I never felt concerned for Egypt, despite the revolution of rage, and the million-strong protests in Tahrir Square, because my conviction was and still is that Egypt will not face the threat of civil war, whether the president is in power or not. This is because a Sunni president would succeed another Sunni president, in light of the Sunni majority in the country that comprises more than 90% of the population there. With regard to Syria, however, I am not equally reassured. Syria is a country with many minorities, and regime change there or changing the ruler there cannot be achieved peacefully, which means a double disaster because Syria has the best record in the Middle East, in terms of coexistence among its various sects. It is enough, for the sake of comparison here, to examine what the Assyrian minority in Iraq and the Coptic minority in Egypt are subjected to in their countries. If there is anything in common between the situations in Egypt and Syria, it would be that both countries' presidents were late in taking the required measures to dissipate popular anger. While I expected that President Hosni Mubarak would be late in taking measures, since he is old and ill, I had thought that President Bashar al-Assad would be ahead of his people and would propose the reforms that they seek. He is young and intelligent, and has the capacity to work 18 hours a day. He also has at his side his wife Asma al-Assad, who is the epitome of intelligence, diligence, beauty and youth. If President Mubarak had said a few days before January 25 what he said afterwards, the youths of Egypt would not have needed a revolution. If President Assad had proposed his program for reform in his speech at the parliament last month, protests would not have erupted from Deraa to the rest of the Syrian cities. President Bashar al-Assad did not really need a protest in the first place to start the process of reform. Ever since I knew him, every conversation we had together tackled the issue of reform and fighting corruption. After Dr. Bashar al-Assad returned to Syria from London, following the death of his older brother Bassel, I would meet him in his office in Mount Qassioun, and every conversation we had included a discussion of his ideas on political work and fighting corruption. These conversations then continued after he assumed his post as president in 2000, when I would meet him in the Rawda Palace in Damascus, and after that at the gorgeous presidential palace overlooking Damascus. Today, I look at the developments in Syria and I worry a lot. I want the president to change the regime, not for the regime to be overthrown. I believe that Dr. Bashar al-Assad is a thousand times better than the probable alternative, which is the fundamentalist and extremist groups. We have seen the Salafists' actions in Egypt, Jordan and the Gaza Strip, and heard what they had to say, and they are not much different than the Taliban, al-Qaeda and their cave mentality. The above is about the extremists, who are religiously, mentally, and politically retarded, and not the Muslim Brotherhood or the young protesters and their legitimate demands. Then I have another cause for concern which I will summarize with two examples. - The Likudnik Senator Joe Lieberman, who represents Israel in the Congress at the expense of the interests of ‘his country' the United States, said that the Obama administration is doing nothing to support the freedom fighters in Syria. - The Washington Post, which is liberal in everything except its op-ed section, published an editorial entitled “Syria's bloody repression”, which urged the administration to impose sanctions on Syria and refer it to the UN Security Council, and to also withdraw the U.S. Ambassador to Syria because “all these would be blows against a regime that is Iran's closest ally in the Middle East, and that supplies Hamas and Hezbollah with missiles to fire at Israeli cities…” The paragraph that I selected above is almost a Freudian slip. The sanctions that the newspaper calls for are completely Israeli-motivated. I say here for the thousandth time that Hamas and Hezbollah are resistance factions fighting a criminal occupation state led by a terrorist gang, killing women and children with U.S. weapons, under the protection of the U.S. veto in the Security Council. The Americans have a saying that goes “beware of getting what you wish for”. If the Likudniks got what they are wishing for, they might find themselves facing suicidal extremists that profess terrorism and would never recognize Israel in any peace process. All the above does not invalidate the fact that the situation in Syria is extremely dangerous. People were killed in the protests, and then mourners were killed during the funerals of the protesters who died. I have not yet read any specific number repeated twice. When we cannot specify exact numbers like this, we use the term ‘tens' [in Arabic] or ‘dozens' or ‘scores' in English. I read an estimate that 300 were killed so far, published by Human Rights Watch, or 200 killed according to Amnesty International. But even if they were three or four dead, this would still be nothing short of a humanitarian disaster. For this reason, the road towards a solution begins with an end to the killing and a start of an honest dialogue. I shall continue with the situation in Syria tomorrow as well. [email protected]
