Brzezinski Goes To Damascus

The man known as the Henry Kissinger of the Democrats and who is currently advising the Obama presidential campaign is heading to Damascus for talks.

Mr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Carter era hawk/realist and an intellectual heavyweight will head a RAND Corp. delegation that will also visit other Middle Eastern capitals:

An assistant to Mr. Brzezinski, Trudy Werner, told The New York Sun yesterday: “He is leading a delegation for RAND and they will be in Damascus. It is a high-level delegation and they are meeting with some high-level people in the region. There is no shortage of issues in the Middle East to discuss as I’m sure you know.”

The visit could be linked to Mr. Obama’s promise of reversing Mr. Bush’s policy by talking to adversaries:

Mr. Brzezinski’s visit to Syria, a country President Bush has accused of arming terrorists and ordering political assassinations in Lebanon, is in many ways in keeping with a theme of the Obama campaign. The Illinois senator in August said during a Democratic debate that he would be willing to meet with foreign adversaries.

Considering the potential explosiveness of the issue, Mr. Obama has distanced himself from the trip:

A spokesman for the senator’s presidential campaign, Tommy Vietor, said the campaign did not know Mr. Brzezinski was leading the delegation. “The first we heard of this trip was from you,” he said. He added: “Brzezinski is not a day-to-day adviser for the campaign, he is someone whose guidance Senator Obama seeks on Iraq.”

But not everyone is buying it:

A supporter of Mrs. Clinton, Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York, said he found it hard to believe that one of the Illinois senator’s main advisers would not know that his visit to Syria would appear to have the tacit consent of the Obama campaign.

Is Mr. Brzenzinski’s visit a bad thing? Experts find visits by American officials to Syria damaging and outright counterproductive. But Mr. Brzenzinki is no Pelosi. He knows very well how the Syrian regime works, and more dangerously, what it wants. Will a Lebanon bargain be soon on the table?