More on Regime Change in Syria

Several points were too bulky to fit into the main body of my column today, "Fin de Régime in Syria?" so I include them here:

(1) My title intentionally echoes one in Foreign Policy magazine from Summer 1980, "Dateline Syria: Fin de Régime?" Yes, I know: Stanley F. Reed III jumped the gun by (at least) 31 years but that does not deter me from repeating his quasi-prediction of the Assad demise.

(2) Contradictory Iranian and Turkish advice to Assad foreshadows the larger differences ahead between the two Islamist powers. Whereas the Iranians counseled Assad violently to repress the protesters and actually helped him do so, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan advised Assad that "responding to the people's years-old demands positively, with a reformist approach, would help Syria overcome the problems more easily." He even got into details: one newspaper report indicates he told the Syrians "to increase the effectiveness of public services, ensure a more transparent economy and public tendering process and restrain the security forces." (Those are not exactly the priorities I would stress.) Contradictory Iranian and Turkish tactics point to looming tensions between the Islamist 1.0 and 2.0 regimes.

(3) The Assad government insists that the street protestors are Salafis, or violent Islamists, and that it is protecting the country from them. As one pro-government politician put it, the regime cannot permit "some people announce a Salafi emirate in Dara'a. This is not Afghanistan." Salafis and other Islamists are indeed a great danger in the Middle East but, as in Libya, they are far from the mainstay of the opposition.

(4) Vogue magazine is unrepentant, even defiant, about its wretched story on Bashar al-Assad's wife Asma. In an interview, Vogue senior editor Chris Knutsen justified the glamorization of tyranny, explaining,

We thought we could open up that very closed world a very little bit. … The piece was not meant in any way to be a referendum on the al-Assad regime. It was a profile of the first lady. … For our readers it's a way of opening a window into this world a little bit.

Rana Kabbani, Syrian-born wife of Patrick Seale, Syrian apologist.

(5) A leading member of the West's Syria lobby, Patrick Seale, has apparently bailed out on the regime. He is married to a Syrian, Rana Kabbani, who published a sharp article, "From the Turks to Assad: to us Syrians it is all brutal colonialism," that surely ended the Seale connection to Damascus. One excerpt from her scathing analysis:

The entrenched and Assad regime is viewed by so many Syrians as an internal colonialism that, much like the external colonialism of the past, has robbed them and bombed them and impeded them from joining the free peoples of the world.