Syria's 'Reformer'

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Human Events:


Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he's a reformer.
-- Hillary Clinton on Bashar al-Assad, March 27

WASHINGTON -- Few things said by this administration in its two years can match this one for moral bankruptcy and strategic incomprehensibility.


First, it's demonstrably false. It was hoped that President Assad would be a reformer when he inherited his father's dictatorship a decade ago. Being a London-educated eye doctor, he received the full Yuri Andropov treatment -- the assumption that having been exposed to Western ways, he'd been Westernized. Wrong. Assad has run the same iron-fisted Alawite police state as did his father.

Bashar made promises of reform during the short-lived Arab Spring of 2005. The promises were broken. During the current brutally suppressed protests, his spokeswoman made renewed promises of reform. Then Wednesday, appearing before parliament, Assad was shockingly defiant. He offered no concessions. None.

Second, it's morally reprehensible. Here are people demonstrating against a dictatorship that repeatedly uses live fire on its own people, a regime that in 1982 killed 20,000 in Hama and then paved the dead over. Here are insanely courageous people demanding reform -- and the U.S. secretary of state tells the world that the thug ordering the shooting of innocents already is a reformer, thus effectively endorsing the Baath party line -- "We are all reformers," Assad told parliament -- and undermining the demonstrators' cause.