There are all sorts of things you can say about the brouhaha about Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria — most of which boil down to it’s stupid that there’s a brouhaha in the first place. We’ve already gone over the standard points — the administration is sending people to Damascus, Republican congressmen are going to Damascus, the Baker-Hamilton 
Commission went to Damascus, the Israelis thanked Pelosi for going to Damascus because she took an important diplomatic message with her from the Israelis when she went. On and on.
A better question than ‘why is it such a brouhaha’ is ‘why is the White House making it such a brouhaha’?
At one level, just to score points domestically. We all understand that. But more broadly the whole episode comes down to a commentary on Bush’s irrelevance.
The president has been despised abroad for years. But that’s not a bad thing for an American president — at least judged in domestic political terms. Now, however, he is also wildly unpopular in his own country. And all his initiatives on the world stage are seen at home and abroad as unmitigated disasters.
In response, the president has withdrawn into a cocoon of his fantasies, ignoring most of the stuff that’s actually happening in the world, most of the drivers that will be affecting our lives for years into the future.
The Israelis use of Pelosi as a go-between between them and the Syrians tells not only the specific but the larger tale. Isn’t this what the US — or whatever country has the pretense of being the great power in the region — is supposed to do?
Here’s what the message was about. As often seems to happen between these countries, the Israelis had been picking up hints that the Syrians thought the Israelis were going to attack this summer. And the Israelis worried that the Syrians would preemptively attack on the Golan Heights to get a jump on the Israelis. But the Israelis say that they’re not planning anything like that. So they asked Pelosi to convey this message to Damascus — to prevent a possible chain of misunderstandings leading to war.
This seems of a piece with February’s news that the Bush administration was insisting that the Israelis not pursue exploratory talks with the Syrians about a potential peace deal.
Pelosi’s trip is an embarrassment for the president because it shows an American actually involving herself in realities on the world stage rather than stuck in denial and fantasy. That may sound a bit starry-eyed. But think about it and I’ll think you’ll see that that’s a lot of what this is about.
Late Update: TPM Reader YK points to this article that says the Prime Minister’s Office is now saying that Pelosi carried no message from the Israelis. But look at the sourcing on the Ha’aretz article linked above.
