ANYBODY EDIT THE GLOBE?:

A hungry eye for Damascus? (H.D.S. Greenway, December 13, 2005, Boston Globe)

MY HEART SANK when I read that Syrian exile Farid Ghadry met recently with Ahmed Chalabi, Iraq's deputy prime minister, in a Washington suburb. Ghadry heads something called the Syrian Reform Party. The party was formed three years ago, and is made up almost entirely of exiles, such as Ghadry, who left Syria when he was 10. ''Ahmed paved the way in Iraq for what we want to do in Syria," Ghadry told The Wall Street Journal.

The real heart-sinker was that the two met in the living room of Richard Pearl, whom George Packer, author of ''The Assassins' Gate," calls the ''impresario of the neo-cons." Pearl was among the leading intellectual lights urging forceful regime change in Iraq.

Pearl told the Journal that ''there's no reason to think engagement with Syria will bring about any change," and he is worried that the conquistador zeal to spread democracy is diminishing within the Bush administration. Syria's strongman Bashir Assad ''has never been weaker, and we should take advantage of that," according to Pearl.
Which is more amusing (or pitiful) here, that they can't even get Richard Perle's name right or that Mr. Greenway is depressed by the idea of Syrians wanting to be free of a brutal Ba'athist dictatorship?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 13, 2005 9:25 AM