On the CBS program “Face the Nation,” Madame Secretary spoke of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad thus:
Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.
One wonders: is she talking about our Bashar al-Assad, the one that lives on Earth? The one who recently got caught building an illegal nuclear reactor with North Korean help? The one who had the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, as well as numerous members of the Lebanese Parliament, murdered? The one that supplied Iranian arms to Hizballah, making the Second Lebanon War possible, and who resupplied them (and way more) after the war, making the next one possible? The one that allows free passage into Iraq for Sunni ‘insurgents’ so they can place IEDs in the path of American soldiers?
That one?
Well, I bet you think that makes Mrs. Clinton really dumb. But she has competition. The article linked above continues:
A key supporter of Mr. Assad in Washington has been Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The former presidential candidate has held nearly a half-dozen meetings with Mr. Assad in recent years, according to this staff. The two men have sought to map out the terms of a renewed Syrian-Israel peace track.
Even this month, as protests starting gripping Syria, Mr. Kerry said he thought Syria’s president was an agent for change.
“President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had,” Mr. Kerry said during a March speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “I think it’s incumbent on us to try to move that relationship forward in the same way.”
I should mention that after all of these meetings, after President Obama sent an ambassador to Syria (the previous one was recalled after the Hariri murder), Assad has not stopped supplying Hizballah, has not stopped helping terrorists kill Americans and Iraqis, has not actually done anything that we’d like. Instead, he’s moved closer to Iran.
Syria is in every way a police state. Dissenters go to jail or just disappear. The ruling family enriches itself at the expense of an impoverished nation, including masses of bitterly poor people, former farmers who moved to the cities when stupid and venal policies combined with a drought dispossessed them. Assad’s security forces have shot down dozens of protesters. This is a “reformer?”
Technorati Tags: Obama administration, Syria, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, idiots
I just saw a blurb on the news yesterday that he’s deployed the army now, this Assad Jr.
Hundreds of murdered will probably balloon into thousands.
SecDefense Gates was quoted as saying, “We will not intervene”.
Wonder when Qadaffy lost his “get out of being intervened against” card?
I think the operative logic of the Obama admnistration is this:
If it hurts Israel, do it.
If it helps Israel, don’t do it.
I dunno. You suppose that is a good predictive foreign policy model for the Obama administration?
You decide.
The apologists for the Syrian Alawite dictatorship are as morally obtuse and stupid as the apologists for Communism.
When it comes to evil, some people see nothing, hear nothing and knowing nothing about it.
Robman,
What’s the difference between intervening between police states? Is it the demeanor of the dictator?
Bashar is well dressed and cosmopolitan and Qaddafi dresses up like a crazy madman.
To our Fourth Estate, style matters more than the brutality of the dictator.
So long as as Assad has his friends in the West, he’s safe from its wrath.