I ask in a plain language that everyone can understand: What good did it do the regime to have killed the children in Houla? Does the regime want to commit suicide and take the Syrian people down along with it? Two days ago, I wrote that the Houla massacre will represent the point of no return in the history of the Syrian uprising, and on the following day, Kofi Annan, the Joint Envoy of the Arab League and the United Nations, followed suit and practically said the same thing, when he spoke of a tipping point. So is it possible that an Arab journalist can see what the Syrian regime and all its advisors cannot? I am not vain enough to claim that my eyes are wide open and that the regime is blind. But all I am saying is that this regime behaves every day as though it has resolved to dig its own grave. The regime accused the terrorists of standing behind the massacre, as it has been its habit to accuse other sides of responsibility for every killing. However, this cannot stand with regard to the massacre in Houla, because terrorist attacks usually involve single individuals, not a hundred, and so a terrorist may carry out a suicide attack as we have seen in Damascus, but does not have the ability to attack a village to execute children with bullets to their heads or by slaughtering them. Today, the Syrian regime has become more of a pariah than both North Korea and Iran. The United States and Japan followed Britain, France and other countries in the EU in withdrawing their ambassadors from Damascus, and instructing Syrian diplomats to leave their capitals. Some of these countries acted on humanitarian grounds only, since they did not bear to see the child victims, while others had been biding their time pending an opportunity to justify hostility to Syria. The regime in Damascus gave both parties a reason to wage a war against it in the future. 15 months ago, Syria was a country that was on good terms with the majority of the world's countries. The regime had mended its relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, and the President and his wife could visit Britain and France and be welcomed warmly. There was an economic alliance among Turkey, Syria and Egypt, which Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan once explained to me in details, and which was confirmed to exist directly to me by Dr. Bashar al-Assad, Gamal Mubarak and Major General Omar Suleiman. Where were we and where are we now? The Syrian regime's war on its people severed the alliance, with Turkey withdrawing its ambassador from Damascus before anyone else did. Then there came the Egyptian revolution which combated the economy itself along with corruption, before it awoke from its revolutionary naiveté. Syria today is a pariah country, and the phrase is being repeated in all the U.S. and UK newspapers I read every day. Syria is facing boycotts, sanctions and threats of foreign military intervention, which ranges in its simplest manifestations from arming the Syrian opposition, all the way to incitement by the U.S. media to rapid military intervention directed at the U.S. administration. Syria today is in a bigger isolation than both North Korea and Iran. Congratulations to the regime for its alliance with Iran, i.e. the alliance of the miserable with the hopeless. In the regime's erroneous calculations, Iran is more important than Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Britain and France, and the U.S. and Japan. Does the Syrian regime realize the gravity of what has been perpetrated in its name in Houla? I am looking at a cartoon of Dr. Bashar al-Assad taking a bath in a tub full of blood, with Kofi Annan offering him soap, and another that comprises three sketches of the Syrian president; in the first he is saying, enough, in the second he is saying, enough large-scale killings, with his hands drenched in blood, and in third he is saying: Kill only the young. A third cartoon showed the grave of the children of Houla with a wreath from the United Nations and the words, “with our deepest sympathy". And a fourth cartoon showed the Syrian President with a cleaver in his hand dripping with blood, with the blood spraying and covering him entirely, except for his forehead and hair. The Syrian regime as we know it is over. The regime chose to fight its own people, and perhaps it came to believe the chant “We sacrifice our soul and our blood for you, O Bashar" and so decided to directly test the extent of its sincerity. The regime has offered its own head on a silver platter to its enemies. In truth, its enemies also include those who continue to find excuses for it and encourage it to walk down the path to ruin. The day I believed that Syria could become the Singapore of the Middle East has long since been gone. Today, I find Syria to be like the Bosnia of 1995, and the Houla massacre to be the equivalent of Srebrenica's. This week, the International War Crimes Tribunal sentenced Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, to 50 years in prison for committing “some of the worst atrocities in human history". I will not say more.
