Ellen Laipson's Blog (iranprimer.usip.org)
May 19, 2011

"The U.S. position is slowly becoming more assertive against the regime of President Bashar Assad, as the brutality and the human cost of the crackdown increases. The fall of the Assad regime would be a grave setback for Iranian influence in the region. But external powers with deep interests in Syria as a regional actor, including the United States, France and other EU members, have not yet declared their support for systemic regime change, given the uncertainty about what would emerge after this long dictatorship. Change in Syria over time would be a gain for the West and a significant loss for Iran."

...right after he finishes killing a few thousand more unarmed dissidents.

At some point, a leader disqualifies himself as a route forward. Bashar has passed that point, and probably took a piss on it when he walked by.

I also don't think the glasnost analogy holds. Today, in an era where information is democratized and global, it will be the Arab street that makes the decision to reform, not the outdated figurehead leaders in power today. Those that adapt to the street will survive; those that fail will be removed.

Cold War politics, welcome to the era of flash mobs.

What you said about humanizing Assad and his potential for reform can also be said about any criminal. There has to be accountability for all the innocent people who were killed, wounded, disabled for life, disfigured, the mass punishment, suffering, and the looting and destruction of property committed by his thugs. He unleashed hordes of vile, hateful, blood thirsty security and army hyenas to ravage unarmed civilians. How can he reform with his hands soaked in his people's blood? It's over for him and his regime.

Whatever Bashar told you or cared to show you about whatever, the reality now is that he has chosen, or he has allowed, or he has turned a blind eye to a bloody, vicious and murderous course of repression against the Syrian people.

Effectively David, what you are asking him to do, is to voluntarily put himself and his inner circle on trial for mass murder. A bit naive, me thinks...

It looks like, unfortunately, he has to stay the course in the vain hope that he might survive - I do not think so and I certainly hope not for the sake of all the dignity and freedom-loving Syrians.

"Twenty-four years ago, U.S. President Ronald Reagan gave a stirring speech in Berlin on the cusp of the end of the cold war. At the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall, long the symbol of the Iron Curtain caste by communism, President Reagan beseeched the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to "tear down this wall."

I remember the year the wall fell very clearly as the year I was glued to the television. I do not, however, remember Ronald Reagans speech. I was a pointless attempt to imitate "Ich bin ein berliner". Pointless because communism was defeated by itself, not the west, as the masses on the streets clearly demonstrated. In Leipzig carried signs which said "Wir sind das Volk" (We are the people), the pun being that communism claimed itself to be peoples movements.

http://img1.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/b/3/3/711/3711735_wir_sind_das_volk.jpg

The speech Reagan gave meant nothing in the revolution we all watched. It was the people themselves that brought down the wall. It was therefore quite appropriate that Angela Merkel celebrated the anniversary by walking across the Spree with Lech Walesa and Gorbachev.

Talking about Assad as if he alone calls the shot in Syria!!!!
- How can someone ignore the vast Iranian empire spreading bigger & more nuclear!!
- Even if there is no opposition neither a replacement, Assad is just too weak to stay or bring a change.
- Assad can only earn the copyrights of more words such as these words recently officials used to refer to him:
Brutal
Cruel
Barbaric
are we in 2011...

Good luck with the conference next week.

I do hope that the participants will be able to recognise and keep focus on the main and overriding issue: Democracy in Syria.
Democracy in its truest and deepest meaning: Freedom, Equality, Justice and Dignity to all Syrians regardless of their ethnicities, religions and political affiliations. If such consensus can be achieved and maintained then disagreement and differences on technicalities can be viewed as enriching.

May the Road to Democracy in Syria be the Road to Damascus and may it be via Antalya and via anywhere else - let's just get there!

From reading articles by even distinguished academics, experts on Syria, such as David W. Lesch, and the replies to them, I remain very disappointed, even despairing, as so little of the bigger story of what is happening in Syria is being told and added to the commentaries.

I taught English at the British Council in Damascus for two years, met hundreds of good, hard-working Syrians, and I regularly return to Damascus.
The views of most Syrians I know are not being expressed and it seems no one dares present them because it is too risky and lonely if you challenge the current narrative: "President al-Assad, as nice as he is, is a dictator who is leading a violent crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators."

I was in Damascus over Easter and spoke to friends there and watched a lot of TV, both local and satellite . Since I have returned to Melbourne, I have interviewed a Syrian student and Syrian Australians. I would value the attention and response of Western commentators to some of the things I have learned. They include the following:

1. Soldiers and security people are being killed by armed civilians ('terrorists'?). The brother-in-law of a friend of mine was killed by armed men. He was an army officer in Homs; he was with his two sons and a nephew when their car was stopped by terrorists and they were all shot and killed. A cousin of Joshua Landis' wife was one of ten soldiers killed in an ambush in Banyas in April. A close friend who lives in a suburb on the outskirts of Damascus rang me Easter Sunday, anxious that he get the news to me that soldiers had been shot and killed in his area; soldiers in the street and in a nearby military hospital had been targeted. The newly appointed head of the secret police in Homs, a man who had recently returned from France with a PhD, was shot and killed along with three or four of his colleagues last week. Every day when I watched television in Damascus, there were funerals of soldiers broadcast and very heart-felt interviews with their wives, mothers, and children. I do not claim that soldiers have not killed innocent civilians (This is something that can never be justified; however, it should be remembered that such killings are not uncommon in times of strife, but they are not necessarily government policy. For example, in 1970, four students were killed at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard. Was the US president at that time held accountable?) So, in Syria, it can be assumed civilians have been killed by soldiers but many have also been killed by unknown gunmen. I met a young man in Damascus who had been in (or by) a small demonstration in an outlying suburb. He said two people were shot and killed and several injured, but it wasn't at all clear who had killed them. I was told that this was a common account of such killings.

