Tuesday, September 12, 2006
How is Syria "better" than Iran?
Well, its soldiers fought and died in the defense of the American embassy. That doesn't make them good guys, or anything. Just better than Iran, in at least this crucial respect.
MORE: Then again, Syria might be more perfidious than Iran.
5 Comments:
By 
Grumpy Old Man, at
Wed Sep 13, 01:00:00 AM:
It's called fulfilling basic international obligations.
Syria does that.
They made a deal with israel on a truce and disengagement, and they kept it.
Not a lovable régime, but like Evita, they kept their promise.
By Gary Rosen, at
Wed Sep 13, 01:21:00 AM:
"They made a deal with israel on a truce and disengagement, and they kept it."
Because they're honorable, or because they don't want their butts kicked by the IDF again?
By honestpartisan, at
Wed Sep 13, 02:08:00 AM:
Well, then there's that whole helping the U.S. as against Al Qaeda thing ...
By K. Pablo, at
Wed Sep 13, 09:07:00 AM:
It is obvious that Syria has played a double game at least since Hafez Assad's days. Providing intelligence regarding al-Qaeda does not exonerate Syria, as it is clearly in the interest of the Alawite regime to keep Salafists under tight muzzle.
Interesting that Hersh's article seems to source heavily on George Tenet partisans within the C.I.A. Given everything that I have read about Tenet since 2003, I'm not sure he's a terribly credible judge of -- well anything, really. But I'm sure leftists will seize upon the embassy incident to portray the Syrians as eminently reasonable.
By Dawnfire82, at
Fri Sep 15, 12:53:00 AM:
Isn't it odd that when considering an Arab country, the fact that they didn't just allow our embassy to be assaulted (an absolute baseline of international behavior, BTW... our own personnel protected the Iranian embassy during the Iranian hostage crisis and the British SAS stormed the Iranian embassy in London when it was seized by separatists) actually counts like bonus points for them? Kind of like we didn't expect anything as good as the absolute baseline of international behavior out of them.
This doesn't mean that they're reasonable. It means that they didn't want diplomatic relations with the US broken off, which probably would have happened had they allowed an assault.
