The talking point on the left over Pelosi's diplomacy trip to Syria is that Republicans have done it in the past and that even this week two Republicans went over there as well and why aren't we complaining about them. This argument is at the level of my eleven year old daughter who complains when I punish her for telling her sister to shut up, "She does it too!"
But since the left loves moral equivalence arguments I thought I would help them out to see how ridiculous Pelosi's trip was by posing the question: what if John Roberts went to Syria as part of his own foreign plan? That's silly, right? Well, we believe it's just as silly that the person in charge of the House would try to insert herself into this nation's foreign policy. It's just as overstepping for her as it would be for Roberts. Foreign policy decisions are made by the president, not congress. They have no authority to set policy. Bush has determined to freeze out Syria and she should have respected that.
She is deliberately undermining our policy by putting her own in place. But don't take my word for it, here is the admission that's what they intend:
Congressman Tom Lantos, who tagged along with Pelosi, said: "We have an alternative, Democratic foreign policy."How can we have two foreign policies? Especially when they are completely different. Who can our allies trust and to whom will our enemies respond?
As I said before, when liberal papers like the Washington Post and USA Today come out against a Democrat, you know that they did something really bad.
Democrats in Congress have been busy flexing their foreign policy muscles almost from the moment they took power in January, for the most part responsibly. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi crossed a line this week by visiting Syria, where she met with President Bashar Assad. She violated a long-held understanding that the United States should speak with one official voice abroad - even if the country is deeply divided on foreign policy back home.The left can complain that there's nothing wrong with the Speaker traveling to Syria but with power comes responsibility. She has much more authority than other members of the House and she can't go against foreign policy no matter how much she doesn't like it. Bush sets foreign policy, not the Congress. She can't set up own foreign policy, it's above her pay grade.
Like it or not (and we do not),
President Bush's policy has been to refuse to negotiate with Syria until it changes its behavior. That behavior is malignant. Syria has long meddled destructively in neighboring Lebanon and is widely seen as the bloody hand behind the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Syria has aligned itself with Iran and supports the violently anti-Israel groups Hezbollah and Hamas. It foments violence in Iraq by allowing suicide bombers and jihadists to cross the Syria-Iraq border.
Pelosi surely knew that as speaker - third in the succession line to the presidency - her high-profile presence in Damascus would be read as a contradiction of Bush's no-talkpolicy. No matter that she claimed to have stuck closely to administration positions in her conversations with Assad, smiling photos of Pelosi and the Syrian president convey the unspoken message that while the U.S. president is unwilling to talk with Syria, another wing of the government is. Assad made good use of the moment.
Also along was House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., who said the meeting was "only the beginning of our constructive dialogue with Syria, and we hope to build on this visit." That suggested Democrats are going beyond unobjectionable fact-finding and getting-to-know-you conversation into something closer to negotiations, undermining U.S. diplomacy.
And this from a Lebanese paper (not a conservative newspaper either):
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.So, what has she accomplished on her diplomacy trip? She has ticked off two of our allies in this region and she has emboldened our enemies. Some diplomat! Leave the job to those who are tasked by the president to do it. Why don't you stick to the job that you were elected and promised to do, cleaning the House. Someone let in all the pork in the supplemental, maybe you should clean that out like you promised to do.
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.
