With an uneasy smile the British diplomat said his next posting could well be Damascus. “Give it a year or two and you can bet we’ll be reopening our embassy,” he said in an off-the-cuff remark.
The comment to the Sunday Telegraph revealed just how much the political winds have shifted on Syria. While it has been the UK’s long-standing position that President Bashar al-Assad must go, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt admitted this week that he is now very much “here to stay".
After Assad led a brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters in 2011, Syria was cast out as an international pariah. It lost its seat at the Arab League, was hit by crippling sanctions and for the preceding years was the subject…