US representatives to talk with Syrian officials at an international conference in Baghdad.

Pelosi’s office said her trip was appropriate.

“The Iraq Study Group recommended a diplomatic effort that should include ’every country that has an interest in avoiding a chaotic Iraq’,” said deputy press secretary Drew Hamill. “This effort should certainly include Syria.”