I have already expressed my doubts about our president's idea of a Mediterranean Union, but, although the preliminary meeting to start things moving towards such a Union seem unlikely to get anywhere, due in part to the absence of Mouamar Khadhafi of Libya, a key player in North Africa and in particular among the other countries of the Maghreb Union (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania).
However, Mr Sarkozy's ambition to launch this new Union has more or less obliged him to invite Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, a country bordering on the Mediterranean which has an important part of its territory under brutal enemy occupation.
This is in itself a good thing, in that it means that relations between France and Syria, frozen after the unsubstantiated allegations that Syria was in some way implicated in the murder of Rafiq Hariri, a former Lebanese prime-minister, known for his subservience to the interests of the rulers of Saudi Arabia. On the basis of looking first to see who could benefit from Mr Hariri's death, the obvious suspect is the Mossad (or some other emanation of the Zionist entity), and it is difficult to imagine why Syria should want to be rid of a man who was so transparently in the pay of a foreign power, a situation which made him unpopular even among his fellow Sunni citizens, and made Syria's friends more popular. Unfortunately, the victim also had close links to our then president, Jacques Chirac, which explains the sudden freeze on diplomatic relations.
Let us hope that Mr Sarkozy can see a benefit in pressing for the liberation of Syria's occupied territory, which would improve enormously his standing in the Arab world, and be a move towards the peace with justice which all honest folk seek in that part of the world.
We must now await the results of the meetings taking part in Paris today (12th July) and tomorrow to find out what is likely to happen next, but we cannot expect a miracle just because certain rulers are actually going to sit down together. We have to remember that the enemy occupant shows no sign whatsoever of being willing to give back the seized lands in Syria (or even the much smaller area of the Lebanon.
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