From an editorial Wednesday in the Dallas Morning News:
The Arab Spring message still hasn’t gotten through to Bashar Assad. Any rational observer could look at the Syrian dictator’s trajectory, compare it to the fates of leaders in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen, and see exactly where this uprising is headed.
No such rationality permeates Assad’s thinking as he presses a military slaughter in which an estimated 15,000 Syrians have perished since March 2011. Horrified senior commanders are defecting to join the war against him. The Syrian ambassadors to Iraq and Morocco have publicly denounced him.
Yet Assad clings to the fantasy that his presidential authority is unquestionable despite never having been legitimately elected to office. Today, disparate, ragtag groups of rebels are besting Assad’s highly experienced, Russian-equipped military at every turn. Defecting military leaders are helping rebel forces achieve high levels of cohesion and demonstrate tactical prowess on multiple battle fronts.
Try as he might, Assad is failing to vanquish this foe. Damascus is now under assault as rolling street battles and explosions destroy Assad’s carefully crafted image of being the man in charge.
The latest humiliation came Monday when the International Committee of the Red Cross declared that Syria is in a state of “non-international war.” This legal designation recognizes that two armies are organized fighting forces. Syria’s civil war is now official.
What would cause Assad, a Western-educated doctor, to ignore all the signs that his days as dictator are done? A primary reason is that Russia refuses to support international economic sanctions and halt weapons shipments to Syria. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says “there is a very significant part of the Syrian population behind him.”
Lavrov’s galling assertion has no polling or election data to back it up. But as long as Russia keeps backing Assad, “he feels like he can keep going, and that’s the message that we want to reverse,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told CNN.
Amazing how the trail of blood leads so consistently back to Moscow, whether it’s from Slobodan Milosevic’s killing fields in Bosnia or the worldwide arms-trafficking empire of Viktor Bout. or the scenes of massacres emerging daily from Syria.
Perhaps the reason these killers cling so stubbornly to power is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is in denial. He doesn’t want to admit the Assad dynasty, like other vestiges of the Soviet empire, is a relic for the history books.
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