Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Assad Sack

 
What will happen when Baby Assad falls? That’s the main floating question. Seldom do you see any proposals that Assad be propped into place and pressured to change his ways.

Maybe we ought to rethink that. According to Big Pharaoh, there is a group waiting to fill the vacuum created by Assad’s topple, and it’s not anyone you’d invite home for dinner. BP says, quoting from the Pan-Arab newspaper, Al-Hayat (Don’t bother unless you read Arabic or like to look at ads in English, some of which have very attractive women with a little un-muslim décolletage) that if Assad goes, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood will step in.

Wonderful. Our choices are either Assad or the Islamic version of the Mafia. Or perhaps that would be sliming the mob. Let’s just say some very bad dudes are pulling on the base of Baby’s statue. Here’s what Big Pharaoh quotes as signs that Syria wants a change — and he says that these signs are the solution which would avoid the total loss of Syria. Supposedly Syria is signaling its willingness to do three things:
    1. Leave Lebanon alone.
2. Help Mahmoud Abbas and stop undermining his authority by supporting terrorists against Israel.
3. Stop or at least try to stop the infiltration of terrorists into Iraq and terminate any terrorist operations and logistics inside Syria.
In the old “trust-but-verify” routine, these signs could be tracked fairly easily. We could:

  • See what Lebanon is saying lately about Syrian intelligence and terrorist interference. Fortunately, there’s a large amount of Lebanese news in English.
  • The situation with Mahmoud Abbas would be harder to verify. Again, though, this change would likely be reported in the Israeli press.
  • Boots on the ground and American intelligence will be all too willing to share the news when Syria suddenly gets cooperative on the border problem.

If Big Pharaoh is correct, this would be a definite improvement over the state of affairs that has existed to this point. You know, I’ve always felt a bit sorry for Baby. As Malvolio says, some of us “are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em.” Unfortunately for Baby, he’s in the third category, one which doesn’t usually end well. One can only hope that — as is claimed for some of our Supreme Court justices — he can “grow in office.”

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For a fun look at Big Pharaoh’s website, see today’s post: “Good News for Americans and Jooooooz. As he well knows, though, having the French on our “side” — however it comes about — is bound to make Americans nervous. What if we start singing their “Surrender Boogie Blues”? Saints preserve us — and maybe they will, since France done gave up all of hers, even crazy old Joan of Arc can’t co-exist with the EU “Constitution.” Or maybe that should be “EU.”

1 comment:

Yaakov Kirschen said...

i am afraid that replacing baby assad will immediately result in U.S. pressure on Israel to withdraw from the golan and bring the foxes right up to the door of the chicken coup.

best would be to weaken baby and slowly introduce the beginning of democratic reforms.

Dry Bones
Israel's political comic strip since 1973

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