What would Assad Choose?

Assad is up and kicking, with Damascus prime national export to Iraq is hitting the shelves again.
No, it is not "Barazee", Syria's famous cookies, but rather "Islamic foreign combatants".

An unnamed senior US military official told the Washington Post on Sunday, that number of
foreign fighters being pushed through the network has risen from "less than half a dozen" to "20 a month".

The Post reported that Syria had reactivated a network used by Al-Qaeda to smuggle Islamic fighters into Iraq, something very similar to what General David Petraeus, Chief of US Central Command, told Congress late last month.

Syria, being unable to deliver on US demands to help halting Hamas and Hezbollah activities, is fishing for bargains with Washington in Iraq. Hence, what better bate would Damascus have than this "reactivated pipeline", given that US troops have begun preparing for withdrawal.

CBS News reported on that same Sunday night (what a tough newsy weekend for Assad), that Syria has rebuilt the structure which housed the reactor bombed by Israel last year and has turned the site into a facility for manufacturing chemical and biological weapons.

Official sources told the network that Syria had significantly expanded its biological and chemical weapons program by doing so.

David Bedein, Philadelphia's "The Bulletin" Middle East Correspondent, wrote the following:

A senior American intelligence source in Washington told the Israeli media Syria had denied having rebuilt the structure and also denied it was part of its biological and chemical weapons program. American satellite imagery, however, showed unequivocally that Syria was lying.

The discovery of the renewed Syrian biological and chemical weapons program adds to a series of differences of opinion that has left the Syrians and Americans in a deadlock.

In the mean time Syria is still the destination of some leaders, and events will shed more light on how much the Syrian regime is ready to "play a positive role". Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas is due in Damascus on Thursday for talks with Assad. The PA chief needs Syrian efforts to tame Hamas in the "under Egyptian auspices national dialogue" to form a government of national unity.

Assad already met with and Jordan's King Abdullah II who is on board of a promotion campaign for a US peace initiative dubbed as "57-state solution". The new American plan, something close to Arab Initiative For Peace on steroids, aims at seeing the Arab and Muslim world recognise Israel as part of the deal.

For Assad to be part of this Washington says "he knows what he needs to do".

Abdullah told Britain's The Times newspaper on Monday that "the world is going to be sucked into another conflict in the Middle East" if peace failed. The Jordanian king warned that "If we delay our peace negotiations, then there is going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12-18 months".

Time is running short and Assad has to pick sides before it is too late.