Bashar al-Assad’s stock value goes up

Michael Young writes that the Gaza war and the Israeli electoral deadlock have driven up Bashar al-Assad’s stock value. Young’s analysis of the Israeli election isn’t as good as Noah Millman’s, which Polansky posted earlier, but he delivers a howler on former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher:

But it’s Lebanon where Syria’s eye wanders most lustily. One writer, Sami Moubayed, who accurately reflects the Assad regime’s thinking, let the cat out of the bag recently when he wrote that the Syrians “want to show the world – mainly the US – that just as they can deliver on Palestine, they can deliver in Iraq and Lebanon.” He went on to quote the former US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, to the effect that Syria “influenced the leaders of Hezbollah to stop the conflicts with Israel in 1993 and 1996.”

It is remarkable how the Syrians will refuse to constrain Hizbullah, while also peddling themselves as potential adversaries of the party. To believe Christopher’s line, one would need to have been relieved of a memory. In 1993 and 1996 Syria didn’t end the conflicts with Israel; it granted Hizbullah great leeway to use its weapons, as it did later on, then bargained over the rising number of Lebanese corpses to earn an advantageous deal – not coincidentally with Warren Christopher himself, living proof that an old fool is someone who will commend you for robbing him blind.

Young drops a hell of a last line, too.