Comment 1: If you want to build something then what you affirm counts more than what you reject, and the more specific your project is, the more viable it could be.
Comment 2: Global power alignments in absence of credible global leaders and in the midst of rising and clashing populisms and a nuclear arms-race is no ground for optimism and does not augur well for the immediate future.
Comment 1: Even decorum can be approached with ideological passion, and that the desire to remain above the fray, to remain pure, can often be quite hypocritical. For change cannot be wrought out from High Heaven, that’s why “gods” always had interlocutors on the ground and why they often descended there themselves. Change can only be wrought out from within the fray, at the risk of ending up with a guilty conscience. Continue reading “Of Guilt and Hypocrisy!”
Quoted at length by Ben Evansky in LiveShots
Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian human rights and democracy activist, who was forced to flee Syria in 2005 after he criticized Syrian President Bashar al Assad. He says the administration is rewarding bad behavior and that the U.S. decision will only embolden Assad’s regime. Moreover, Abdulhamid is convinced that this kind of concession is “another sign of confusion and weakness on the part of the Obama administration
Daniel Levy a Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation, and tells Fox News that having an ambassador on the ground is not a gift to the Syrians, but rather part of a toolbox to help conduct effective diplomacy. He says “It is actually easier for the Syrians to avoid and sidestep the pressing issues on the bilateral U.S.-Syrian agenda if American diplomacy is intermittent, fleeting, or low-level .” Levy believes the “non-high-level engagement” that was used during the Bush presidency “was a very poor one indeed, and to continue that approach as its original architects are advocating would be to repeat those mistakes and to invite continued failure.”
Ammar Abdulhamid, founder and executive director of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to democracy promotion in the broader Middle East and North Africa region, believes the administration is mistaken if it thinks that having an ambassador in Syria, “will facilitate the communication process with its leadership (and) are missing the point.” He says “successive administrations have sent numerous high level delegations to Syria…and that all have fallen on deaf ears.”
Yet it seems that the Obama administration is not considering abandoning its policy, despite the threat by a few senators of holding up the ambassador’s nomination, due to the reports of Syria supplying Scuds to Hezbollah, indeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told reporters that the presence of an ambassador will give the administration a better insight into what’s happening in Syria.
Abdulhamid says that time and time again the U.S. has implored the Syrians to stop terror attacks… prevent the flow of arms to Hezbollah…and to cooperate with UN inspectors who are looking into its aggressive nuclear program. He says in return for Syria’s help, the Obama administration even dropped its insistence on the release of political prisoners and improving the human rights situation in Syria. Abdulhamid has a few words of advice for the administration; he says that “history has shown us that the only thing the current leaders of Syria care about is empowering and enriching themselves at the expense of their people, theirs is a mafia-regime par excellence, and no amount of pragmatism and real politick can change this fact.”
Last month the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations backed Obama’s nominee Ambassador Richard Ford and sent his nomination to the U.S. Senate. A date for a vote on his confirmation has yet to be announced.
Quoted in The American Spectator
Ammar Abdulhamid, the Executive Director of the pro-democracy Tharwa Foundation, was much more critical of the Obama Administration’s policy (as well as that of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who recently visited Syria). “Nothing can be gained from engaging tyrants,” he said. Abdulhamid noted that the regime that Western governments are attempting to engage does not speak for the Syrian people, saying “the true leaders of Syria are in prison.”
“Peace and stability cannot happen at the expense of our freedom,” Abdulhamid insisted. He’s right of course. I fear that the Obama Administration is determined to learn this lesson the hard way.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 