"(Reuters) - Thirty years ago Hafez al-Assad cut phone lines from Hama to stop word spreading of his bloody crackdown on an uprising in the city, ensuring that the 1982 Syrian revolt was crushed and many thousands killed before the world even knew of it.
Three decades on, his son is 18 months into a military campaign waged, despite efforts at censorship, in the glare of a global media spotlight; but Bashar too can rely on Cold War-era divisions among major powers, and a growing sense of impotence and indifference, to shield him from armed foreign intervention.
A bloody winter lies ahead, many observers believe, with each side short of a killer blow and little sign of restraint.
More than 1,000 people are now being killed in Syria every week, according to activists who collate reports from various sources. Some are rebels, some loyalists; many are civilians.
Instead of stirring ever greater outrage, the remorseless violence seems instead to have numbed an outside world which has no answers to Syria's nightmare, giving Assad free rein to ratchet up the firepower against opponents who began protesting in the streets and are now fighting an ill-matched civil war......."
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