THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

I would think that Robert Fisk is on to something here.

And now – bingo – Sarkozy has done it again. This time it's Bashar al-Assad, another presumed "sponsor of world terror" – this twaddle comes from Washington, of course – who will (if he accepts the invitation française) be in Paris on Bastille Day to take his place in the reviewing stand at the end of the Champs Elysées. The man whom millions of Lebanese believe plotted the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in Beirut on 14 February 2005 will thus be receiving one of France's highest honours: to stand beside the French president as he reviews his military forces.

Le Canard Enchaîné, my favourite French newspaper, carried a wonderful cartoon this week in which an extremely good likeness of Bashar asks Sarkozy and the gorgeous Carla: "What is it exactly, your 14 July?" And Carla replies: "It's the end of a tyrant." And Sarkozy, almost lost for words, then adds: "Er – a king." Well quite. And both apply to Bashar, whose succession after his father's death in 2000 did rather suggest that Syria was now a caliphate (as Egypt will become if Uncle Hosni is succeeded by his son Gamal Mubarak). But seriously, how did Bashar, a hate-figure of the United States and an adjunct to Bush's crazed notion of the "axis of evil", get on the guest list? Sure he's been asked to attend France's spanking new "Union of the Mediterranean" (along with Ehud Olmert), but there's more to it than that.

For one thing, both he and Sarkozy smell American failure. The American disaster in Iraq – and in Afghanistan (a movie coming to your local cinema soon) – and its total failure to produce a peace between Israel and the Palestinians and the loss of Lebanon as its protégé (now that the pro-Syrian Hizbollah can veto America's friends in the parliamentary majority once there's a cabinet) means that France can move in among the wreckage for a second crack at le mandat français.

The tribunal to judge Hariri's murderers still does not exist and even Walid Jumblatt, my favourite Druze nihilist, has been in Saudi Arabia to ask the king to keep pushing for the court. He did the same in Washington, chatting to Bush and Gates and the rest along the same lines. But the United States has failed in the Middle East.

How come Li'l Georgie's BFF's get to talk to people we don't like but we can't? In Georgie's case we know it's because he doesn't speak the language.