Israel Matzav

Syria simply explained

Noah Pollak explains that contrary to what we're hearing from Washington (where they are at a loss to explain Assad's motivation in supplying weapons to Hezbullah), Syria is quite easy to figure out.

Bashar is a promoter of a remarkable array of death and destruction in the Middle East: killing American soldiers in Iraq, murdering Lebanon’s pro-democracy community into submission, killing Israelis, arming Hezbollah, hosting Hamas, and so on. This is intended not only to make Syria into a bigger player than it would otherwise be, but allows Bashar to maintain his illegitimate police state of a regime by constantly invoking foreign threats. And it ensures that the United States and other western powers will continuously drag themselves to Syria to beg for cooperation. “The road to Damascus is a road to peace,” Nancy Pelosi famously declared on her visit in 2007. This is like saying that the road to a brothel is a road to virginity.

In the Obama administration, there are a few people, like Feltman, who understand Syria. But foreign policy is run from the top. The person who doesn’t get it is the president, who seems confused by the failure of the region’s dictators and terrorists to respond constructively to his sensitive reorientation of American foreign policy. Right now he is stuck between his ideological commitments and the reality of their failure, and in the meantime the Middle East’s rogues are not waiting around for The One to figure out what level of nuance he ultimately wishes to pursue. They see naivety and irresolution, and they capitalize.

Indeed (although I'm not sure why he thinks Feltman gets Syria).

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:22 AM