Syria’s Assad rebuked

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, fresh from a rebuke by the Arab League, appeared increasingly isolated this week after his onetime ally Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan bluntly told him to step down and the U.N. strongly condemned his regime. Invoking the bloody end of Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi, Erdogan warned Assad to “remove yourself from that seat” or risk suffering a similar fate. The eight-month uprising against the Assad regime, during which more than 3,500 people have been killed, escalated this week, with reports of military defections to the opposition and insurgent attacks on government offices in Damascus. In the western city of Homs, fighting has swelled between the minority Alawites, Syria’s ruling sect, and the majority Sunni population, raising fears that the conflict could descend into all-out sectarian war.

It’s time for the butcher of Damascus to head into exile, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. If he won’t go quietly, the U.S. and others should “bolster the opposition” and impose more sanctions in order to further “tighten the economic noose.” Military intervention “shouldn’t be ruled out.”

Yes it should be, said Aaron David Miller in The New York Times. “Syria is not Libya.” The U.S. and NATO would be foolish to consider any military involvement in this fight. The Syrian opposition is inchoate and “stunningly vulnerable,” and the government’s remaining friends, Iran and Hezbollah, would complicate any intervention. Assad’s regime “is rotten fruit, but it’s not at all clear whether it’s ready to fall.”

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The best strategy is to keep offering Assad an exit strategy, said The Economist. When he has felt threatened in the past, he has grown more murderous, but he cannot overlook the evidence that the diplomatic tide has turned against him. Even Iran “betrays doubts over whether to stick with him.” Syria’s neighbors have everything to lose if Assad, feeling cornered, stokes a sectarian bloodbath to deflect the uprising against his regime. They now have to take the lead in convincing him to stand down and “negotiate a way out of his murderous impasse.”