ience with them will snap. There has been much bloodshed in Arab life, everyone knows all too well. But the Hariri murder, in full public view at midday in West Beirut, claimed the Syrian power structure as its collateral damage. Assad’s move to replace the head of military intelligence with his brother-in-law only days after Hariri’s murder was a clumsy response to the suspicions swirling around Syria.
The claims of an Iranian-Syrian accord should also not be given much credence. Iran’s horizons are wider, and Iran’s interests differ radically from those of Syria. For all their strident revolutionary poses, the Iranians are shrewd, unsentimental practitioners of realpolitik. Iran’s pursuit of its nuclear ambitions (or the barter of these ambitions for economic and political concessions from Europe and the United States) overwhelms the concerns of Syria, with its extortion rackets in the Bekaa Valley and Tripoli. Tehran will not ride to the rescue of Damascus. […]
[S]uddenly it seems like the autumn of the dictators. Something different has been injected into this fight. The United States — a great foreign power that once upheld the Arab autocrats, fearing what mass politics would bring — now braves the storm. It has signaled its willingness to gamble on the young, the new, and the unknown. Autocracy was once deemed tolerable, but terrorists, nurtured in the shadow of such rule, attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. Now the Arabs, grasping for a new world, and the Americans, who have helped usher in this unprecedented moment, together ride this storm wave of freedom.
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