Many of the US diplomacy documents leaked by Wikileaks on Lebanon and Syria were based on the US ambassador/charge d’affaires describing an event or reporting the stances of different politicians, but few involved the authors’ personal and direct comments, and opinions about the subject leaders. Saad Hariri, Walid Jumblatt and others were among these leaders in Lebanon. But this time, there is specific American cable leaked by Wikileaks, that fully assesses the Syrian foreign policy, and gives very brutally blunt opinion about the Syrian President Bashar Assad and his team(s). I think this cable is ‘gem’ from a research point of view! it clearly details the American view of the Syrian hollow diplomacy. This assessment is an outcome of the working relationship for decades, between Syrian regime and the United States of America

The cable is written by the US charge d’affaires in Damascus at the time Maura Connelly, who became later (and still) the American Ambassador in Lebanon. She wrote that President Bashar Assad is different from his father, former President Hafez Assad. Meetings with the father had wealth of detail and historical perspective, but seems it is not the case with the son. The cable describes Bashar as ‘neither as shrewd nor as long-winded as his father but he, too, prefers to engage diplomatically on a level of abstraction that seems designed to frustrate any direct challenge to Syria’s behaviour and, by extension, his judgment’.

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