Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
13 December 09
It's remarkable how easy it is for Middle Eastern dictatorships to fool the West. Iran has been stringing along Europe and the United States for seven years on the pretense that it is ready to make a deal on its nuclear weapons' drive. The Palestinians persuade the West that they really do want to make peace but just need a better offer. And so on.
Sometimes the foolishness is due to ideology or bias, but ignorance is often a major factor. The assumption that Middle East dictatorships or Islamist revolutionaries really want to be moderate, that they're just victims and everything is the West's fault, or that a solution of conflicts is just a concession away overwhelms anything like a sense of history, research, or comprehension of what's going on.
Here’s an example, only one among hundreds. What makes it so symbollic is because it would have been so easy to get this story right. Since Bashar al-Asad inherited the family dictatorship eight years ago, there have been an endless stream of stories on how he is a really nice guy and just wants to be friends. Stories about the regime's sponsorship of terrorism and extremism--visible in every speech Bashar and his colleagues make in Arabic and all that appears in the Syrian state-controlled media--don't get much coverage. Neither does the fate of democratic dissidents.
Syria, of course, is a brutally repressive dictatorship where non-violent dissenters are consistently arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. It also sponsors terrorism in all directions, against Americans and Iraqis in Iraq; against Lebanon where it murdered about a dozen people in recent years including former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri; against Israel by sponsoring Hamas and Hizballah; and periodically against Jordan.
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Related: Guardian Hearts Mukhabarat Media
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