Syria, the real Arab spring prize

Is it possible to imagine that Bashar al-Assad, the British-educated
Syrian leader, will be deterred from following his father’s example,
which stamped out the cries for freedom in his country?

What a prize that would be: a democratic Syria. Forget Libya, Syria has
huge geo-strategic implications because of its relations with Iran,
Lebanon, Hezbollah and Hamas. Regime change would have an enormous
impact on Israel and Iran.

The Assad family from the minority Alawite sect succeeded in engineering
a dynastic succession where fellow Baathist Saddam Hussein (and now
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak) failed. But hopes of reform and cooperation
nursed by the U.S. and Britain, which tried to engage with Bashar, were
dashed. All Western attempts to peel the Syrians away from their Iranian
allies have failed.

The last uprising in Syria was violently suppressed by Hafez al-Assad in 1982. Tens of thousands of Sunni Muslims were massacred in the town of Hama after an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood. It was enough to give the Syrian people — and the rest of the Arab world — pause for thought.

Until now, that is. This is a ruthless dictatorship, arguably the most repressive in the Middle East. The first crack in the regime appeared on Thursday, when Assad’s presidential adviser Bouthaina Shabaan offered a series of quite unprecedented concessions in the face of seething protests in the town of Daraa.

But 24 more people were reported to have been killed today after the demonstrators spurned the government offer, seen as a stalling tactic.

Will the “modern” Bashir al-Assad, married to a British-raised Syrian wife, stand on the right side of history? We can dare to hope. He has just taken a first, unsteady step in the right direction. President Obama can, and should, encourage him. But this cannot be an uprising Made in the USA. It must be for the courageous Syrian people to decide their own destiny.