On Syria

Moved on! Check TheCairoCalls

Let me first make one thing clear; what I am talking about here is the Syrian government, which for the surprise, and may I add the disappointment of every observer, had managed to stay in power, unchanged, and unwilling to even consider to. I'm not talking however about the Syrian people who have a very delicious cuisine and more than their fair share of gorgeous women (well that last statement was really shallow, but I felt compelled)

The Syrian situation is in fact a very delicate one. At one hand you have the United States, France, and the UN (now that's a bizarre combination) trying to up the pressure on the Syrian government, either to expose missing pieces of El-Hariri investigation, or to better control the borders with Iraq, through which the US claims, most of the Iraqi terrorists manage to infiltrate into Iraqi soil. And on the other hand, you have the 38 years old standoff with Israel over Golan, which, for everybody's bedazzlement, the Syrian government never talks about unless there are news of some sort of agreement between Israel and any other Arab country about anything. If you take an even further step back and look at the overall strategic position of Syria, you'd find that the really defining conflict for Syria would be with Turkey over the water of Tigris and Euphrates, especially that Turkey is getting fractious about the prospects of dealing with a Kurdish state in Iraq upstream, an Arab, Syrian-sponsored one (however unlikely this is now) further on, and a Shiite, Iranian protectorate to the far south.
At the middle of the whole mess, is a country which is governed by a government that sees that to remain in conflict is to remain in power. The Syrian government believes that they will not have any pivotal rule in the region unless they remain to be the voice of anti-Americanism, anti-peace, and anti-progress (not that they're all the same thing). It's a government that sees that remaining in conflict with Israel would give it excuses to continue holding a large portion, of otherwise unemployment-prone, young people under conscription, to continue opposing any sort of political or economical reform, and to continue having the name of Al-Assad imprinted on every brick in Syria, and until recently, Lebanon. It's a government which saw nothing wrong with bombing, actually bombing with military planes, its own citizens in Aleppo because it suspected that some terrorists belonged there. It's a government which is so oppressive that when its head is on TV, nobody in any public place can summon the courage to change the channel, just change it, because he knows that this very action might be his last.
The Syrian people are in a very tight position. They have this government which caused Syria to be the alienated, dismal country it doesn’t deserve to be, and that must be dealt with sooner or later, and they also have all sorts of challenges from abroad (US, Turkey, Israel...), which although they didn't cause (their government did), they are the ones who have to deal with.
They don't have the luxury of time.