Mick Hartley

Michael Young foresees the end of the Assad regime:

To capture the essence of the Syrian regime’s behavior today, a very useful place to start is W. H. Auden’s poem “August 1968,” whose theme is the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring.

“The Ogre does what ogres can,/Deeds quite impossible for Man,/But one prize is beyond his reach,/The Ogre cannot master Speech:/About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain,/The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,/While drivel gushes from his lips.”

It was, indeed, an inarticulate Syrian ogre that greeted the decision of the Arab League, traditionally a generous assemblage of ogres, to suspend Syria’s membership in the organization. And the drivel has come in the form of indignant statements by Syrian ambassadors and officials; but also in the mob attacks against diplomatic missions, a reminder of how frequently the Assad regime, that of father and son, has targeted foreign envoys to make its displeasure known.

Were it not for the fact that President Bashar Assad, with his family and close comrades, is steadily transporting Syria toward civil war because he refuses to leave office, we could derive grim satisfaction from the incoherence in Damascus. For once the explicit thuggishness, the feigned outrage to mask the shameless deceitfulness, the apocalyptic warnings, are failing to have an impact. Assad has misled several times too often, and, finally, his credibility has evaporated.

And yet we tend to forget that the Syrians had their way for decades by deploying precisely those methods. Their fury comes from the realization that their act, the single act that Syria’s regime has learned, is boring the audience. To gain Arab attention, Assad must take steps to further intensify the violence against his own population. He hopes to provoke an all-out sectarian conflagration that polarizes opinion, thereby creating a frightening enemy, in that way, perhaps, recouping for his regime much of its lost support. And yet a sectarian conflict is precisely what the Arab states wish to avert, and Assad must sense, with the example of Moammar Gadhafi still fresh in his mind, that a civil war really can go either way for an autocrat clinging to power….

It is difficult to predict what will happen next in Syria. But the Assad order has been stripped down to its carcass, left only with the brutality of Alawite solidarity, fortified by mounting Arab isolation. The ogre is stammering, meaning the end cannot be too far off.

Poor Bashar's only remaining friends now are the Iranians. For them nothing changes. It's the same old story, the same old enemy: 

Syria is Iran’s most important ally in the region, providing a transit route for arms going to the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. The U.S. and European nations have said that Iran is aiding Assad’s crackdown even as Arab nations step up their criticism of the regime’s attacks on protesters. 

Mohammad Javad Larijani, Iran’s top human rights official [!], said he was “quite aware” of the shift by the 22-nation Arab League against the Assad regime. Its criticism of Syria doesn’t stem from a concern for human-rights violations, given that a “good number” of those governments are guilty of similar abuses, he said. 

‘The issue is that they want to generate a government which is submissive to Israel,’’ he told reporters in New York. 

"While drivel gushes from his lips." More ogres stammering.