Give Me a Break

This has to be one of the biggest wastes of time I’ve ever heard of.

The State Department’s two leading Twitterati, Special Advisor on Innovation Alec J. Ross (@alecjross) and Policy Planning staffer Jared Cohen (@jaredcohen), are in Syria this week leading a delegation of tech companies hoping to, as the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon puts it, “woo President Bashar al-Assad away from his strategic alliance with Iran” with offers of networking equipment, computer software, and the like.