Dancing with the Wolves on Bastille Day

With Syria coming back on the world stage with fury and force, one has to wonder what the French president Nicolas Sarkozy seems to think of dictators and thugs running the show in the Middle-East. After a red-carpet reception at the Elysee palace and full review of the French honor guards in Paris by President Bashar Assad of Syria, Sarkozy declared in joint news conference that Syria “plays an essential role” in the Middle-East and described France’s revived talks with Syria as “clear-sighted, frank, and loyal.”!

Only a month ago President George W. Bush and President Sarkozy in a joint statement issued by the French presidential palace called on Syria to “establish full diplomatic relations” with Lebanon, playing down the perception of diverging views between the two countries on Syria. Today, while President Bush continues to uphold the principle of sanctioning the Damascus leader and his close circle of cronies by having the U.S department of Treasury issuing another directive against Rami Makhluf’s companies, President Sarkozy seems to have elected to take an active role in uplifting Mr. Assad’s status from a pariah leader who foments instability and sponsors terrorism to a man of peace. Talk about a French stab in the back!

President Sarkozy actions today seem to fly in the face of all what President Bush stood and worked for to accomplish throughout his two terms in office.
Beginning with the correct belief that authoritarian and despotic states in the region plays the biggest part in fomenting hatred and violence against the West and ending with the War on Terror. Embracing Syria today by the French is a tantamount to embracing Saddam by the U.S at the height of his oppressive rule.

While in Paris, President Assad’s extensive press coverage have given us plenty to think about. In an interview he gave to the French press, and an answer to a question about the possibility of releasing from jail Michele Kilo the Syrian dissident and prisoner of conscious, Mr. Assad said “he (Kilo) signed a joint declaration with Walid Jumblat, while Jumblat called openly on the United States, two years ago, to invade Syria and to topple the regime. According to our laws, he [Jumblat] has become an enemy and if we meet with him, we go to jail. For Michel Kilo to be set free, he needs a presidential pardon, which I'm willing to grant him on the condition that he admits his error. he must confess to dealing with the enemies of the state”

Mr. Kilo, a well known avowed nationalist and a journalist by profession, was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to 6 years in jail for signing and initiating the “Damascus Declaration”, a statement signed by multiple groups of dissidents asking for peaceful and democratic change in Syria.

Aside from the fact that Mr. Walid Jumblat, the Druze leader of the Progressive Socialist Party in Lebanon, was never a signatory of the “Damascus Declaration”, the idea that Mr. Assad can defiantly ignore the pleas of the international community for releasing political dissidents from jail in the heart of the French capital two days prior to the celebration of the birth of the French revolution is an invitation to catharsis.
President Sarkozy’s new approach to his foreign policy in the Middle-East seem to undermine American interests and goals in the region and calls on the White-House to remind the French of the negative consequences of appeasement of dictators and thugs. It seems only yesterday when the world seems to ignore the signs of trouble that lead to World War II. The French president should remember the sacrifice this country has made to save their precious freedom from oblivion and should at least pay due diligence to the demands of the people around the world in what the French revolution have brought to its people in it’s axiom of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”.