dagblog - Comments for "Syria Proclaims It Now Has Upper Hand Over Uprising"

Despite public posturing and

acanuck — Wed, 11 May 2011 22:07:32 +0000

In reply to I thought I'd emailed a piece

Despite public posturing and hand-wringing over the repression, I think both the United States and Israel are deeply worried that the Assad regime might fall. Whoever rules Libya is really a sideshow; who gets to rule Syria affects every neighboring state in unpredictable ways -- and many of those ways are dangerous.

I thought I'd emailed a piece

we are stardust — Wed, 11 May 2011 02:36:30 +0000

In reply to Shadid just filed another

I thought I'd emailed a piece at FP Magazine to myself, but I can't find it now. A woman wrote about how and why the Arab Spring for some nations was prompting reactions in some of the Gulf nations toward further and further repression. If my brain clears, I'll hunt further; it was good, and she linked the players and proxies into a cohesive piece. The clues as to why the West is silent were likely right.

This is very hard news; so many more disappeared people, so many imprisoned for so little; so many dead.

Found it: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/06/counterrevolution_in_the_gulf

Shadid just filed another

artappraiser — Wed, 11 May 2011 02:09:25 +0000

In reply to Syria Proclaims It Now Has Upper Hand Over Uprising

Shadid just filed another story from Damascus:

Syrian Elite to Fight Protests to ‘the End’
By Anothy Shadid, New York Times, May 10/11, 2011

DAMASCUS, Syria — Syria’s ruling elite, a tight-knit circle at the nexus of absolute power, loyalty to family and a visceral instinct for survival, will fight to the end in a struggle that could cast the Middle East into turmoil and even war, warned Syria’s most powerful businessman, a confidant and cousin of President Bashar al-Assad.

The frank comments by Rami Makhlouf, a tycoon who has emerged in the two-month uprising as a magnet for anger at the privilege that power brings, offered an exceedingly rare insight into the thinking of an opaque government, the prism through which it sees Syria, and the way it reaches decisions.

Troubled by the greatest threat to its four decades of rule, the ruling family, he suggested, has conflated its survival with the existence of the minority sect that views the protests not as legitimate demands for change but rather as the seeds of civil war.

“If there is no stability here, there’s no way there will be stability in Israel,” he said in an interview Monday that lasted more than three hours....