Don't court Assad

[Halle]

Who is more cynical: Syrian President Bashar Assad for offering to open peace talks while continuing to support terror, or President Moshe Katsav, who invites him to visit, fully expecting a rebuff?

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Procedurally, we have a problem with Katsav pretending that he can unilaterally invite his nominal Syrian counterpart, ostensibly without coordination with the Prime Minister's Office. If an move like this is to be taken seriously, it must be made by the prime minister, as was Menachem Begin's offer to Anwar Sadat in 1977. Then too, Katsav's offer of a "no pre-conditions" visit seemed to be at odds with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's conditioning talks on Assad ending his attacks on Israel through his proxies, Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad. This is no way to run a railroad.

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Despite this, we pretend that we must compete with Assad in presenting our bona fides for peace. Maybe this wins us five bonus points on the US State Department's naughty-and-nice scorecard. But it also makes us complicit in the lie that peace in the Middle East requires better communication between Arabs and Israelis, rather than a genuinely progressive leadership in Arab capitals.

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http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1073881744567

[Erica Cartman]

1. Well, yeah!

Just last week, security sources revealed that the Syrian planes that brought relief to Iranian earthquake victims flew back with weapons for Hizbullah. According to The Miami Herald, Bush administration officials are debating taking military action against Syria "as evidence mounts that the government in Damascus is stepping up support for the terror group Hizbullah and allowing anti-American insurgents to reach Iraq." The US has even reportedly cautioned Israel about responding too warmly to Assad's diplomatic overtures.

"In this context, it is absurd for Israel to act as if its problem with Syria were completely isolated from Syria's troublemaking in Iraq, and as if it matters nothing that Assad's tyranny represents the exact opposite of the political transformation that the US is seeking in the region.

When is Israel, not just the US, going to start acting as if freedom and democracy matter?

This is exactly what passed for "realism" in the US before 9/11. And it is what passed for pragmatism here in the Oslo years, when Yitzhak Rabin concluded that he'd rather have Yasser Arafat "cracking the skulls" of terrorist leaders than doing the dirty work himself. What we have since discovered is that there is no such thing as "our son-of-a-bitch," that a Palestinian dictator is as much a threat to us as he is to his own people. What the Palestinians need, no less than Arabs living under other Arab regimes, is a new birth of freedom, not a modulated despotism."

[Aidoneus]

2. Not familiar with the incident mentioned at the start

The point made in the title of the original piece above seems somewhat moot, as al-Assad believes that there can be no "peace" while Sharon leads the government. I agree & disagree with this idea:--the Bulldozer's typical proclivities stongly suggest against it, but he's perhaps the one Israeli politician who can do something really radical without getting butchered for it the next day (the Yesha militants will remember how much he's done for them, and then wait a week before shooting his ass and building shrines to the "hero" who offs him).

I think they should arm Hizbullah to the teeth and hand out weapons to all people in south Lebanon, so that if Israel wants to occupy it kill people there and destroy their lives again, they'll bury themselves trying.

Wouldn't that just make your day if the "W" gangs did your dirty work in Syria also?

And on the side, "a new birth of freedom" for Palestinians would perhaps mean that the Israeli military stops killing people in their cities for just a short period. That's a good start, and has not yet been tried. Perhaps whoever wrote this piece should not be thinking aloud about which of Israel's rivals needs to be overthrown next, but rather why Israel has effectively gotten away with what it has and be thankful that such is so. I'm sorry that the hopes of Yitzak "break their bones" Rabin's for a quisling puppet PA regime fell apart (leaving a pathetic eunuch trapped between hammer & anvil), hopefully it continues to do so and with a more useful and honest face to it.

It's surprising to me how far I've drifted on this over a couple years' time..