Thursday, December 8, 2011

Assad the apologetic: the new face of the Syrian regime



Cracks may be starting to show as Bashar al-Assad desperately tries to head off sanctions from fellow Arab states

Fares Chamseddine
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 8 December 2011

"....I've never seen the Syrian president speak this way before. We are used to Bashar the triumphant, when he called the Gulf Arab heads of state "half-men". There is also Bashar the comedian, who cracked jokes and laughed at them when he addressed the Syrian people in his parliament at the start of the crisis. But I have never seen Bashar the apologetic. Listening to the autocratic ruler of the Middle East's most repressive police state say that somebody else did all the bad things, and that he doesn't own the country but is merely the president, reminded me an awful lot of Muammar Gaddafi, when he famously declared that if he held an official government position he would have waved his resignation letter in the face of the people.

Similarly, Gaddafi once threatened to set the Mediterranean on fire if Libya were attacked, while Assad also promised to unleash an earthquake that would "burn the Middle East" if Syria became a target for Nato. But in spite of the pompous military exercises the Syrian army has just carried out, the regime today has never been more isolated, or more worried....."

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