The Damascus road show — no joke

So while Bob Hope and Bing Crosby fumbled along on the Road to Morocco, Pelosi stumbled onto the Road to Damascus, meeting with and giving an American imprimatur to a genuine rogue running Syria. And beyond her star crossed peace messages between Syria and Israel (a Dr. Kissinger she’s not) the trip emerged as a sorry ham-handed spectacle wonderfully highlighting what was presented as a kind of “alternative” U.S. foreign policy.

Congressman Tom Lantos, Chair of the powerful House Foreign Affairs committee, who does know better, joined this regrettable rendezvous with Syria’s dictator. Lantos sounded sadly partisan, “We have an alternative Democratic foreign policy. I view my job as beginning with restoring overseas credibility and respect for the United States.” By befriending Mid-Eastern rogue regimes?

There’s an old Washington saying, “Politics ends at the water’s end edge.” In other words politicians Democrat or Republican, refrain from criticizing the President or U.S. foreign policy when they are overseas—least of all in the capital of one of America’s enemies, and especially in the shameful wake of her recently passed Congressional resolution calling for an American troop pullout from Iraq.

Beyond partisan broadsides being hurled across the Potomac, the real issue here is that the high profile Congressional visit gave a legitimacy and standing to a regime who deserves little of either. Assad Jr. who has run the family dictatorship since his father passed on in 2000, has been shunned even among Arab states, never mind most of Europe. The Bush Administration has kept arms length from the Assad dynasty over Syria’s state sponsored terrorism, its aid to Sunni militants in Iraq, and its cozy ties to Islamic Iran. Another reason remains Syria’s shadowing over Lebanon.

Syrian’s three decade long occupation of neighboring Lebanon ended only in 2005 and that was after a targeted and lethally effective hit on that country’s prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. UN investigators implicated Syria. Ironically even as Pelosi was meeting Assad, seventy Lebanese lawmakers were petitioning UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to set up a formal investigative tribunal into the Hariri assassination.

Importantly France, Lebanon’s former colonial power and a strong supporter of the murdered Prime Minister has kept its distance from Assad. President Jacques Chirac a personal friend of murdered Hariri, extended France’s cordon sanitaire around Syria. Importantly, France and the U.S. cooperated closely in the Security Council to restore Lebanon’s sovereignty from Syrian military control.

Far from being another Easter break Congressional “fact finding” junket, Pelosi’ Road to Damascus opened the path for other political figures to visit the Syrian capital. The UN’s Ban Ki-moon just announced plans for a trip and I’m certain that visiting ancient Damascus will become a new fashionable destination for politicos tired of Pyongyang, bored with Beijing or fed up with Fiji.

But there’s a larger point. The Secretary of State and the State Department can and should be doing the quiet diplomacy and soundings of Syria, not grandstanding politicians from San Francisco whose diplomatic sequel may be the Road to Utopia.