Israel Matzav

Bashar al-Assad: Hope and change same

The Washington Post editorializes over the US sending an ambassador to Syria. The Post cannot bring itself to reject President Obumbler's gambit in its entirety, but even this Center-Left mainstream media outlet understands that the odds of changing the Assad regime's behavior are somewhere between slim and none (Hat Tip: Noah Pollak).

Mr. Assad wants the United States to lift sanctions; he wants the European Union to grant Syria trade privileges; he wants Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights and grant Syria the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee; and he wants Syria's check on Lebanese sovereignty accepted. In exchange for all this, he is offering -- well, not much, it always turns out. He told one group of Western visitors that he would no more break with Iran than the United States would break with Israel. He says that Syrian sponsorship of Hezbollah and Hamas is not on the table. He has promised to check suicide bombers bound for Iraq but has never done so.

The exercise of talking to Mr. Assad serves a certain purpose, since it allows a skilled diplomat such as Mr. Burns to lay out the administration's incentives for changed behavior as well as its red lines, and it might make Iran's paranoid leaders nervous. But anyone who thinks the Obama administration has come up with a way to change the Middle East through detente with Syria would do well to study the history of Mr. Assad's decade in power. That gambit has been tried, by more Western diplomats and politicians than can be counted, and the results are clear: It doesn't work.

Sorry, but I wish the US would give up trying. All they are doing is encouraging Mr. Assad to believe that he can pry the US away from Israel and get the Golan back for free. Besides, you cannot embrace terrorists without some of their disgusting venom rubbing off on you. There's nothing here that can go right - only things that can go wrong.

UPDATE 10:28 AM

There's a reality check on Syria from Marty Peretz here. Note that although he doesn't expect anything to come out of the US 'engaging' with Syria, he doesn't oppose it. Here's another reason he's wrong:

Syria dismissed on Saturday an International Atomic Energy Agency recommendation to allow its inspectors unrestrained access, days after the agency said a bombed Syrian complex could have been a nuclear site. "We are committed to the non-proliferation agreement
between the agency and Syria and we (only) allow inspectors to come according to this agreement," Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said.

"We will not allow anything beyond the agreement because Syria does not have a military nuclear programme. Syria is not obliged to open its other sites to inspectors," Moualem said after meeting his Austrian counterpart Michael Spindelegger.

And when Israel has to destroy another Syrian nuclear reactor 12-18 months from now, the last thing we want is an American ambassador sitting in Damascus. What could go wrong?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:06 AM