'Engagement' with Syria is a waste of time

There are a couple of interesting comments about Syria over at Contentions. Michael Totten explains why Bashar al-Assad cannot make peace with Israel even if he wanted to - and he doesn't really want to anyway. Assad’s late father and former president Hafez Assad imposed his dictatorial “emergency rule” on Syria in 1963, and he and his son have justified it ever since by pointing to the