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Referring to the two
issues, Assad said in his speech to parliament, which lasted more than an hour
on Sunday:
- “When a surgeon in an operating room... cuts and cleans and amputates, and the wound bleeds, do we say to him your hands are stained with blood? Or do we thank him for saving the patient?”
- “What happened in Houla and elsewhere are brutal massacres that even monsters would not have carried out… If we don't feel the pain that squeezes our hearts, as I felt it, for the cruel scenes -- especially the children -- then we are not human beings.”
Atwan retorts in his editorial
today:
- President Assad goofed “when he said the surgeon stains his hands in blood to save the patient because the Syrian surgeon he had in mind could hemorrhage the patient without saving him.”
- “I totally agree with Assad’s description of perpetrators of the Houla massacre as ‘monsters.’ But he did not acknowledge the monsters were Syrians loyal to the regime and protected by its military and security forces… If he is so sure of their innocence, all he has to do is allow an independent international investigation into the massacre and undertake to hold accountable all those responsible.”
The West has taken
advantage over global outrage over Houla to reach out to Syria's ally and
protector Russia to join a coordinated effort to resolve the 15-month-old
conflict that has claimed well over 10,000 lives.
Russian President Vladimir
Putin is today hosting European Union chiefs in St. Petersburg for his new
presidency’s first summit to discuss, among other matters, Russia's Syria
policy.
Speaking Sunday in
Stockholm, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Russia to help start a
political transition in Syria, the outcome of which she says should be Assad's
ouster.
“Assad's departure does
not have to be a precondition, but it should be an outcome so that the people
of Syria have a chance to express themselves,” she said.
Russian Foreign Minister
Lavrov has spoken of the ongoing political transition in Yemen as an example of
something that might work in Syria. That, according to Clinton, would
require much more active participation from Moscow.
"It took a lot
of time and effort with a number of countries who were involved at the table
working to achieve a political transition. And we would like to see the
same occur in Syria," she said.
FIVE SCENARIOS
Political analyst Nassif Hitti, guest writer of today’s think piece
titled “Syrian scenarios”
for the Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily al-Hayat,
believes the Yemen example is one of five likely dénouements in Syria.
The scenarios are:
1) Disintegration and
crisis management, whereby the process would be chaperoned by a diplomatic drive
to try and extinguish the unrest fire. “Syria would enter the stage of
drawn-out social
conflict, when violence would ebb and flow until the emergence of areas –
no matter how small or for how long – outside of state authority. State
institutions would degenerate and the state itself would become weaker than the
regime. All manner of armed violence would hold sway in the Syrian arena, with
no peaceful or definite political solution in sight.”
2) Afghanization
comparable with the struggle against the Najibullah regime
in Afghanistan. Persistence of violence as the only way to settle the crisis, coupled
with the absence of a political horizon, would amplify the revolution’s militancy
and radicalism. With Styria sitting on the region’s strongly sectarian volcanic
fault line, the Syrian arena would mobilize and magnetize international
jihadist fighters. Should this scenario take hold, an Arab Afghanistan would be
implanted in the Arab Mashreq.
3) Iraqization, which would feature the fall and breakdown
of state authority with time and the outbreak of internal strife among the
country’s original components under enticing “national” slogans. The slogans
would lure and mobilize one particular component but fail to build bridges with
its counterparts. Internecine strife among the initial constituents would reign
supreme, leading the state to wear away and killing the chances of a viable
“national” solution.
4) Lebanonization, or civil war as in Lebanon,
with neighborly or distant meddlers and a Lebanese-style system of democratic
governance rooted in consensual sectarianism. The system would be vulnerable
and prone to external meddling. We’ve already seen the Lebanonization of the
regime in Iraq and we can catch a glimpse of the Iraqization of Syria’s
situation.
5) Yemenization, or a political transition as
underway in Yemen despite the obstacles and fundamental differences between
Syria and Yemen concerning the role of outside forces and the tenacity of the
two regimes. Besides, Yemenization means the head of state bowing out and the
regime staying in place, albeit with minor changes. Such a scenario remains brittle
and susceptible to culminate in one of the four aforementioned dénouements.
