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UK Foreign Secretary Sums Up the Trouble with Syria

[Telegraph-UK] Editorial - British Foreign Secretary David Miliband accurately summed up the West's perennial conundrum over how to deal with Syria after his talks on Tuesday with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. The Syrian regime, he said, "can be a force for stability or it can be a force for instability," and more often than not it has chosen the latter course through its active support for Islamist-inspired terrorism and nuclear proliferation. The Syrian government plays host to radical Palestinian movements such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad that are not averse to employing terror tactics to achieve their goals, and actively supports the Iran-backed Hizbullah militia that constantly threatens Israel's northern border, while the Assad regime itself was implicated in the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Syria's main regional ally is Iran, with which it is suspected of collaborating in developing nuclear weapons, and it also has close ties with North Korea, which supplies Damascus with ballistic missiles. If the Syrians really are serious about bringing stability to the region, they could make a good start by ending their involvement in their many rogue activities.
2008-11-19 01:00:00
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