Syria Again 

Syria Again

Lee Smith has a piece on Syria and "Assad the younger." (Link via Instapundit). The point seems to be that the Bush administration is right to distrust Assad, and Seymour Hersh was wrong to suggest that trusting him would be a better policy.

My question again is: is Assad worse than Musharraf of Pakistan?

Part of Smith's piece makes no sense. General Mustafa Tlass recently retired. He was famous for hating both Israelis, and indeed Jews in general, and Arafat of the PLO. With him gone, Arafat's Fatah has been invited to open an office in Damascus for the first time in years. Maybe the general's retirement paved the way? Maybe the general was pushed to retire? Smith doesn't claim to answer many questions, but he suggests briefly that the U.S. may have pushed for the general's retirement because of the general's involvement in smuggling weapons into Iraq. Is it a big success for the U.S. to have a new office of Fatah in Syria?