Israel Matzav

Assad must be quaking in his boots

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be quaking in his boots: Hillary Clinton has told him to quit and leave Syria.

"Assad must transfer power and depart Syria," Clinton told a news conference in Istanbul after meeting foreign ministers from Arab and Western nations to discuss counterterrorism.

"The regime-sponsored violence that we witnessed again in Hama yesterday is simply unconscionable. Assad has doubled down on his brutality and his duplicity and Syria will not, cannot be peaceful, stable or certainly democratic until Assad goes."

United Nations observers have been prevented from reaching the village of Mazraat al-Qubeir, near Hama where anti-Assad activists say Syrian troops and militiamen loyal to the president massacred at least 78 villagers, the head of the monitoring mission said on Thursday.

The reported carnage came hours before a divided UN Security Council discusses Syria.

The latest killings will heap pressure on world powers to act, but they have been stymied by divisions pitting Western and most Arab states against Assad's defenders in Russia, China and Iran.

But wait... no... not yet....

[Clinton] suggested that peace envoy Kofi Annan's plan, whose central plank was a ceasefire that never took hold, needed to be given a last chance, saying other nations - presumably Russia and China - would not support stronger action unless its failure was incontestable.

"We think it is important for us to give Kofi Annan and his plan the last amount of support that we can muster because, in order to bring others into a frame of mind to take action in the Security Council, there has to be a final recognition that it's not working," Clinton said.

How much more recognition do you need? Isn't it nice to be in a post-American world where everyone does what is fit in his own eyes? And by the way, to whom does Clinton propose to transfer power in Syria? The Muslim Brotherhood? Al-Qaeda? What could go wrong?

Labels: Bashar al-Assad, Hillary Clinton, leading from behind, Syrian uprising

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:23 PM