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BIRDS OF A FEATHER: Assad in his interview and Putin in his hang glider next to a Siberian white crane
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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has rehashed his
lines.
He tells Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram al-Arabi in an interview appearing in full tomorrow,
Saturday:
- The terrorists won’t win, but defeating them will take time
- The Libyan scenario won’t be repeated in Syria
- Saudi Arabia and Qatar are nouveaux riche and the West’s surrogates
- Qatar was the quickest to fuel violence in Syria
- Saudi Arabia was behind Israel’s 1967 war on Egypt and does not appreciate the present Axis of Resistance against Zionism
- Turkey is now guided by neo-Ottomanism
- A triumvirate of Iraq-Syria-Egypt is the master key to Middle East stability
There is little else interesting or newsworthy in the
excerpts from the interview with Assad posted on the magazine’s website.
What is intriguing though are the motives of a publication
partly-owned by the Egyptian government for giving Assad a platform to attack
the Syrian revolution and its leading regional backers.
It’s akin to a periodical in Washington choosing to
interview Pol Pot when his gang was taking Cambodian
lives during the mid-seventies.
Editorially,
ingenious author and political analyst Samir Atallah writes in his daily column
for Saudi Asharq Alawsat:
The
latest statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry last Tuesday called for a
return to the Geneva communiqué of the Action Group for Syria (AGS).
The
said Geneva conference is where UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed raised
a question that got no reply, “Where’s Kofi Annan?”
Kofi
was in Tehran listening carefully to Iran’s love of peace and harmony in Syria
and the region, and especially in Bahrain and the rest of the Gulf.
There’s
something odd on the international stage concerning Syria. There are disparate
languages and a monotonous tone. America is similar to Russia. Moscow repeats
that the Syrian president need not stay in power. Washington has been reciting
for a year that he is on his way out. Lakhdar Brahimi is meanwhile saying what
Kofi Annan said.
In
their opinion, Bashar al-Assad is restating his love of the homeland, the
nation and steadfastness and that Syria has no problem other than countries
arming terrorist gangs.
Everyone
behaves as if the innocent people being killed every day were Siberian white
cranes, the sort of endangered birds Vladimir Putin is trying to save from
extinction.
The
world is full of travesties. The most insolent of them is to see a world leader
taking to the sky in a motorized hang glider while his warplanes were bombing
Aleppo, raising the number of Syrian fatalities above 30,000.
The
comportment of all sides vis-à-vis Syrians has been dull and repetitious in
many languages.
Hillary
Clinton did not offer Syrians more than Sergei Lavrov, who recently ceased his
daily barbs, ordering his subordinates to do the talking instead.
One
state used the veto and another followed in its suit. The pair crippled the
Arab League and UN Security Council and agreed on doing nothing more than audit
the daily numbers of killings in Syria.
In
truth, both principals realize there’s no solution. All conferences and
communiqués will lead to nothing other than what we see: carnage from the air,
shrieks of death on the ground, tents awaiting refugees and storms, and the anticipation
of Assad’s next verbiage and his dialogue with the opposition he cloned.
