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Coddling Assad

By John Tabin on 4.15.11 @ 1:29AM

The Obama administration has turned down a plea from Syria's democratic opposition to step up diplomatic pressure on President Bashar Assad, who has violently repressed peaceful anti-government protests.

"The White House has to date rejected our requests for stronger action on Syria," Ammar Abdulhamid, an unofficial spokesman in the West for the Syrian activists organizing the widespread demonstrations, told The Washington Times...

In the White House meetings, the opposition representatives have asked for President Obama personally to condemn the Assad regime on camera. They also called for the United States to impose sanctions on regime officials who ordered the military to fire on the crowds and for the United States to support a separate resolution against Syria at an April 27 session of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

"President Obama has not personally condemned the regime. The White House has not yet issued sanctions against officials who ordered soldiers to fire on peaceful demonstrators. The White House will not say whether they will pursue a Syria specific resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Council," Mr. Abdulhamid said...

Radwan Ziadeh, director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies who attended both meetings with White House officials, told The Washington Times that the administration's response for more pressure on the Assad regime has been "lukewarm."

"They told us they do not have the same leverage with Syria that they do with Egypt," he said. "We asked them to use stronger language on Syria. We want Obama to say something himself in his own words."

Mr. Ziadeh added that the U.S. officials said they are working with the European Union to draft a resolution for the Human Rights Council special session. But the proposed resolution will address the crackdowns in Bahrain, Yemen and Syria.

That the administration would take roughly the same approach toward Syria as it does toward Yemen and Bahrain is just stunning. Yemen and Bahrain are difficult cases where -- because of counterterrorism considerations and Iranian designs, respectively -- US values and US interests are genuinely in tension. Syria is comparatively easy: The Assad regime pursues an explicitly anti-American foreign policy as part of the Tehran-led 'resistance bloc' (and imprisons writers who criticize the alliance with the Islamic Republic). You would think that taking a tougher line against Assad's crackdown on protestors would be a no-brainer. Why on Earth does the White House seem to be guided by the fantasy that Assad should be treated with kid-gloves?

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Syria Almighty| 4.15.11 @ 2:34AM

Anyone who thinks that these are 'peaceful protesters' is an idiot. Peaceful protesters don't burn private and public property, attack hospitals and kill their workers, have weapons and use them against civilians and police, create fake videos and images of people pretending to be dead/attacked, nor do they chant extremist and bigoted slogans against non-Sunni people and call for their death and destruction.

This blog should be more accurately named "American propaganda."

Bob K.| 4.15.11 @ 8:25AM

I have always wondered why no one who writes about this mentions that it is an old, bloody, Muslim internecine feud that has been going on in Syria for generations between the ruling Alawite Muslim minority and the Sunni majority. The Alawites, who control the Army, have less than 15% of Syria's population and they view it as an existential problem threatening their survival and they are, in a large part, supported by other minority groups.

The religious and cultural patterns and problems in Syria created by it's many religious minorities require a fine political balance for it to function.

My late father-in-law who was a 1st generation Syrian Orthodox Christian used to say, only half jokingly, that Lebanon did not exist; Danny Thomas invented it. It was all Syria.