Now it’s Syria’s turn

last updated 8 January 2015

The wave of popular revolts rocking the Arab world has rolled into Syria, which this week saw pro-democracy protests flare up across the country. Thousands of people took to the streets of cities and towns from Latakia in the northwest to Daraa in the south, and called on President Bashar al-Assad to repeal 48-year-old laws that ban opposition parties and grant sweeping powers to security forces. Assad responded with a brutal crackdown. More than 60 protesters were killed during clashes with police, who broke up marches with bullets, batons, and tear gas. Assad did fire his cabinet and acknowledged that reform was needed, but said “chaos’’ would not be tolerated. Protesters, he said, were dupes of “conspirators” working for “an Israeli agenda.”

The collapse of this “murderous” regime can’t come soon enough, said Elliott Abrams in The Washington Post. Assad claimed to be a modernizer when he inherited power in 2000, but he has proved every bit as bloodthirsty as his late father, Hafez. He has turned Syria into a “pathway for jihadists from around the world to enter Iraq” and kill U.S. troops. In neighboring Lebanon, Assad has ordered the “car-bomb killings” of journalists and politicians who criticize him, and he continues to arm the militant group Hezbollah. It’s clear that the Syrian tyrant is an “enemy of the United States,” said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. So why isn’t the Obama administration pushing the U.N. and the Arab League to “take as strong a stand against Assad” as they did against Libyan despot Muammar al-Qaddafi?

Beware of what you wish for, said Patrick Seale in Foreign Policy. Syria is a volatile mixture of Sunni Muslims, Alawis—a Shia offshoot to which the president and his military chiefs belong—and Christians. If Assad’s authoritarian government fell, the majority Sunnis would try to wrest power from the Alawis. And once the “bloodthirsty sectarian demons” have been unleashed in Syria, “the entire region could be consumed in an orgy of violence.”