Published in The Washington Times December 30, 2007
  
It has been eight months since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi embarked upon her foreign policy initiative to Syria to meet with President Bashar Assad. She made that trip against the advice and without the consent of the president constitutionally responsible conducting foreign policy. Justifying her April journey, Mrs. Pelosi stated "the road to Damascus is a road to peace." She has said little since. Let us examine what has happened in Syria since her visit that may explain her silence.

There is always danger involved in a democratic leader's decision to go to a foreign state to conduct direct talks with a tyrannical leader whose inability to respect the human rights of his own people is obvious. The danger lies in giving credibility to the tyrant and undermining support for that country's human-rights activists.

The month after Mrs. Pelosi's visit, the Syrian government launched an accelerated crackdown on free speech and peaceful activism, arresting several dissidents within a three-week period. Perhaps emboldened by Mrs. Pelosi's visit and her personal accolades about the Syrian president, Mr. Assad sentenced six of Syria's leading activists to extremely harsh sentences ranging from three to 12 years. The six — Michel Kilo, Mahmud 'Issa, Sulaiman Shummar, Khalil Hussain, Dr. Kamal al-Labwani and Anwar al-Bunni — were all convicted on politically motivated charges, most for simply signing a declaration calling for improved Lebanese-Syrian relations. These sentences made clear Mr. Assad's mandate that Syrian citizens are not to express political opinions, even though this right is guaranteed by an international agreement to which Damascus is a party. While the United States and the European Union criticized the sentences, Speaker Pelosi remained uncharacteristically silent.

Also the month after Mrs. Pelosi's visit came passage of a referendum to confirm a second seven-year term of office for Mr. Assad. In a general election reminiscent of the sham elections that took place in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's reign — with only one candidate on the ballot — Mr. Assad received 97.2 percent of the vote. While this obviously would be a shocking tally in a democracy, it is not so in a dictatorship. However, not even in a country like Russia, where democracy is on the ropes as it transitions to dictatorship, did Mr. Putin receive such an impressive landslide vote or appear as the only candidate.

After Mr. Assad's victory, the Syrian interior minister commented, astonishingly with a straight face, "This great consensus shows the political maturity of Syria and the brilliance of our democracy." A U.S. State Department spokesman complemented Mr. Assad for having "defeated exactly zero other candidates." Again, Mrs. Pelosi remained silent, offering no criticism of the Syrian grinch who stole the election.

But perhaps the most telling development in the wake of Mrs. Pelosi's visit to Syria occurred on Sept. 6. Israeli aircraft entered Syrian airspace to attack a facility under construction at Dayr az-Zawr. Damascus was secretly building, with assistance from North Korea, a nuclear reactor. Development of the facility had reached the point Israel no longer felt safe to allow it to continue — so the reactor was destroyed. But the attempted construction raises the question if the road leading to the reactor was the same "road to peace" to which Mrs. Pelosi referred. Unsurprisingly, not only was Mrs. Pelosi silent on this development and the Israeli attack but so too was Mr. Assad.

This year draws to a close, but not without Syria having attained two other benchmarks. On Dec. 9, Mr. Assad launched yet another crackdown on domestic human-rights activists. This time, seven arrests were made within a week. And, as revealed in a Dec. 18 Defense Department document titled "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq," it is now reported Syria is the entry point for 90 percent of all foreign terrorists into Iraq.

News of these events unfolding in Syria should cause one grave concern. If Speaker Pelosi still believes the road to Damascus is truly the road to peace, her GPS is in desperate need of recalibration.