Bashar al-Assad's Joke

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has issued a decree to set up diplomatic ties with Lebanon and open an embassy...The decree announced "the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Syrian Arab Republic and the Lebanese Republic and the creation of a diplomatic mission at ambassador level in the Lebanese capital Beirut," Syria's official news agency reported...the two sides also agreed to tackle longstanding Lebanese demands to demarcate borders and investigate the question of missing Lebanese prisoners in Syria.

...Syrian troops left Lebanon in 2005 ending years of military and political domination by the giant neighbour...But tensions have been raised again since September when Syria deployed 10,000 troops on the northern Lebanese border, prompting anti-Syria politicians in Beirut to raise the possibility of an invasion.

...Many Lebanese blame Syria for the killing of former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri in 2005.

...Syria's close ally, the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, which has Lebanon's most powerful military force, is now part of a national unity government and has the power of veto over its decisions.

This funny if only because why should Syria require diplomatic relations if they already dominate Lebanon? After all, according to the Great Syria ideology which guides al-Assad, Lebanon is a natural element of that eventual geographical entity.

And how large is "Greater Syria"?

In the Syrian nationalist irredentist ideology developed by the founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the Lebanese Antun Saadeh, Greater Syria is seen as the geographic environment in which the Syrian nation state evolved. Initially considered co-terminus with historic Syria as described above, Saadeh later expanded it to include the Sinai, Iraq, Kuwait and Cyprus. He pointed to what he considered to be the region's distinct natural boundaries, and described it as extending from the Taurus range in the northwest and the Zagros Mountains in the northeast to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the south and includes the Sinai Peninsula and the Gulf of Aqaba, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including the island of Cyprus, to the arch of the Arabian Desert and the Persian Gulf in the east.

I trust you noticed that that Wikipedia description doesn't mention Israel although it is smack in the middle of that territory (would it be described as "occupied teritories" if it ever comes about?).

As Daniel Pipes highlighted the problem:

On first entering Syria, the observant traveler will probably be startled to go through passport control and notice a military map of Syria on the wall, for this map contains several anomalies. It shows the Golan Heights under Syrian control, though they have been occupied by Israel since 1967. Syria's boundaries with Lebanon and Jordan appear not as international borders but as something called "regional" borders. Israel does not even exist; instead, there is a state called Palestine. And Palestine is separated from Syria by a line designated a "temporary" border". Finally, the province of Hatay, a part of Turkey since 1939, appears to be included in Syria; only on close inspection can one see the "temporary" border between it and Syria.

That aspect of the situation, the BBC declined to deal with.