Assad Likely To Succeed In Bid To Quell Syria Protests

[Purveyor]

A Syrian opposition website yesterday compared President Bashar Assad with a hijacker who names his ransom fee and then cuts off all contact until his demands are met.

The comparison is right about one thing at least - Assad isn't taking phone calls from Ban-ki Moon. In their last conversation, a few days ago, he asked the United Nations Secretary General why he had called him, anyway. The Turkish prime minister is apparently in the same boat; Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he last spoke to Assad "four or five days ago." On Friday he denounced the "atrocities" being committed by the Syrian regime against its own citizens, calling its actions "savagery." Strong words for a man who only a week ago said he still considered Assad a "good friend."

Syria seems unmoved by both Erdogan's remarks and by the UN Security Council, where he has the full backing - and the threat of their veto of any anti-Syrian resolution - of China and Russia. Their support enables Assad to continue to characterize his violent suppression of demonstrations and shooting of protesters as an "internal Syrian matter" or the work of "armed gangs," and to claim that any international intervention is a plot to destroy the regime.

Assad is operating on the assumptions that time is not working against him, that his army will succeed in suppressing the demonstrations even if they continue for longer than anticipated and that even if Turkey or other states sever ties with Syria it will still be able to count on cooperation from Iraq, Iran and Russia. Another assumption, presumably correct, is that Syria will not be subject to a Libya-style international military onslaught. Assad's Syria has endured periods of severe diplomatic isolation in the past. With the UN draft resolutions intended, for now, only to censure the acts of suppression, without imposing additional sanctions, Assad can ignore the threat.

MORE...

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/assad-likely-to-succeed-in-bid-to-quell-syria-protests-1.367160