This slaughter will end only when words of condemnation are acted on

Dictator of Damascus will continue his bloody reign until he is stopped

By Robert Fisk

"Words, words, words. Bashar al-Assad knows his Hamlet, and he is not impressed.

Yes, his isolation grows daily. A day after King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia pulled his ambassador out of Damascus, the Kuwaitis and Bahrainis – we shall naturally ignore, here, Bahrain's own bloody internal suppression – have dutifully followed his example.....

The trouble is that everyone has been running out of patience with Syria since the spring, and no one has done more than turn up the rhetoric as the statistics of innocent dead ticked up from 500 to 1,000, to more than 2,000. And of course the absence of journalists inside Syria means that the full story is not known....

And the Assad family, cynical as it is, enacting legislative reform while killing those who might benefit from the new laws, fully understands the hypocrisy of the Arab and European reaction to the Syrian bloodbath....

Any sane Arab, Muslim – "or anyone who knows that this has nothing to do with religion, ethics or morals", in the words of King Abdullah – knows that spilling innocent blood leads to hopelessness. We might be more impressed were it not for the fact the Saudis and their tame imams remained resolutely silent when a million and a half Muslims were slaughtered on the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war battlefields. Back then, of course, the Saudis – and the West – were on the side of that nice Sunni Muslim dictator Saddam Hussein against the horrible Shia theocrat Khomeini. Now the Sunnis of Syria are fighting the Shia – for which read Alawite – dictator of Damascus. Having convinced themselves that his survival would only embolden Shia Iran, however, the monarch of Riyadh has come down on the side of the Syrian people – for now, at least.

Assad is almost certainly doomed. But he's more like Macbeth, "in blood stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go'er". "