It’s a cliche – and more often than not a lie – to say that any country is worth visiting for the hospitality of its people alone. But I have never met a people more generous than the Syrians I met traveling this summer.
Most guidebooks warn against discussing politics in a country that has been under Ba’athist rule for over 45 years, but on numerous occasions I found local people eager to speak about how they responded to American and European presence in the region.
Although some were vehemently anti-American, I was never greeted with any hostility when I told them I was British. Equally, most – I remember particularly the young men in the Damascus hamman – were capable of making the distinction between a government and its people, and looked forward to a new administration in Washington.
So it’s with great disappointment that I heard about the American incursion into Syria last week. After a summer in which the Syrians have promised to open an embassy in Lebanon and ‘come in from the cold’ into the open arms of President Sarkozy (presumably also thawed by Carla Bruni), the American strike at Abu Kamal flies in the face of a European strategy to bury the hatchet with President Bashar. What a waste!
