Steven A. Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations has a take on what might be next in Syria, now that the ever-cautious United Nations has outright accused Syrian government officials of assassinating former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
You have to look at Syria’s power structure as more like The Sopranos, than as a government. It will reveal that in fact, at the highest levels of the Syrian government, they were calling the shots and ordered the assassination of Hariri. It is hoped that this will be one of the factors that will lead to the unraveling of the Assad regime in Syria. The problem as I see it is that it may increase international pressure on the Syrians, but in terms of domestic political pressure, there is no coherent, unified, strong opposition in Syria. So if there is going to be any change in Syria, it’s going to have to come from within.What can we look for if there really is an unraveling or dramatic weakening of the Syrian regime? It would probably be a palace coup in effect in which members of the Alawite clique who run the government believe that President Bashar Assad has not played his hand very well and that these people have significantly sullied Syria’s reputation and put the regime in such jeopardy that they have to take action to put things back together again.
The omniscient InstaPundit has links to more.
Posted by Alan at October 22, 2005 12:42 AM