"Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ordered on Thursday the formation of a committee to raise living standards and study scrapping emergency law that has governed Syria for the last 48 years, his adviser said.
Assad did not order security forces to fire at protesters in the southern city of Deraa, Bouthaina Shaaban said at a news conference in the Syrian capital."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/24/syria-assad-committee-idUSLDE72N20320110324
Maybe someone (his buddy, John Kerry?) should tell Assad that it's hard to improve civilian living standards when much of a country's GDP is devoted to providing armaments to Hezbollah and maintaining hegemony over Lebanon.
It is also difficult to improve civilian living standards when an unprecedented five-year drought has decimated farmlands, caused hundreds of thousands of persons to abandon their rural villages and migrate to Syrian cities, and has reduced three million people to extreme poverty.
Yes, Syria could benefit from Israeli desalinization technology, but far more important to Assad is maintenance of his tyrannical hold over the country.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, the protests in Daraa and the subsequent escalation of hostilities between Hamas, whose leadership resides in Damascus, and Israel is no accident. If Assad can distract the Syrian street by encouraging a new war between Hamas and Israel, the Syrian dictator is willing to fight until the last Palestinian.
No comments:
Post a Comment