All of those fools who are touting talking to Syria, and giving back the Golan Heights to achieve peace with Syria can stop now. (Oh, they won’t, but they should.) Bashar Assad has said quite clearly that even if he gets back the Golan, he won’t be dumping his patron-in-terror, Iran, and he will never give up funding the Iranian proxy army in Lebanon, Hizbullah.

Syrian President Bashar Assad rejected Israel’s demand that Syria cut its ties with Iran and Hizbullah.

He said that detaching his country from the two was “irrelevant” to reviving peace talks.

So the point in talking to Syria would be…?

Uh-huh.

Yesterday David Ignatius wrote:

The game-changing events in the 2008 campaign are issues of war and peace. Both may be in play between now and November, in ways that add extra volatility to the presidential race.

And of course the “game changing” event in the Middle East that he refers to is peace:

The other wild card in the campaign is, happy to say, the possibility of Middle East peace negotiations. Bush administration officials continue to insist they have a chance of reaching an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement while Bush is in office. By this, they mean an agreement on paper — one that would codify the outlines of the two-state solution that was negotiated but never finally concluded during the last days of the Clinton administration. This “shelf agreement” could be endorsed by the U.N. Security Council and provide a baseline for continuing talks next year about implementation.A peace agreement — even one that has no practical effect on the ground — would be a feather in the cap for President Bush. But its political benefits for the GOP would be limited. Even a full-fledged peace treaty between Egypt and Israel failed to save Jimmy Carter from defeat at the polls in 1980. In that election, as perhaps this year, the Iranians played the role of spoilers.

Finally, there are noises offstage from Israel and Syria about a possible peace treaty. This would be the ultimate pragmatic bargain — Israel likes the stability that Bashar al-Assad’s military regime provides in Damascus, and it regards Syrian hegemony in Lebanon as an acceptable and perhaps desirable price. An important feature of the Syrian-Israeli dickering is that they have used Turkey as the key intermediary. If Turkey can broker peace between these two, it would reattach Ankara firmly to the Arab world for the first time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

Why Syria’s hegemony over Lebanon is acceptable to Israel, Ignatius doesn’t bother to explain. Still the visions of an Israeli surrender of territory really excites him.

Daniel Pipes thinks a little caution is in order.

The Middle East’s deep and wide political sickness points to the error of seeing the Arab-Israeli conflict as the motor force behind its problems. More sensible is to see Israel’s plight as the result of the region’s toxic politics. Blaming the Middle East’s autocracy, radicalism, and violence on Israel is like blaming the diligent school child for the gangs. Conversely, resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict means only solving that conflict, not fixing the region.

To David Ignatius and many other Middle East navel gazers, an Israeli-Arab peace treaty (no matter how useless) will be a transformative event. To Daniel Pipes it is the transformation of the Middle East that is a prerequisite for peace.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

There’s a group called Follow the Women that’s organized a bike ride through the Middle East in the name of peace. Here’s what a participant wrote last month:

Nearly 250 women, representing 30 nationalities from mostly Europe and the Middle East, but also the United States and Canada, arrived in Beirut last week for the third “Follow the Women” bike tour, which winds through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and - Israeli government permitting- the Occupied Palestinian Territories.Started in 2004. One of the founders is a British woman named Detta Regan, “Follow the Women” is not a race, but a bike tour where women ride in the name of female empowerment and the aim of expressing solidarity with the Middle East. It is also a good place to break down cultural stereotypes and experience woman-to-woman diplomacy, away from official government positions and media hype.

Most of the Western women I cycled with expressed surprise at how calm Beirut is, and how beautiful. “It’s nothing like how it is in the news,” the British woman next to me exclaimed.

Note that the group didn’t plan to show solidarity with the women of Israel. And also note that now that they are in Syria, things aren’t so calm in Beirut anymore. And it’s their current host who’s fomenting the violence.

The utter cluelessness of these women was described nicely recently by Bret Stephens:

For reasons both telling and mysterious, Israel has become unpopular among that segment of public opinion that calls itself progressive. This is the same progressive segment that believes in women’s rights, gay rights, the rights to a fair trial and to appeal, freedom of speech and conscience, judicial checks on parliamentary authority. These are rights that exist in Israel and nowhere else in the Middle East. So why is it that the country that is most sympathetic to progressive values gets the least of progressive sympathies?

How welcome do you figure this woman would be in Tehran or Gaza?

But let them ride their bikes and give cover to the tyrants who are fomenting the strife in the Middle East.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.