Best in show

Why would Syria accept the Arab League plan with “no reservations”?

Try this:  because it requires nothing verifiable of Damascus except to talk with its opposition.  Bashar al Assad has said he is willing to do that from the first.  But there aren’t many protesters willing to do it, unless there is a prior agreement that they are talking about transition arrangements.  If the protesters refuse the dialogue, Bashar will continue the crackdown.

Even better from Bashar’s point of view if some of the protesters accept and others do not.  Then he will have succeeded in splitting them.  He’ll get some nice photo ops with the dialoguers while going after the others again.  The opposition was already having troubles unifying its disparate forces.  Accepting the Arab League plan is a neat maneuver to make that even more difficult.

What could the Arab League have done if it wanted its efforts to bear fruit?  The protesters were asking that it suspend Syria from membership and ask for international community support for the demonstrations.  Fat chance.

It might have asked to deploy international observers to verify withdrawal of the Syrian military forces, apparently promised in the Arab League agreement, from population centers.  That would have been something worth the paper it was written on, and a good deal more.  Maybe they can still move in that direction, though nothing in the history of Arab League initiatives suggests they will.

Meanwhile, over at the Syrian national news agency Sana the focus is on Syria’s pavilion at the Tehran media fair.  It was best in show!

PS, 10 am November 3:  Here are Bashar’s tanks shelling Homs this morning, after the agreement is supposed to have gone into effect.

I imagine there is some Syrian government explanation for this, but they haven’t bothered posting it on their website, which doesn’t mention that the Arab League agreement calls for military withdrawal from Syrian cities.  Then again, we don’t really know whether it does, since no one seems to have come up with a copy of the actual agreement.

Follow updates on the situation at The Guardian.