[Weekly Standard] Elliott Abrams - Iraq has accused Syria of involvement in terrorist incidents in Baghdad. Iraqi TV has aired a confession by an accused al-Qaeda terrorist, a Saudi who claimed he had been trained in Syria by the Assad regime's intelligence services. Syria also continues to support Hizbullah's blocking of the formation of a government in Lebanon. The Palestinian terrorist groups remain headquartered in Damascus, and under no visible restraints. And on Aug. 19, President Bashar Assad paid a visit to President Ahmadinejad in Tehran. The Assad regime is a vicious dictatorship that is an enemy of peace in the region. While there have been six visits to Damascus by high-level administration officials, the new U.S. policy has produced no change in Syrian conduct, but it has produced a change in American behavior: Now we have even lost the moral clarity with which America used to speak about the nature and actions of the Assad regime. The writer, a senior fellow for the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, was a deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration.
2009-09-03 08:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive