Is the United States doing enough to pressure Syria to allow Lebanon full independence?
Short of sending 100,000 Marines to Damascus, my sense is the U.S. policy on Damascus is the correct one. I don’t think sanctions would be useful in any way, and in fact they’ve proved counterproductive elsewhere. The Syrians are not behaving well on a number of fronts, including in Lebanon, and that will continue. But most worryingly, what we’re seeing in Syria is that the country is going down the path of domestic violence. Every few days we hear of skirmishes and numbers of people killed. This touches a broad spectrum of the population, which is increasingly unhappy. It really has nothing to do with Lebanon, and it is bound to get worse.
