Syrian President Bashar Assad has confirmed recent communications with the French government, saying security officials from France initiated contact with them, requesting a meeting.
“We don’t have anything to ask from French intelligence. We have all the information about the terrorists,” added Assad, during a high-profile interview with France 2 television.
The Syrian government has for the most part not had contact with the US-led coalition in the ISIS war, relying instead on the Iraqi government to transmit messages back and forth.
During the interview, Assad was critical of the coalition’s involvement in the war, saying the coalition wasn’t serious about defeating ISIS and was carrying out onl a handful of airstrikes on any given day.
Great, now the establishment neocons have another excuse to rail against the French.
The French have long been hard line against Assad.
The French are saying they are the hard line against the nuclear deal with Iran.
So what are they doing here?
This could be, watch what they do, not what they say. If anyone is more dishonest in diplomacy than the US, it is the French. Don't believe a word they say.
In this case, Assad said they did it, so they probably did make the contact.
This bears close watching. Things are happening quickly, not the same things as before.
I'm critical of the coalition's involvement in the war too. I don't believe we should have any involvement whatsoever. The only real interest we have in the Middle East is oil. The Germans learned how to make oil 90 years ago. The South Africans make half their oil consumption, and have for about 40 years. If we used the money we waste on Middle Eastern wars to build synfuel plants, they'd no doubt keep running for at least 40 years too. Instead, the expensive missiles we make are blown to pieces. The other problem, of course, is keeping the Middle Easterners over there killing each other rather than letting them come here and kill us. This obviously requires a rigorous and fanatical increase in immigration control. Still no reason to intervene in the Middle East. But even if we finally found we needed to, having left the locals to fight it out would mean that the polities that resulted would be self-sustaining. No doubt the people who'd run them would be even more evil than we could imagine in our worst nightmares, but at least we wouldn't be wasting lives and money propping them up, as we do in Iraq and Afghanistan.