The Butcher is Back

Can someone please explain the mystery of the Assad regime's longevity? If the regime was a kind, responsible, democratic, well-integrated into the international community, respectful of human rights, economically successful... then one might understand that such a begnin dictatorship might last more than 50 years.

BUT,

The Assad regime is a cruel, barbaric, dictatorial, pariah in the international community, a consistent and chronic violator of human rights, a decrepit socialist economic system, a familial oligarchy of profiteers and cronies, whose power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority (the Alawite Shiites) ruling by terror over the remaining Syrian population.

The Assad regime invaded Lebanon in 1976 and contributed more than any other party to the destruction of the country by undermining the country's institutions, shelling Lebanese cities for months on end, kidnapping and forcibly disappearing innocent people whose whereabouts remain unknown, and in recent years working hand in hand with the terror organization Hezbollah to dismantle the little bit left of a functioning Lebanese state.

Syrian jails are notorious for their babarity and their arbitrary detention and torture of people, and for making an extortion business out of the families of the detained. Lebanese detainees from the 1970s and 1980s are no longer identifiable because their Syrian jailers change their names and neither their families nor human rights organizations can find them.

Syria has scuttled any apparent move toward peace with Israel, being the only Arab country with borders with Israel to have rejected a peace treaty with Israel while forcing tiny Lebanon to follow suit by arming and funding Palestinian terror organizations since the 1960s, then Iranian terror organizations like Hezbollah.

The only thing that the Assad regime can be credited with - from a Western standpoint - is that it has never fought Israel after 1973. Having fought and lost the 1949, 1967, and 1973 wars with Israel, Hafez Assad (the father of current butcher Bashar) made a deal with Henry Kissinger, the criminal former US State Department Secretary, in 1974 over the Golan Heights which was occupied and annexed by Israel: The US will not remove you from power and will surrender Lebanon to you as long as you keep peace on the Golan Heights with Israel. And both sides have kept their word on that deal ever since. And that is why the Assad regime is still alive and kicking when all other Arab dictators have fallen and, unfortunately, been replaced by a new generation of pro-Western dictators.

Assad has never challenged Israel over its occupation of the Golan, has never fired a bullet attempting to liberate the Golan, and has never allowed any resistance - Palestinian or Iranian-backed - to operate and fire from the Golan on Israel (like has always been the case in Lebanon), while shoving Lebanon into becoming the only active war front against Israel.

And now, the filthy Arabs have again embraced the Assad regime, forgiving it the murder of half a million of its own people, the detention and torture of hundreds of thousands, and the eviction of 12 million Syrians out of their country into refugee camps. Other dictators with such a record would be sitting in a criminal court facing charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

But not Assad. The West and the Arabs seem to find merit in the Assad regime that they can never articulate. The West, especially the Americans and their European poodles, take a tough tone in their public statements about vague sanctions that never deter Assad or change his behavior. They go haywire about every other dictator in Asia and Africa, sending armies and peacekeeprs, bringing criminals of war to the Hague for prosecution.... But not Assad. They go after terrorist leaders, killing them with drones and bombings. But not Assad.

What is it that protects the Assad regime? Is it the deal that Henry Kissinger made with the regime in 1974 to protect Israel and implant the Palestinian refugees permanently in Lebanon so they no longer make a claim to the Right of Return? 

Are the Arabs and the West making a new deal with Assad in which the 2 million Syrian refugees and illegals in Lebanon will be permanently settled in the country just like the Palestinian refugees, transforming Lebanon into a Sunni Muslim majority country that is friendly to Israel, now that all the Sunni arabs have sold Palestine and become allies of Israel? 

Lebanon is again being sold to the Assad regime in exchange for concessions elsewhere. The pattern of Western and Arab treachery vis-a-vis Lebanon has not changed since the late 1960s. The Lebanese don't seem to understand that Syria is Lebanon's Enemy Number One and Lebanese politicians are afraid of the Syrian regime's propensity to assassinate those who disagree with it, like it did between 1975 to date. It took Syria six decades to recognize Lebanon's right to exist as an independent country and agree to post an ambassador in Beirut. Syria's Assad sees and treats Lebanon exactly as his friend Vladimir Putin sees and treats Ukraine: Just as Putin believes Ukraine to have always been part of his imperial and soviet Russia, Assad believes Lebanon was always part of some Greater Syria fantasy spawned from his Baathist ideology.

How long can a diminishing native Lebanese population last in the face of the Syrianization and Islamization of the country? Can the Lebanese people really stand up to the long term objective of the West to eliminate the annoying Lebanese formula that complicates its simpleton views of the Middle East, what with its recalcitrant Christian community that refuses to disappear like Iraq's and Syria's Christians? In their ignorance and greed, Western decision-makers have convinced themselves that the Middle East would be simpler to understand and manage if it is reduced to a Jewish (Israel) versus Sunni Muslim (Saudi Arabia) duality. The "uniqueness" of Lebanon, namely its Christian community, the last free Christian community in the entire East, has been a thorn in their primitive cerebrums and they have decided to finish with it once for all. Lebanon's Christians used to be Catholic Europe's foothold in the Near East back from the early centuries of the Church and the European Kingdoms. But now the prevailing anglo-saxon protestant winds coming from the United States and the United Kingdom have founded a new foothold in Palestine, a colony called Israel, and have no use for Lebanon and its Christians.