Syria’s main opposition today condemned a UN-proposed peace plan endorsed by the Security Council, while Bashar al-Assad’s regime maintained its attacks on civilians and opposition activists.

“Such statements, issued amid continued killings, offer the regime the opportunity to push ahead with its repression in order to crush the revolt by the Syrian people,” said Samir Nashar, member of the executive committee of the Syrian National Council.

 In the worst of several violent incidents today, three children were among 10 civilians killed when security forces fired on their bus in the northern town of Sermeen as they tried to escape to Turkey, said the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

With the crisis deteriorating, the West’s democracies “ought to reflect on the Syrian conflict’s strong resemblance to the situation in Yugoslavia in the 1990s,” writes Radwan Ziadeh, a spokesperson for the Syrian National Council and executive director of the Washington-based Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

“Now, as then, oppressed populations are being asked to invest their hopes in a U.N. envoy,” he writes in The New Republic. “It is at times like these that history’s tendency to repeat itself has the perverse and horrific effect of forcing us to relive a nightmare.”

If the divided opposition, which has failed to coalesce under a single commander, ever does get outside military support it will be too late to be effective, said Washington-based Syrian activist Ammar Abdulhamid.

“Why should foreign intervention be wrong when people demand it?” a Homs-based activists asked Abdulhamid, a Syrian dissident who runs the must-read Syrian Revolution Digest blog. “Russia, Iran, Hezbollah all support the regime. That’s a form of intervention, isn’t it? We are not fighting just the regime, we are fighting foreign states that stand behind it. So make this an equal battle for us. We can take care of ourselves.”

The opposition may gain some encouragement from Turkey’s efforts to unify Assad’s opponents and indications that Russia is cooling towards its ally in Damascus.

“Russia will not be focused on keeping Assad in power for the sake of keeping Assad in power,” said Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre think tank.

Ankara has shifted its stance from an initially lukewarm approach to the Arab Spring, analysts suggest, but it is finding it difficult to convert the soft power appeal of the ‘Turkish model’ into hard power leverage to effect change in Syria.

“They wanted to position themselves on the right side of history, expecting the Syrian regime to fall in weeks as in Tunisia and Egypt,” said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

“Right now there is a disappointing situation for Ankara,” he said. “What they banked on didn’t happen. Their bluff and bluster was met by bluff and bluster from the Syrian side and now we are certainly in a bit of a stalemate.”

Turkey will host an April 1 conference of Syrian opposition groups with Western and Middle Eastern government officials. But recent rifts within the exile-based Syrian National Council confirm that the opposition is in what one analyst calls “a state of chaos.”

“The SNC, which has been the dominant external leadership and umbrella group for the opposition, and is led by Burhan Ghalyun, is facing a crisis,” says Joshua Landis, a leading Syria expert:

It has been extremely successful in getting the international community organized to isolate the al-Assad regime and to turn against it. Ausama Monajed, as a right-hand man of Ghalyun’s, was largely responsible for getting both Europe and the United States to sanction Syria within an inch of its life. But what we’ve discovered in the last few weeks is that they failed to get a Western invasion of Syria, which would have capped their success and brought down the regime.

Assad has not been willing or able to compromise ”because his Ba’athist, one-party state is extremely brittle,” Landis tells the Council on Foreign Relations:

When Assad first came to power in 2000, there was what was called a Damascus Spring, and he told Syrians to criticize and to say what they wanted, and within three weeks, almost every Syrian group that had organized itself was asking for an end to Allawite monopoly of the political power. They were asking for freedom and an end to dictatorship, and that’s why the Damascus Spring lasted for only about a month. It was very clear that the system is highly corrupt and it’s highly coercive, built on patronage and loyalty to a family. Once you undermine that, it will crumble.

“The Alawites are lost and they don’t know what to do,” says Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. “For 40 years they have identified with the regime but now with the rise of sectarianism Syrians are having to put hatred in their hearts.”

But not all of them, writes Roula Khalaf:

Fadwa Suleiman(above) is held up as a hero of the Syrian revolution, partly because she is a famous young actress playing the role of her life. But she also hails from the Alawite minority sect that has ruled Syria for 40 years – and by joining the revolt she has taken a higher risk than most.

