In the stone courtyard of a Syrian restaurant in the old quarter of Damascus, the leaders sat beneath a cedar tree and talked about terrorism. Syria's veteran Foreign Minister, Mr Farouk al-Shara, was hosting the European Union's senior foreign policy officials on the last leg of a five-day tour of five Middle Eastern and Asian countries. As they sipped Lebanese wine the conversation turned into an explosive argument about how to define terrorism.
At a press conference on Thursday, Mr al-Shara had declared that organisations such as Hizbollah were legitimate resistance movements that should not be treated in the same way as the perpetrators of the attacks on the US.
The External Affairs Commissioner, Mr Chris Patten, replied that, regardless of definitions, organisations that sent people out to murder innocent civilians were wrong. "We think that political problems should be solved by political means, not by murdering innocent people," he said.
As Mr Patten spoke, the EU's foreign policy chief, Mr Javier Solana, sat silently. As the EU's foreign policy "troika", which also includes Belgium's Foreign Minister, Mr Louis Michel, visited Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria this week, Mr Solana was always the least talkative.
Once, in Tehran, when Mr Solana and Mr Michel conspicuously avoided answering an awkward question, their reticence looked almost like cowardice.
But the former Spanish foreign minister was unapologetic. Foreign policy, he said, required discretion and as someone with an increasingly important role in the Middle East peace process, he had to be particularly careful with his words.
Mr Michel, as the current president of the European Council, was the leader of this week's delegation. But when Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres or Colin Powell want to call the EU, the phone usually rings in Mr Solana's pocket.
He would not say if Washington had told him when the expected military action would start but he was confident that any action would be targeted and strictly limited. As a former secretary general of NATO, Mr Solana is aware that any military action could kill innocent civilians.
"I have to accept it, yes. I accepted it in Kosovo. I was at that point in the driving seat. It was very sad and very terrible but it's impossible otherwise. It's just impossible. You have to choose between doing nothing or doing it with a risk. Of course you have to limit the risk. But there's always a risk," he said.
Earlier, the EU delegation had emerged from friendly talks with Iran's President and Foreign Minister only to discover that the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameini, had ruled out any help for US action against Afghanistan.
Mr Solana was sanguine about the Ayatollah's comments, which he said reflected the complex political structure of Iran.
"We cannot change Iran in 24 hours. But they made clear they are interested in a dialogue. We have to put this in perspective. The attacks of the 11th of September were a turning point. They changed something. And everybody now wants to and has to find his place in this changed world," he said.
Mr Solana believes that any military action against Afghanistan will be on a relatively small scale and will chiefly involve special forces rather than infantry divisions. Few European countries, if any, are likely to be actively involved but Mr Solana maintains the EU can play an important role in the long-term fight against terrorism. "You cannot fight that with tanks or precision weapons. You have to do it with information. You have do it with intelligence. That's the only manner in which you can destroy such networks. It's not physical, it's not a bridge or a tower. . .This is much more. It's people who are intelligent, who have tremendous means. So it has to be intelligence that can destroy this," he said.
It is in this phase of the "war against terrorism" - a term Mr Solana regards as misleading - that the EU hopes to involve Arab countries. In states such as Iran and Syria, with which the US has no diplomatic relations, the EU provides the only channel for dialogue with the West.