The Arab Summit of Fes in 1982 saved the regime of late President Hafez Al-Assad from international condemnation, which nearly occurred on the background of the genocide which the city of Hama had been subjected to. At the time, preoccupation with the withdrawal of the Palestinians from Beirut had been predominant, and many had formed the conviction that an Arab peace plan would be able to achieve what the Khartoum Summit's “Three No's” could not. The most difficult step Hassan II had to face was that of heading towards calling for an Arab Summit, to be held on the ruins of the failure of the first edition of the shortest Arab League event, the main feature of which was the suspension of the summit during its opening session. The presence of President Hafez Al-Assad had to be ensured, on the basis that there could be no war without Syria, nor could there be peace if the Syrians were not on board before the process was set in motion. His adviser Ahmed Ben Soda, who had extended his stay in Damascus, tells that the King had insisted on sleeping in the reception hall of the presidential palace in Damascus, but was relieved by the President's promise that he would be in the forefront of those present. The scene has changed tremendously roughly three decades later, and there are no Syrian officials, no matter how highly ranked in the regime's hierarchy, who will find anyone to insist on their country's presence in the Moroccan capital this time. Indeed, the Syrian regime has severed its ties with its own people, before moving skillfully towards achieving harsh isolation at both the Arab and international levels. Whether it took such a direction with its eyes open or shut does not matter, since the result allowed it practices that went against the current. The Syrian regime's problem is not in the first place due to disagreements with the Arab World, which gave it all the opportunities possible to find a dignified way out, one that would spare it the broadening scope of increasing condemnation. Nor is it rooted in the fact that Syria's relations with the Arab World, and particularly with Europe and the United States of America, lack warmth, as a result of what is being described as the existence of a certain conspiracy. Rather, the mistake resides in its failure to incorporate new facts, which indicate that dialogue at the domestic level on the basis of a democratic methodology that would bring together all active forces, and most prominently the opposition, remains the natural and smooth gateway to multilateral dialogue with other Arab, Muslim and international parties. When the regime in Syria categorized the street protests as part of a planned conspiracy, it was getting itself implicated in straying very far from the point that would have allowed it to start a positive dialogue with the opposition. And when it found it appropriate to duplicate the slogans and expressions it had been preceded to by collapsed Arab regimes, without exerting any effort to interpret the direction taken by events and development, it was only moving at a greater speed towards the same fate. If pointing to conspiracies coming from abroad, and categorizing the angry people standing up to regimes of oppression and tyranny as gangs of armed extremists and victims of hallucinations, had been of any use, these false assumptions would not have ended up with results far beyond what could be have been imagined by regimes wallowing in the mud of bankruptcy and downfall. All policies begin with signs. In ancient times, Sufi mystics who had renounced worldly pleasures would surrender to the language of signs, being more suggestive in discerning the features of the path ahead. Yet the Syrian regime, like any school that does not care to listen to the world's pulse, has wasted numerous opportunities, the latest not being the fact that its withdrawal from Lebanon through a UN resolution meant severing the link between the delusions of regional roles and the reality of preoccupation with the injustice that upsets the Syrian people. Like it, the Libyan regime too did not understand that removing international sanctions would have no effect, unless it was coupled with carrying out profound internal reforms that would achieve the integration of Libya within its post-Cold War international environment. Perhaps the impact of the end of the Cold War means that strength can only be found in democracy, growth and achieving reconciliation at the domestic level. The matter requires no more than to turn and look back a little. While the collapse of the Eastern bloc led to European countries that were tied to it breaking free of the bonds of tyranny and submission, and taking the direction of building emerging democracies that were embraced by Western Europe, the strong signals received by the Arab World did not help totalitarian regimes realize that protecting themselves with the delusion of foreign conspiracies does little more than obscure the features of the path ahead – making it devoid of any way out or any horizon. The Arab League has done what it had to do and more, with a great deal of patience, deliberation and self-control – and it never had the intention to overlook the practices of obstinate regimes, which have failed to overcome their fears of change. Indeed, the Arab League itself has changed, as it takes on the new commitments that have resulted from the wave of the Arab Spring. The problem does not lie in characterizing a crisis or in a misunderstanding between Syria and the Arab World. Rather, it is embodied in the crisis of a regime that does not want to change. Differences of form between the reality of this or that regime do not matter. Indeed, state officials in Egypt kept repeating that the Mubarak regime was not a copy of that of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, and the Libyans who surrounded the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi strongly disapproved of linking Mubarak's Egypt with the fate of the revolutionary leader, who fell victim to the anger of the revolution. The fact that Bashar Al-Assad's regime has missed its last opportunity only means that color-blindness lead to confusion and lack of discernment. And if the Syrian regime leaves its seat empty at the meeting in Rabat, there will surely be those who will fill that vacuum at this meeting, and indeed at the heart of Damascus.
