As the blame game continues for those who, whatever our other faults, are not too deluded to see in Syria’s fate a far-reaching disaster, one valiant attempt to peer below the mire of claim and counter-claim is given here by Simplicius the Thinker. While definitive analysis is likely a long way off, his substack post today advances our understanding and should not be missed.
Of several major points, two worth noting here, though not as substitutes for reading him in full, are that (a) the Idlib breakout never expected to go all the way, but did an opportunistic carpe diem in light of SAA weakness; (b) the claim (made by pundits I respect, such as Iran’s Professor Mohammad Marandi and Syrian Kevork Almassian, echoed by yours truly) that the Astana deal between Turkey, Russia and Iran was foolish or worse is too hindsightedly simplistic.
On the less egg-in-face side of things, 1 I welcome his viewing Bashar al-Assad as:
… a kind of tragic figure because it appears now in retrospect that while he was a good man and kind leader, he may not have been an effective leader. The reality is that he was never meant to become ruler. He was a simple doctor-in-training while his older, firmer brother Bassel al-Assad, elder son of Hafez, was meant to inherit the throne until he tragically died in a car accident …
In a BTL exchange yesterday, continuing this morning and from which this post arises, I opined:
Hezbollah, like Russia, [was] invited by Syria’s elected government – behind which even those who at Daraa had demanded greater freedom now rallied. Indeed, many now attacked Bashar for being too soft – “the old man would never have stood for it!” – on the “moderate Islamists” who’d hijacked the Daraa protests.
There’s a touch of the Michael Corleone about Bashar – excepting of course that Michael, propelled by events to shed his distaste for “the family olive oil business”, would go on to match and even exceed his father’s ruthlessness.
Bashar, the wannabe eye surgeon, would not.
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Funny, ain’t it, how even in the midst of epoch shaping events, one of the first reactions of we who stick our heads above the parapet is to ask: “did I make a fool of myself? Human nature, I suppose.
As the blame game continues for those who, whatever our other faults, are not too deluded to see in Syria’s fate a far-reaching disaster, one valiant attempt to peer below the mire of claim and counter-claim is given here by Simplicius the Thinker. While definitive analysis is likely a long way off, his substack post today advances our understanding and should not be missed.
Of several major points, two worth noting here, though not as substitutes for reading him in full, are that (a) the Idlib breakout never expected to go all the way, but did an opportunistic carpe diem in light of SAA weakness; (b) the claim (made by pundits I respect, such as Iran’s Professor Mohammad Marandi and Syrian Kevork Almassian, echoed by yours truly) that the Astana deal between Turkey, Russia and Iran was foolish or worse is too hindsightedly simplistic.
On the less egg-in-face side of things, 1 I welcome his viewing Bashar al-Assad as:
In a BTL exchange yesterday, continuing this morning and from which this post arises, I opined:
While in an October post, US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 2, I noted that:
There’s a touch of the Michael Corleone about Bashar – excepting of course that Michael, propelled by events to shed his distaste for “the family olive oil business”, would go on to match and even exceed his father’s ruthlessness.
Bashar, the wannabe eye surgeon, would not.
* * *