Syria's Choice

From FrontPage Magazine:

Syria's Choice

By Hassan MneimnehThe Weekly Standard Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Seven years after 9/11, Washington policymakers remain fundamentally confused about the nature of Islamist extremism, the ideas behind it and the states that manipulate it. In few places is this problem more obvious than in the U.S. relationship with the secular Assad regime in Syria.

After the most recent iteration of the on-again off-again Washington-Damascus relationship—a meeting between the Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—Muallem described the meeting as a "positive beginning of a dialogue" while the state-controlled Syrian press heralded it as the United States coming to its senses and joining Syria in the fight against the common threat of radical Islamism. Never mind that some of those radical extremists threatening us are in the employ of the Assad regime and may well have been behind a recent bombing in Damascus that killed 17. Never mind, also, that the price that Syria is actively seeking for its promise of cooperation is the restoration of its influence on Lebanon—a dominion that it had to abandon in the aftermath of the Cedar Revolution of 2005.

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