Rice meets Syria’s foreign minister

A month after excoriating Queen Nancy of SanFran for launching her diplomatic filibuster to Damascus, Condie herself, leader of the State Department’s Foggy Bottom Boys, makes the trip herself…for some undetermined reason.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she raised the issue of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria in talks with Syria’s foreign minister today but “didn’t lecture him” in the first high-level meeting in years between the two countries. Miss Rice described as “professional” and “businesslike” her half-hour meeting with Syria’s Walid Moallem on the sidelines of a major regional conference on Iraq.

So what’s the point of this meeting? Perhaps this is a clue:\

Ahead of the meeting, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said Syria had stemmed the flow of foreign fighters across its border — a chief U.S. demand. “There has been some movement by the Syrians,” said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV. “There has been a reduction in the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq” for more than a month.

A payoff in the form of facetime and recognition as being a “real” power worth the effort of the US to touch base with? It makes as much or more sense than anything else that the Chief can think of.

Still, the point is…?