Posts
The Economist has a good backgrounder on Lebanon. This country is in the process of seeing the democratic reforms of the Cedar Revolution undone by the creeping "direct action" of a street mob in Beirut. And the Western media ignore this attempt by a minority of 40% to seize the government by a coup de pouce while they are in a tizzy of fits and snits because President Bush has put his speech on Iraq off until January.
Enter stage left a bumbling second-rate double-digit IQ misfit from Florida who happens to have stumbled into being re-elected by facing a less-than-competent Republican. The photo of Sen. Bill Nelson sitting with Bashar Assad is comic, in an opera bouffe fashion. As the term implies, both of these fellows are buffoons, but Assad is a murderous buffoon who killed Rafiq Hariri and is exerting every effort to halt the UN Investigative Committee's Inquiry by trying to overthrow the Lebanese government. I wonder if Bill the bland buffoon asked Assad the killer buffoon whether he had anything to do with it? Billy did admit to getting Assad to say he's interested in working with the US on the Iraq border and Iraqi internal security issues. But on the only issue that Bashar has any influence over, this criminal told Nelson that Lebanon and Syria's support for Hezbollah and Hamas were none of the US's business.
The Wall Street Journal has a serious article which makes a case for Congress getting more involved, but unfortunately, Nelson isn't the only buffoon wanting to visit Damascus. A real parade of fools, three more of the most mendacious slippery mike-hogging types in Congress, Sens. Dodd, Specter, and of course, J[ust] F[or] Kerry are eager to demonstrate their heft and gravitas by going to Damascus, getting the photo-op sitting next to the stick-insect [can't wait to see the bouffant Kerry and crew-cut baby-Assad photo], and then coming back to be interviewed by "serious" journalists like Baby-Face Russert and Earnest Brian Williams. And don't forget Matt Lauer.
These solons are ostensibly going to Damascus about Iraq, but the Arab world will interpret their visits as paying homage to Assad, thereby increasing this incompetent blustering nitwit's prestige and emboldening him to more excesses in Lebanon, the only place that Assad has real influence.
So serial recidivist megalo-mikehogs like Dodd, Nelson, Specter and Hairdo are going to visit an all-but-open-and-shut-case murderer of the country next door. And giving American foreign influence in the region an even less enviable profile.
President Bush and Condi Rice are going to have to exercise what little political clout they have left, and use it wisely, to restrain these nitwits on their self-promoting junkets.
Ah, but there's always Dennis Kucinich. That photo-op will be precious as this five-foot wonder stands next to six-six stick-insect Assad!
3 comments :
But what are we to do about Syria?
We don't have the troops for an occupation, and if we pursue regime change by other means (e.g. bombing raids on government buildings), the people who would take over would likely be worse than Assad.
I don't think that Syrians are mostly pro-western revolutionaries just waiting for a reason to replace the government with a democratic, pro-western one.
We could, of course, try to threaten (bluff) Syria into compliance, but unles we can convince them that we have a plan for regime change that won't bring us down with them, I don't see bluffs as being a successful strategy.
As in Iraq, the US faces a Hobson's Choice between talking with a certifiable murderer of a [former] head of government and treating him like the French do---an international pariah beneath contempt.
Doesn't happen often, but as with their food, in this case again the French have it right.
Did you notice how in a recent statement W referred to Lebanese PM Saniora as PM Sonora? The guy has Mexico on the brain. It seems that no other country is quite real to him-possibly including Los Estados Unidos.
Post a Comment