2. Syrians I met acknowledged that the initial demonstrations in Daraa were very badly handled. It was common knowledge that the cousin of the president who had been in charge of the army there was held accountable and was imprisoned.

3. There have been calls at demonstrations which people in the West would not relate to 21st century understandings of 'freedom' and 'democracy'. For example, one of the first chants reported from Daraa was "No to Hezbollah, No to Iran, Yes to Islam". (This would be interpreted as a "yes' to Sunni Islam, and a 'no' to an inclusive Islam, and a 'no' to a secular Syria.) Another chilling chant reported later and heard in other areas, has been, "Send Christians to Beirut and Alawis to their graves". A leading Islamic scholar with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, someone who has been banned from entering the US, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has called on Arabs to protest against the Syrian regime. This week, there was a call from an imam in Saudi Arabia to support the protests for democracy in Syria (Did he see the irony in this, I wonder?). Armed men, non-Syrians have been captured in Syria and others have been detained in Lebanon by the Lebanese army. People in Damascus I talked with worry about the role of Salafists in the current unrest. (Salafists were apparently responsibility for the killing of the Italian activist, Vittorio Arrigoni, in Gaza recently.)

4. A university student I met in Damascus told me that she has 250 Facebook friends and that they all support the president. A Syrian student in Australia said people in Syria 'love' the president because he is young and open-minded and totally different from the 'old-guard' as represented by people like Mubarak, (or, I would add, one main player in the opposition outside Syria, Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former vice-president, and someone with close family links with the Saudi Arabian royal family and Saad Hariri in Lebanon). People I talked to in Damascus questioned the agenda of those who continued to protest; they said the reforms introduced were substantial and should be given a chance. A peaceful protest was help in Damascus almost a week ago; the protestors had obtained permission for their demonstration to test the new laws on protests. One Syrian friend said, unlike Egypt, in Syria 'democracy comes on Fridays'; mass protests are not happening in city squares. The mass protests which were held across Syria in April supported reform and the president.

5. At least 5 journalists have resigned from Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya in protest at the reporting of those stations. A highly regarded Al-Jazeera journalist, Ghassan Bin Jeddo, resigned from his position as head of the Al-Jazeera office in Beirut to protest against the lack of objective reporting of events in Syria and the wider region and its abandonment of the station's policy of neutrality. He has been interviewed at length about this, but I am waiting to read an account of his views in the West. (Don't any experts watch Arabic channels?)

It appears that people who write for the mainstream Arabic and Western media on Syria are playing very safe. They don't dare stick their heads above the trenches and present the bigger picture.

Regards,

Susan
http://pool.abc.net.au/users/susandirgham

The problem with this piece, like those of others that sought to flatter once loyal pets and clients in the Middle East who served foreign interests over that of their own people is that it totally neglects to mention a few things:

1. Assad, like Gaddafi, like Mubarek, like Saddam (his fellow Ba'athist no less), like Noriega, like Marcos, and like a whole host of others had an image of a "modernizer" a "moderate" a "family man" a "visionary for his people" holding back the forces of "extremism" and "terrorism" as LONG AS HE SERVED AMERICAN AND FOREIGN POLITICAL AND CORPORATE INTERESTS

The problem with this piece, like those of others that sought to flatter once loyal pets and clients in the Middle East who served foreign interests over that of their own people is that it totally neglects to mention a few things:

1. Assad, like Gaddafi, like Mubarek, like Saddam (his fellow Ba'athist no less), like Noriega, like Marcos, and like a whole host of others had an image of a "modernizer" a "moderate" a "family man" a "visionary for his people" holding back the forces of "extremism" and "terrorism" as LONG AS HE SERVED AMERICAN AND FOREIGN POLITICAL AND CORPORATE INTERESTS. The minute he crossed the line from disobeying, the well crafted PR machine that worked so hard to construct his image, was then employed to lift the veneer and curtain to show at what cost that image was constructed.

2. This puff piece with its half ass justifications is almost as laughable as the one done on Saif al Islam Gaddafi, the so-called Libyan "modernizer" and "force of democracy" here:

The Good, Bad Son:
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/saif-qaddafi-2011-5/

3. As for the asinine and brain dead comments claiming that some level of popular support still holds for this Ba'athist regime, let me simply ask those paid corporate/military/political hands shilling for the dictator to please ascertain how this "popular leader" and "his populist leanings" lead to a 13 year old boy, Hamza Ali el Khatib, being tortured, castrated, and having nearly every bone in his body broken for attending a protest with his family:

We are all Hamza Ali el Khatib:
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2011/05/we-are-all-hamza-ali-el-khatib-syrias.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/world/middleeast/31syria.html?ref=world

For the PR flacks and govt. hacks of Syria, please try not to stick your tongues back in and try not to salivate too much at the videos of the regime and puppet you are trying so hard to shill for.

Why would so many smart people (including high ranking officials in the US government) prefer to remain delusional about Bashar Assad instead of facing the reality that he is just another Assad, albeit with an European background, a nice professsional background and a western appearance. How many people should be sloughtered before the people who claimed to have known Bashar as a potential reformer whould be willing to admit that they were cunned and there judgement was wrong?