Via FLC
Assad’s government “has become a killing machine,” says Turki bin Faisal of Saudi Arabia, "Change in Syria is now inevitable.”...Speaking a day after Turki at the Vienna meeting, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak echoed the prince’s prediction about the Assad regime: “It is doomed. . . . It is going to disappear, in a few weeks.”
“Iran is a paper tiger, but it has steel claws,” Turki added. The Saudi prince was referring not only to Syria but also to the heavily armed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and the Palestinian movement Hamas...
They as well as Damascus are now the targets of a Sunni counterrevolution that has reached critical mass as Iran continues to be accused of working on a nuclear weapon and as U.S. troops withdraw from Iraq, a Shiite-majority nation that will increasingly be subject to Iranian influence and ambition.
Russia, too, appears to invest larger meaning in the Syrian conflict. “Vladimir Putin scores the Libya result as a win for the West and thus a defeat for Russia,” says a European ambassador who monitors intelligence reporting on the Kremlin. “He is determined that Syria will not make this a trend, and Russia will oppose collective action against Assad wherever it can.”
Putin’s return to a zero-sum calculus reminiscent of the Cold War has cast a heavy shadow over secret, informal talks among the United States, Britain and France and those with the leading Sunni countries on hastening Assad’s downfall. So out of deference to Russian sensitivities, these talks have steered clear of any discussion of the kind of coordinated NATO intervention that occurred in Libya. But diplomatic sources report that there is an active exchange of intelligence and tentative discussion of some form of joint operations, as well as an intensifying common effort to help Syria’s emerging opposition forces become more organized and effective...
I doubt that Assad pays much attention to this gathering consensus. Certainly his father, Hafez, whom I interviewed three times, would have dismissed it..."
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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