Rick Moran gives us a run down on the early returns of Nancy Pelosi and Condi Rices overtures. First he gives us the latest from Lebanese-Syrian blogger Across the Bay:
The latest news came today, when dissident Kamal Labwani, who was arrested in 2005 for meeting with State Department and White House officials to call for democratic and human rights reforms in Syria, was sentenced to life in prison, commuted to 12 years with labor. (And the NYT never questioned the Syrians’ bull when they said they sentenced a suspected al-Qaeda member for 3 years!)
This is what you get when you engage Syria: intransigence in foreign policy (a euphemism for the regime’s policy of sponsoring terror and destabilizing its neighbors), and wanton brutality domestically, against brave civic and human rights activists.
I’ll end with the words of the Post’s editorial: “The danger of offering ‘friendship’ and ‘hope’ to a ruler such as Mr. Assad is that it will be interpreted as acquiescence by the United States to the policies of dictatorship.â€
The round up continues as he delves into the cases of those who have been arrested, refugees from the regime whose families are suffering in their stead, and more.
Meanwhile, the regime has made almost no effort to control the insurgents based in Syria. I guess this is Nancy’s idea of what being a mother can accomplish.
Right or wrong, I give you the thoughts of Across the Bay:
The Washington Post’s editorial page does it again, with another (almost all around) excellent editorial on Syria that for the most part dovetails with my own remarks. That is that the real failed policy has been that of engagement with Syria, as all delegates without exception have returned with one invariable result: absolute failure.
The title of the editorial says it all: No results in Damascus. In fact, the harsh sentence on human rights activist Anwar Bunni (which many dissidents in Syria are linking directly to the Pelosi visit) is yet another indication, as I have argued before, that the results of talks with Syria are not just useless, but in fact damaging. The net balance is negative, not even neutral.
I don’t know whether engagement with Syria is the right thing to do, or if it is, what form it should take. However, I am a little tired of the notion that engagement has no downside. The “what can it hurt to at least talk” attitude. Actually it can hurt quite a lot, and far more often than is admitted it causes far more harm than not talking.
[tags] Syria, Assad, Nancy Pelosi, Condi Rice [/tags]
