SO now we know. Those who oppose Bashar Assad's bloody dictatorship, those who have protested the gunning down and torture of men, women and children, those who deplore the loss of more than 60,000 lives in the savage repression of a revolt that broke out in March 2011, whether they are members of the Arab League or the United Nations or ordinary Syrians who have had enough, they are all, all of them “puppets of the West”. This was pretty much all that Assad could find to say during his rare TV broadcast on Sunday about the forces ranged against him. Thus, it demonstrates better than anything the moral and indeed the intellectual bankruptcy of this blood-stained regime. Assad and his cronies are still trying to cling on to the power that is slowly, but inexorably, slipping from their grasp. Had the Syrian dictator possessed an ounce of statesmanship he would have admitted that he had fundamentally misjudged the mood of his people. His response to an unrolling carpet of rebellion has been brute force alone. Though there were times in the early days when he could have talked, when he could have sought to negotiate an orderly and peaceful change, he preferred instead the path of bloodshed. His armed forces and the loathsome Shabiha militiamen have killed every Syrian they even suspected of disloyalty. The Arab League worked hard to find a solution that would stop the rising death toll. Its peace monitors mounted a genuine effort to enforce a truce which Assad himself never had any notion of honoring. Even as he talked peace, he spat in the face of those who sought to help his country. The Assad family's 42 years of privilege and power have blinded the dictator to political reality. In the spring of 2011 as the revolt spread, he could have seen that he himself was not part of any solution, but the problem itself. A wise man would have recognized that the future of a multi-ethnic Syria rested with a rapid settlement, part of which would have been his own relinquishing of power. He could have gone into exile hated by those who had suffered under the Assad regime's four decades of uncompromising rule, but nevertheless honored, to a degree, for his desire to spare his country the trauma of civil war and massive loss of life. Historians may say that Assad found himself a prisoner of the top Baath party leaders of his court, the same people who, it is said, forced him to roll back the modest political reforms he initiated when he took power on his father's death in 2000. If that is true, then he has shown himself to be a weak and unprincipled leader prepared to clamber up the rising pile of Syrian corpses as he tries to stay on top. On Sunday, he sought to pretend that the rebellion contained few Syrians but many foreigners. To the cheers of loyalists in Damascus, he called for outside powers to stop arming “the terrorist groups”. The irony of course was almost inevitably lost on him. It is that Russia is the outside power that has done most to drag out this terrible civil war by continuing to arm and supply his own regime. Thanks to Moscow's efforts, the real terrorist group in Syria remains the Assad regime itself.
