In 2007, the new Democratic Majority Leader defied President Bush by sitting down to meet with a member of the Axis of Evil.

“We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace,” Pelosi told reporters after her talks with Assad.

Now the road to Damascus is the road to war. And Pelosi and Obama are racing down it along with everyone else.

Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour are nowhere to be found striding insouciantly through the desert or hoofing it alongside a camel. This road movie has an entirely different cast of characters.

It’s a race against time. And a race for blood.

Forget the Grand Prix or the Daytona 500, the real race right now is the race to Damascus. The racers include Syrian rebels in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns and homemade tanks, toting weapons and equipment supplied and paid for by Qatar and Turkey, and more covertly by the British and French intelligence services. Racing along with them are carloads of international diplomats urging their governments to give the militias more money and more weapons.

Everyone is on the road to Damascus in this amazing race. Christian refugees from Aleppo and Alawites packing in behind the tanks of the Syrian army, Iraqi militias that used to plant IEDs in front of American Humvees who have found new work blowing up churches and taking over Syrian bases.

There are international activists from around the world, reporters or citizen-journalists embedded with the rebels, Russian advisers embedded with Syrian units, Qatari trainers turning children into child soldiers with the rebels and Turkish officers trying to get the entire rabble moving in the right direction toward Damascus.

There are photographers with liberal arts degrees and two-thousand dollar cameras and Flickr accounts working as stringers for some wire service while keeping a Chomsky in their backpack and there are UK Jihadists who converted to Islam after a childhood sipping the weak tea of the Church of England and can’t wait to text their Imam and find out which women they can rape in wartime.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah’s militias out of Lebanon are shooting at Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood militias from across the Middle East and even Europe in one of those unique displays of family entertainment that you wish would go on forever, but that won’t, because despite the Hasish-fed bravado, supplemented with meth from Iran’s top laboratories, the whole shooting match only as long as it takes the side with the weakest bladders to run away, and then both sides brag about their great victory on YouTube and Facebook.