The Lebanon Daily Star vs. Nancy Pelosi

LGF Hat-Tip

The usually anti-Bush Lebanese paper, Lebanon Daily Star, had it quite on the mark when it said how absolutely useless and undermining Pelosi’s visit was to the Middle East. She didn’t go there spreading Bush’s message, as some have claimed. What she did was meet with a leader of a country that is a terrorist (of sorts) himself. Legitimizing the murderous affairs in both Iraq and Lebanon, way to go Nancy. First you parade with known NAMBLA members in San Francisco; now you parade with terrorists in Damascus. The clip from the Lebanese newspaper is below (emphasis added for political “ire”):

We can thank the US speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for having informed Syrian President Bashar Assad, from Beirut, that “the road to solving Lebanon’s problems passes through Damascus.” Now, of course, all we need to do is remind Pelosi that the spirit and letter of successive United Nations Security Council resolutions, as well as Saudi and Egyptian efforts in recent weeks, have been destined to ensure precisely the opposite: that Syria end its meddling in Lebanese affairs.

Pelosi embarked on a fool’s errand to Damascus this week, and among the issues she said she would raise with Assad - when she wasn’t on the Lady Hester Stanhope tour in the capital of imprisoned dissidents Aref Dalila, Michel Kilo, and Anwar Bunni - is “the role of Syria in supporting Hamas and Hizbullah.” What the speaker doesn’t seem to have realized is that if Syria is made an obligatory passage in American efforts to address the Lebanese crisis, then Hizbullah will only gain. Once Assad is re-anointed gatekeeper in Lebanon, he will have no incentive to concede anything, least of all to dilettantes like Pelosi, on an organization that would be Syria’s enforcer in Beirut if it could re-impose its hegemony over its smaller neighbor.