INDEED: Michael Young to the Obama White House: “The last thing [Syria’s Bashar al-Assad] will ever do if he manages to repress his own people is undermine this by negotiating with Israel.”

The White House, though, is hardly the only place in the American government where foreign policy makers don’t understand this. As our Secretary of State recently said, members of both the Republican and Democratic parties believe Assad is a “reformer.” It doesn’t take more than a decade for an absolute dictator to reform his own system, and reformers don’t shoot hundreds of unarmed kids in the back while calling them pawns in a Jewish conspiracy.