Thawing U.S./Syrian Relations Means... Posted by Adam Blickstein

...that American diplomats, politicians, administration officials and members of the media no longer have to avoid Syrian airspace when traveling across the Middle East on official business. A small but important nugget from Andrea Mitchel this morning:

MITCHELL: One very telling point. We're flying to Beirut from Kuwait early yesterday morning and suddenly Matt Lee the AP Correspondent of the State Department looks at the display, the digital display and sees we're flying over Syrian airspace. This hasn't happened. We used to take a crazy detour. You know the distance between Tel Aviv and Beirut, to go to Beirut from Tel Aviv with Colin Powell or Condi Rice we used to go all the way around over the Mediterranean to avoid going over Syrian airspace with a military jet. You have to get permission. They wouldn't have granted it. So now we're flying the direct route. And so he asked "what's up here," and it took a couple of hours to find out yes they had gotten permission from the Syrian military for an Air Force jet to fly over. I'm not saying its the first time cause we used to have diplomatic visits there, but we are going to be exchanging ambassadors, the assistant secretary Jeff Feltman is going to be going back in 10 days to Damascus. Stuff is happening.

Syria used to be on the periphery of the Axis of Evil. Now they are allowing American military planes with the Secretary of State to fly over their airspace, avoiding a pretty long and pretty unnecessary detour. Real diplomacy in action. Video is here, pertinent portion around 7 minutes in.

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An emerging obstacle to U.S.-Syrian rapprochement may come from Syria's neighbour to the southwest: Israel, which had, until its assault on Gaza in December and January, been in peace talks with Syria mediated by Turkey.