Once again, Mark Steyn proves himself the pre—eminent pundit. His Telegraph column contains much wisdom and humor, as we are accustomed to seeing from him. I was particularly struck by his neo—realism here:

The New York Times' Thomas Friedman was arguing a couple of weeks back that Syria plays by "Hama rules" — a reference to the town whose inhabitants Pop Assad slaughtered en masse. I think he's wrong. Those days are over. Even if you've got the stomach for it, with 150,000 US troops on your border going the exhibitionist corpse—piling route is a much bigger gamble than it was in the "stability" era. Syria, at the very minimum, is being neutralised and turned in on itself.

Thomas Lifson  3 8 05