Damascus suffered a setback in Washington Tuesday as the State Department back pedaled on a meeting between a visiting Syrian delegation and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welsh. In a press conference Monday, Gonzalo Gallegos, the department’s acting deputy spokesman, had said, “Assistant Secretary Welsh said he is prepared to meet with them if requested.”

However, the following day, the tone in the daily press briefing room had changed.

“I don’t have for you who the participant from the United States will be,” Gallegos said Tuesday when asked about the delegation’s visit with US officials.

Arabic daily Al-Hayat reported on Wednesday the meeting will not be with Welsh. David Schenker, director of the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the paper that one reason for the change was fierce opposition from the White House and the National Security Council to anything that might even appear to be a shift in US policy on speaking to the nation the US lists as a state sponsor of terror.

The three-man Syrian delegation, which included Ahmad Samir al-Taki, an advisor to the Syrian prime minister, arrived in the US as guests of Search for Common Ground, a non-governmental organization concerned with peaceful approaches to conflict resolution.

While the State Department has insisted the delegation would be treated as “private citizens and academics, not a government delegation,” they are likely there in a gambit to influence US policy.

According to Al-Hayat, the delegation’s trip was organized and is being handled by Thomas Dine, a Jewish American who spent 13 years at the helm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobbying group. The newspaper reported Dine is a strong advocate of the United States playing a more active role in Syrian-Israeli peace negotiations.

“What this is, is the Syrians trying to work the US lobby circles, basically to pressure the US government to open up a little bit to Syria,” said Oussama Safa, director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies.

“Working with a former AIPAC [director] is absolutely no coincidence,” he said. “He’s someone who has vast connections, vast contacts in the US. This has been going on for a while, obviously, the Syrians have been trying to use those same channels that political action committees in the US use to influence congressmen and decision makers, including [on] the Israeli-Syrian track, but possibly also the international tribunal and the international isolation that they are subjected to.”

The meeting with the State Department’s top man on the Middle East would have been a serious boost for Damascus, especially coming on the heels of a US policy shift by sending Under Secretary of State William Burns to talks with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, on Saturday.

While the US and Syria have embassies in each other’s countries (and Syrian Ambassador to the US, Imad Moustafa, is a constant lobbying force for his government), America’s embassy in Damascus has been without an ambassador since recalling Ambassador Margaret Scobey in the aftermath of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination.

Relations between the two countries have been in the freezer ever since, and the US has refused to participate in ongoing Israeli-Syrian peace talks despite calls for involvement from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Riad Daodi, a legal advisor to Syria’s foreign minister and Damascus’ top negotiator in talks with Israel through Turkish mediators, was supposed to join the delegation, but Damascus held him back at the last moment.

Some Lebanese groups abroad, including the US-based Lebanon Renaissance Foundation, have released statements on the delegation.

“We just want it to be clear in Washington that this is not a delegation that represents the Syrian people, but the Syrian regime,” said Firas Maksad, who noted that he was not opposed to dialogue between the US and Damascus.

“We encourage engagement, but we encourage that that engagement be conditional on ensuring Lebanon’s sovereignty and ending Syrian meddling in its affairs,” he said.

Joseph Gebeily, president of the Lebanese Information Center in the US, a research institute, worked to lobby against a meeting between the delegation and US officials since word of it first came out. Speaking to NOW Lebanon, he said: “It is totally unexpected that there should be any welcoming or talks with people close to the Syrian regime in Washington or elsewhere until we see the Syrian regime changing their behavior.