The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the Obama administration gave Middle East envoy George Mitchell a treat to bring to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad when Mitchell stopped off in Damascus on Sunday: a presidential fiat will ease sanctions on Syria. According to the Journal, “the U.S. decision targets spare aircraft parts, information-technology products and telecommunications equipment, sales of which have been restricted by U.S. sanctions on Syria enacted in 2004.”

All of which is very nice for the Assad family and Alawite-minority business that runs that country, while it helps their ally Iran export terrorism via Hamas and Hezbollah and keep its neighbor Lebanon under its thumb.

The point of making nice with Assad is to tempt him to break up his country’s 30-year-old alliance with Tehran and to make peace with Israel. These are laudable goals, but the problem is that the Syrians have been listening to such overtures and then cheerfully rebuffing them since Jimmy Carter was president. Though the younger Assad seems like the sort of fellow who would want to align himself with the West rather than with the nasty Shiite clerics in Iran, his regime’s legitimacy rests on the same principles as those of his father, Hafez: war against Israel and hegemony over Lebanon. Take away these foundations and what possible justification can there be for a dictatorship run by a family from a religious minority?

The Assads may say they will make peace if they get the Golan Heights from Israel, but they have proved over and over again that they much prefer to rule a Golan-less Syria than to have Syria, with the Golan, run by somebody else.

All of which means the Obama administration’s optimism about flipping Syria from being an ally of Iran to joining the club of moderate Arabs headed by Egypt and Jordan is, at best, unrealistic and, at worst, seriously deluded, especially since efforts to appease Syria inevitably come at the expense of Israel.

But even as we watch the latest attempt to bribe the Assads lead to inevitable disappointment, it is also interesting to note the incongruity of an administration that is trying to simultaneously engage both Iran and its ally. If Obama’s Middle East strategy is to throw enough baksheesh at Damascus to abandon Tehran, doesn’t anybody in Washington realize that the Syrians are aware that U.S. talks without preconditions with Iran will mean similar attempts to bribe the ayatollahs into behaving regarding nuclear development?

If the goal were to isolate Iran by stripping it of its allies, we’d probably have a better chance of achieving it if the Syrians actually believed that the West meant business about stopping the Iranians’ nuclear program. But given Washington’s signals about engagement with Iran and about defense umbrellas for those it threatens — a not-so-subtle hint that nobody here thinks they can stop Iran from getting nukes — why should Assad abandon Iran when it is obviously winning the game? An alliance with a nuclear Iran that is itself being appeased by the Americans is a much better bet for the longevity of Assad’s regime than is peace with Israel and the West.

That’s the problem with Obama’s promiscuous engagement policy. Engaging with all the bad guys ensures that none of them will think you mean business about achieving your policy objectives, which in this case are no nukes for Iran, an end to funding Syria and Iran’s terrorist allies Hamas and Hezbollah, and independence for Lebanon. For this administration, engagement isn’t a coherent strategy; it’s an ideology. And like any policy based on blind faith, it is doomed to fail.