Why the Syrian Regime Won't Fall

Suppose this was a Hollywood script conference and you have to pitch your story idea in 10 words or less. It's a movie about Syria. As much as the currently in-research Kathryn Hurt Locker Bigelow film about the Osama bin Laden raid was pitched as "good guys take out Osama in Pakistan", the Syrian epic could be branded "Sunnis and Shi'ites battle for Arab republic".

Yes, once again this is all about that fiction, the "Shi'ite crescent", about isolating Iran and about Sunni prejudice against Shi'ites.

The hardcore Sunni Wahhabi House of Saud - in yet another towering show of hypocrisy, and faithful to its hatred of secular Arab republics - has branded the Bashar al-Assad-controlled Ba'ath regime in Syria "a killing machine". 

True, Assad's ferocious security apparatus does not help - having killed over 2,400 people since unrest erupted in March. That is much more, incidentally, than Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's forces had killed in Libya when United Nations Resolution 1973 was rushed in to allow foreign interventions. The Diogenes the Cynic response to this "where's the UN" discrepancy would be that Syria, unlike Libya, is not sitting on immense oil and gas wealth.

The Assad regime issues from the Alawite Shi'ite sub-sect. Thus, for the House of Saud, this means Sunnis are being killed. And, to add insult to injury, by a regime aligned with Shi'ite Iran.

Thus, the Saudi condemnation, followed by minions of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), also known as the Gulf Counter-Revolutionary Club, plus the toothless, Saudi-manipulated Arab League. To top it off, House of Saud and Gulf wealth is actively financing the more unsavory strand of Syrian protests - the radicalized Muslim Brotherhood/fundamentalist/Salafi nebula.

By contrast, the only thing pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain received from the House of Saud and the GCC was an invasion, and outright repression.

Now for the Turkey shoot

Turkey's position is far more nuanced. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is overwhelmingly Sunni. They are playing for the regional Sunni gallery. But the AKP should be aware that at least 20% of Turks are Shi'ites from the Alevi branch, and they have a lot of empathy with Syrian Allawis.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu - the academic father of the celebrated "zero problems with our neighbors" policy - this week spent no less than six hours talking to Assad face-to-face in Damascus. He was deeply enigmatic at his press conference, implying that the Assad regime ending the crackdown and meeting the protesters' demands was a "process". Assad could reply he had already started the "process" - but these things, such as free and fair elections, take time.

Davutoglu explicitly said; "As we always underlined, our main criteria is that the shape of the process must reflect only the will of the Syrian people." At the moment, the regime would reply, the majority of the Syrian people seem to be behind the government.

Davutoglu's words also seem to imply there's no reason for Turkey to interfere in Syria as long as Damascus is reasonable and stops killing people (Assad admitted "mistakes" were made) and introduces reforms. So the impression is left that Davutoglu was contradicting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has vocally advocated for Turkey to "solve" the Syrian quagmire.