Our Dear Friends, the Syrians

So here’s a really startling story from al-Reuters

March 27 (Reuters) – Washington estimates up to 90 percent of suicide bombers in Iraq enter the country via Syria which has not acted to stop this flow of attackers, the U.S. State Department’s Iraq adviser said on Tuesday.

David Satterfield, who is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s key adviser on Iraq, said Syria had an obligation to stop “jihadists” crossing into Iraq where suicide bombings are an almost daily occurrence.

He estimated 90 percent of suicide bombers in Iraq were foreigners and while the mix of nationalities changed, some 85 to 90 percent of them crossed over from Syria.

“They (suicide bombers) see Syria as a more accommodating country through which to transit across the border to come into Iraq to perpetrate their terror,” Satterfield said in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, .

“It has to stop, it is not in Syria’s long term interests to let this violence continue,” he added.

Let’s work backwards, starting with that idiotic last line about Syria’s interests. It is dead wrong. Syria has clearly judged that it is very much in its national interest to support jihad in Iraq. That’s why they’re supporting–and no doubt are involved in recruiting and training–the suicide bombers.

You’d think they’d have figured that out by now, but people like David Satterfield, who recently got kicked in a tender part of the male anatomy by the Iranians at a Baghdad conference, still somehow wants us to believe that if only the Syrians behaved just a little bit better, they’d get better relations with us. Which MUST be what they really want.

Not. They want us killed, humiliated, and driven out of the region so they can extend the range of their depredations. Assad knows that terrible things will happen to him if he cooperates with the United States, because his own country is very much in the grips of a massive Iranian operation. Lots of Syrians are now being paid by the mullahs to become Shi’ites, and there is a big contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards there as well.

There is still no sign that the senior people at Foggy Bottom have the vaguest understanding that we are at war. It’s still business as usual for them.