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Crouching tiger, hidden dragon

Now that the UN Security Council has at least condemned the regime violence in Syria, everybody is looking for President Obama to amp up calls for Bashar al Assad to step aside.  The Administration, I am assured, knows perfectly well that an orderly transition to a less autocratic regime in Damascus would be a big improvement from the U.S. perspective.

But what if the President says Bashar has to go, and then he doesn’t?  The U.S. hasn’t got lots of leverage, as it did over an Egyptian army that was heavily dependent on U.S. money, training and equipment.  The most vulnerable sector in Syria is energy, where European rather than American companies are the critical players.  Posing the President as a crouching tiger is better than exposing him as a paper tiger, especially after the week he has just gotten himself through.

And what if the transition is not orderly, but breaks down into sectarian and ethnic violence, with the risk of overflow into Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey? That could be a big mess, one we would regret for many years into the future.

The problem with this argument is that it suggests a quicker transition would be far better for the U.S. than one that drags on .  Those who know Syria well are saying Aleppo and Damascus will turn against Bashar sooner rather than later.  Sami Moubayed says unemployment, lack of moderate community leaders willing to calm the situation, and the influx of people from all over Syria into the two largest Syrian cities will ensure that the revolution eventually spreads there.  In the meanwhile, the demonstrators are straining the security forces and beginning to bend them at the edges.

While Juan Cole is correctly disappointed in the wording and lack of teeth in the UN Security Council statement, I’m more philosophical about it.  I see it as a necessary step along the way to ratcheting up pressure on Bashar.  Its significance is that it happened at all, not the specific wording.

I wish we could wave a magic wand and make the Syrian army turn into pussycats, but we can’t.  Only the demonstrators can make that trick work, by maintaining their nonviolent discipline and convincing some of the soldiers and police that their interests will be better served if they embrace the revolution rather than fight it.

While not often mentioned, it is important to keep an eye on the Chinese, who could either save the Syrian regime with cash for oil contracts or sink it by permitting more action in the Security Council and lining up with the Americans and Europeans.  Syria doesn’t have enough oil to be of great interest to the Chinese, and a lot more of it is likely to flow once Bashar is gone.  The hidden dragon may well be the deciding factor against the regime.

Meanwhile, the Syrian army has punched into the center of Hama, killing a few dozen more of its own citizens and making an orderly transition less likely.  Bashar seems to have decided that he prefers to resist the inevitable, like Gaddafi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen, than give in like Mubarak in Egypt or Ben Ali in Tunisia.  Yesterday’s scenes of Mubarak caged in a Cairo courtroom will not have encouraged him to rethink.

PS:  AJ English continues to do a good job, with a lot of help from courageous friends at Shaam: