Democrats enjoyed rhetorical revenge Thursday after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met Syria's foreign minister, just a month after President Bush and many congressional Republicans lambasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for traveling to Damascus.Rice's meeting in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, "is a marked improvement in the administration's ostrich policy approach, and a tacit admission of how wrong it was last month in criticizing the speaker of the House and congressional colleagues, including myself, for going to Damascus,'' said Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo.
Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Lantos led a bipartisan House delegation in a meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad. The meeting came about the same time four House Republicans traveled to Syria separately to meet with Assad, whose government the administration assails as a sponsor of terrorism that is helping to destabilize Iraq and Lebanon.
Until Rice's meeting, Bush had banned high-level diplomacy with Syria for the past few years. However, he came under criticism in the Iraq Study Group report late last year, which called for a diplomatic offensive to encourage Syria and Iran, another nation Bush scorns, to help improve conditions in Iraq.
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I am with a growing number of Canadians who believe she should be tried by the World Court for War Crimes against the Iraqi people.