Rattlesnake Ridge      

 
      BFF
“On one of the city’s main streets, families have still gathered every night on the sidewalks and in the medians for nighttime picnics. Vendors crowd around selling hookahs, popcorn, sandwiches and coffee. Traffic moves slowly as people park cars by the sidewalk and open doors and windows to let music stream out to entertain the crowds……. But Aleppo’s reluctance to join the revolution goes beyond any alleged cowardice. As a financially stable city, Aleppo was already less likely to revolt, and since the nationwide unrest erupted in mid-March, residents have by turns been made complacent by government enticements and scared by the overwhelming presence of security agents and spies. Whereas Damascus is the capital and administrative hub of Syria, Aleppo is the economic center where much of the money flows, said Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian opposition activist and dissident in the United States. Many of the country’s factories, textile plants and pharmaceutical companies are in the city………….”

The regime in Syria, just like those in Libya and Yemen, just like all Arab regimes whether dictatorships or monarchies, clings to power. As a Ba’ath Party regime, it is more willing to kill its own people than say, even the Mubarak regime in Egypt. The Ba’ath Party has had a specially dark and bloody history, in both Iraq and Syria. It started as an imitator of Europe’s Fascist “Nationalist” parties, but later acquired socialists pretensions after the expansion of Soviet power. Yet it soon descended, especially in Iraq, to a basically tribal power center (tribal in the literal sense and in the broader sense of a clan or a sect). In that, the Ba’ath rule became no different from any dictatorship or absolute monarchy; only it was bloodier than both other cases because of the mutual mistrust with the people. Neither Nasser nor Sadat or Mubarak in Egypt were ever nearly as repressive as the Ba’ath, nor were most Arab monarchies with one exception (some would say two exceptions).
No doubt the Syrian toothpaste is out of the tube. Yet the shape of the future is unknown. Arab despots are very creative in bargaining with their people and clinging to their power under different, new, guises. And the outside world (especially the West) does not like any change not of its own making. That is why the overall verdict on the so-called Arab Spring is undecided, yet.
Cheers
mhg



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