Why did Saud go all the way to Damascus just to announce the summit? (Notice how every little meeting is now a "summit.") Why didn't Bashar just go to Jeddah? Was Saudi Arabia putting him in a fait accompli situation because he had claimed he was too "busy" to go?

So here we were, minding our own business, thinking the excitement had gone out of the whole Syria-Lebanon affair and that the year had seen every possible development there was. Thanks to Abdel Halim Khaddam, however, we had the farcical session of parliament in Damascus today to send off 2005 with a big bang.