In the West Bank city of Qalqilya, a twenty-foot-tall statue of Saddam Hussein was unveiled last week in the midst of a major thoroughfare. The statue was sponsored by the Arab Liberation Front (ALF), a terrorist group that, like Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Stephen Flatow comments:

[T]he Palestinian Authority’s district governor for the Qalqilya District, Rafi Rawajba, attended the unveiling ceremony. Rawajba is a representative of the Fatah movement. . . [And] if the mayor or Abbas didn’t want [the statue] there, it would be gone in five minutes.

In fact, the ALF has erected statues of Saddam in several other Palestinian Authority (PA)-controlled cities, too, and Abbas has not ordered them taken down, either. That’s because he was always one of Saddam’s biggest fans. . . . Just two weeks ago, the official Fatah Facebook page included Saddam alongside photos of other Arab heroes in a collage with the slogan, “From the sea of the blood of the martyrs, we will create the state of Palestine.” On the tenth anniversary of Saddam’s death, last December, the Fatah Facebook page featured a memorial poster hailing Saddam as a “martyr.” There’s even an entire “Martyr Saddam Hussein Square” in Ramallah, the PA’s capital city. . . .

Nearly 300 American soldiers died fighting Saddam in the Gulf War in 1990. Another 4,497 gave their lives fighting Saddam in the Iraq war of 2003 and its aftermath. The creation of statues and public squares in PA territory honoring Saddam is a direct slap in the face to the U.S. and its fallen soldiers.

Abbas and the PA received $357 million from the U.S. last year. Abbas seems to assume that the aid will continue to flow, even if he allows anti-American terrorists such as the ALF to be part of the PLO, and even if statues of America’s enemies, like Saddam Hussein, are erected in PA cities. To judge by the non-reaction of the Trump administration to the newest Saddam statue, it appears that Abbas’s assumption may well be correct.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.