In Damascus, a mob organized by the Asad regime attacked the U.S. and French embassies. The French guards fired into the air, wounding two, and the demonstrators stopped. Three French embassy workers were injured. At the U.S. embassy while Syrian guards fired teargas, the U.S. Marines didn’t fire and the mob surged into the embassy breaking windows and wrecking at least part of the building for two and a half hours as Syrian security forces stood by.
Those are the basic facts. The question is: what does this mean and what will the Obama Administration do about it.
What this tells us about Syria’s government
Syria, unlike Mubarak’s Egypt, is a real totalitarian regime. The rulers believe, and experience has taught them, that violence and intimidation always wins. It is the kind of government that President Barack Obama and the well-meaning peace processers and those holding university degrees in conflict resolution can’t understand. It is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq without any more-human face.
This is a regime that sponsors terrorism to kill Americans in Iraq. It has sponsored terrorism against Israel for 50 years and continues to do so. It has assassinated political leaders, journalists, and judges in Lebanon. A few blocks away from where visiting U.S. officials a few months ago were tweeting about the wonderful coffee in cafes, dissidents were being tortured.
And so let’s reconsider the following exchange:
Question: “Aren’t you concerned that your outstretched hand has been interpreted by extremists, especially [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, [Hizballah leader] Nasrallah, [Hamas leader] Meshal, as weakness?”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it’s not clear to me why my outstretched hand would be interpreted as weakness.
And yet this is precisely what’s happened. The previous Bush Administration took a hard line on Syria with sanctions and other pressures. That didn’t work, said the Obama team, so we’re going to try a little tenderness. For 2.5 years it let Syria get away with murder. Senator John Kerry and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attested to the reformist and moderate nature of this murderous regime. The White House did everything possible to reduce sanctions against Syria.
But that didn’t work. The two sides were playing entirely different games. The idea that the United States had the slightest chance of splitting Syria from its Iranian patron was always absurd but the media and academia largely censored out the multiple, persuasive arguments on that point.
The attackers scrawled the word “dogs” on the Embassy walls.
In their own koran Jews are ”apes,” and ”pigs.”
But infidels are ”dogs.”
If you keep up on the news you realize that even in the USA Muslims try to discriminate against d0g owners, they hate dogs that much!
In some Islamic countries dogs are slaughtered.
Iran just made owning a dog a crime.
(In the koran a dog that serves a purpose, like a sheep dog or a guide dog, was OK and only black dogs were bad in and of themselves.)
Too bad the Bible verse ”Do Not Go Beyond the Things that are Written” was not stolen when the koran was put together. (1 Corinthians 4:6)
Shades of things to come – Will Syria be Obama’s Iran hostage crisis? It seems preordained given that he is serving Carter’s second term now.
The saddest part of all of this is the (thus far) lost opportunity to topple Syria – second only to Iran in purveying terror around the Middle East and beyond – and to give the Syrian people a fighting chance at replacing a hereditary dictatorship with something they can control for themselves. For some reason Obama has instructed our military to dabble in Libya (inconclusively) under the auspices that these efforts are devoted to saving civilian lives. Meanwhile Syrians are gunned down in the streets by Assad and our embassy is attacked. Idiocy!
What the hell do they have against dogs? Dingos didn’t steal their babies, fanatical Islam did.
@Nan G:
That’s because dog ownership has had growing popularity in Iran…amongst Muslims. Does the Iranian regime represent how Muslims hate dogs? I know there have been news stories about Muslim taxi drivers and dogs (probably would not enjoy being postal carriers) and mentions in a hadith and a bit of mention in the Koran, but in the really real world….are you suggesting that Muslims as a whole actually hate dogs because their religion tells ’em so? Or is this just more anti-Islamic bigotry and a bit of overexaggerated distortion from non-Muslim armchair non-Islamic imams who like to tell Muslims what their Islamic faith tells them they can and cannot believe and do in order to be considered devout Muslims?