Thank you Hafez al-Assad by Caroline Glick

...Had Assad accepted Israel's offers, we would have been facing a situation today that we would be hard pressed to contend with. On the one hand, we would be facing an all but certain war with Syria with al-Qaida or Iran controlling everything from the Jordan Valley to Haifa Bay. On the other hand we would be facing this threat as a fractured society.

Caroline Glick..
CarolineGlick.com..
24 May '13..

The threats emanating from Syria have become downright frightening. For the past several days, Home Front Defense Minister Gilad Erdan has been warning repeatedly that it is certain that Israeli population centers will be hit by Syrian ballistic missiles and that we have to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios, including Scud missile-launched chemical weapons attacks on Israel's metropolitan centers.

On Wednesday, Air Force commander Maj.- Gen. Amir Eshel spelled out Israel's concerns from a military perspective. The chance of war breaking out at any time is extremely high. Syria has a massive arsenal that includes advanced anti-aircraft missiles, anti-ship missiles and surface- to-surface missiles. Syria also has large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, advanced artillery as well as the other components of a large conventional military force.

Eshel warned, "Syria is collapsing before our eyes. If it collapses tomorrow we could find its vast arsenal dispersed and pointing at us."

In that event, Eshel said, the air force will have to operate at 100 percent of its capacity to clear a path for ground forces to operate in Syria and secure the armaments to prevent them from being dispersed, or used against Israel.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz warned that Israel could easily find itself fighting a three-front war in the near future. Presumably we would be fighting Syria, Lebanon and Iran - whose nuclear program continues to move to completion undaunted by empty US and European threats.

Syria is a mess because there are no good guys in a position to win. Syrian President Bashar Assad is one of the most dangerous leaders in the world. He is a major supporter of terrorist groups. He enabled al-Qaida and Hezbollah to use Syria as a logistical base in their war against US forces in Iraq. He is a vassal of Iran. He is allied with Hezbollah. He is a mass murderer.

Since the civil war began two years ago, Assad's complete dependence on Iran and Hezbollah - as well as on Russia - has been exposed for all to see. There is little doubt that whatever checks the US was able to exert against him before the civil war began no longer exist. And if he survives in power, he will be completely indifferent to US pressure and so will behave far more violently than he did before the war began.

And yet for all Assad's horrific behavior and the reasonable presumption that his actions will only become more violent and dangerous with each additional day he remains in power, the most telling aspect of the Syrian civil war is that Israel, the US and Europe are incapable of deciding whether he is better or worse than the alternatives.

Because standing opposed to Assad and his Hezbollah and Iranian protectors is al-Qaida.

The son also rises, for Arab misfortune

Michael Young
Daily Star (Beirut)
08 April '10

Michael Young is opinion editor of The Daily Star. Another excellent piece on who are the people in your neighborhood.

In his book “What’s Left,” the British author Nick Cohen quotes a onetime Foreign Office official as saying, “All isms are wasms.” That amusing phrase is an apt summation of Arab nationalism, as regimes throughout the Middle East claiming some sort of fealty to nationalist ideology find themselves at different levels of political breakdown.

The most flagrant sign of the decline of Arab nationalist regimes is their transformation into hereditary republics. Recently, Hosni Mubarak returned from an operation in Germany to face questions about his future. What ailed him remains unknown, but it is no secret that the 81-year-old Egyptian president has long sought to prepare the way for his son, Gamal, to succeed him.

In this, Mubarak is little different than the late Hafez Assad, whose son Bashar followed him as president of Syria. Had Saddam Hussein remained in power in Iraq, he would almost certainly have handed over to one of his psychopathic sons. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, hopes one day to see his son Ahmad in office. In Libya, Moammar Gadhafi appears to have similar aspirations for one of his boys, perhaps Seif al-Islam or the younger Moatassem. And in Tunisia, President Zein al-Abedin bin Ali is rumored to want his son in law, Sakher al-Materi, to one day lead the country.

Forgotten in these family plots is that, in several countries, nationalist regimes once drew their legitimacy from overthrowing monarchical orders perceived as corrupt or in the pocket of foreign powers. Inherent in the Arab nationalism of the latter years of colonial rule and the first decades of independence was a conviction that the ideology was a byword for reform. Baathism in Syria and Iraq introduced purportedly egalitarian socialist principles, as did Nasserism in Egypt. Habib Bourghuiba gave Tunisian women rights while also introducing improvements in education and more.

Yet that did not prevent all Arab regimes from consolidating autocratic rule, usually in the guise of family-led kleptocracies. Whereas specific nationalist leaders may have enjoyed legitimacy upon taking office, all came later on to rely substantially on violence to maintain order. This was the case in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia after Bin Ali, and the list goes on. Arab nationalists, previously thought of as representing the vanguard of a new Middle East, instead merely reproduced the methods of pre-Independence regimes, usually in far more brutal ways.

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