“Come and see reality, see your brothers in blood peacefully demanding freedom,” Ms Suleiman tells her fellow Alawites in a video recorded from the religiously mixed city of Homs.

If Bashar al-Assad’s forces have been unrelenting in waging war against a largely Sunni Muslim uprising, they are even less forgiving towards one of their own. They have been hunting down Ms Suleiman for months, forcing her into hiding.

“Sectarian violence in Homs would be worse if it weren’t for Fadwa Suleiman,” says Peter Harling, a Syria analyst at the International Crisis Group. “She has tried to contain the damage among Alawites who have been hijacked by the regime.”

Bashar’s father, “Hafez al-Assad dismantled the Alawite identity,” says Harling. “It’s even hard to speak of an Alawite religion today – their sheikhs [religious scholars] don’t carry much weight in the community.”

Nevertheless, the sect feels obliged to support the regime, says Lebanese Alawite businessman.

“It’s an existential question for the Alawites,” he says. “This regime protects them and if it goes we will have an Islamist government. This uprising is not only about Bashar, it is about changing the whole ideology of Syria.”

International intervention is the only way to avoid the conflict’s escalation into sectarian civil war and avoid a repeat of the 1990s’ Balkans carnage, says Ziadeh, a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group. The parallels with the former Yugoslavia are even evident in the “political sensibilities” of Assad and Slobodan Milosovic, he writes:

[T]hese two men also shared a similarly cynical political sensibility: Any and all ideologies were subordinate to their desire to establish personal power. Both had a record of supporting unity when it was in their interests, only to switch to supporting virulent sectarian nationalism when circumstances changed. In short, they are leaders who acquire influence in the least sustainable of fashions, by constantly manipulating their own people.

RTWT

Ziadeh will be a witness at a Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission hearing on the Human Rights Crisis in Syria: Tuesday, March 27, 2012. 9:30 AM – 11:00 AM, Rayburn B-318, Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.

Since March 2011, growing numbers of anti-government protests in Syria have been met with a brutal crackdown by the Syrian government, including widespread killings, torture, and indiscriminate shelling of cities. More than 8,000 people have been killed, and over 200,000 people have been displaced. The Syrian government is even using landmines as a deadly tactic to prevent civilians from escaping.

This hearing will examine the systemic and grave human rights abuses by the Syrian government, and the impact of those abuses on the Syrian people.

Panel I: Robert Ford, U.S. Ambassador to Syria. Panel II: Maria McFarland, Deputy Washington Director, Human Rights Watch; Suzanne Nossel, Executive Director, Amnesty International USA; Andrew Tabler, Next Generation Fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy’ Radwan Ziadeh, Visiting Scholar, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

If you have any questions, please contact the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission at 202-225-3599 or tlhrc@mail.house.gov.

With Syrian army defections reportedly on the rise following the ouster of Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the democratic opposition and international community are seeking to ramp up the pressure on Damascus and maintain the Arab Spring’s momentum.

Washington today took the exceptional step of announcing sanctions against Syria’s most senior diplomat, Foreign Minister Walid Al-Moallem. The announcement followed the news that the brother of a prominent US-based Syrian dissident was arrested and came a day after video footage broadcast on YouTube (above) showed Robert Ford, the US ambassador to Damascus being harassed by pro-Assad demonstrators.
The State Department dismissed the footage, which purports to show US connivance in the anti-Assad protests, as a “feeble attempt to divert the world’s attention from what’s really happening to the Syrian people.”

Pro-democracy activist Radwan Ziadeh (right), a Syrian scholar based at George Washington University, confirmed today that his brother was arrested by Syrian Air Force security operatives.

“Yes, the [Syrian] Air Force security arrested him today morning and we don’t have info about him where he is exactly right now,” Ziadeh said in an email to the Digest. “I have a concern [he] may be under torture.”

A former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group,  Ziadeh was one of several exiled Syrian democracy advocates who met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier this month.

Several observers have noted that Syrian diplomats have been facilitating the domestic repression of dissent by identifying exiled democracy advocates and threatening to harm relatives back in Syria.

“You have the Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Mustafa, under investigation by the FBI for orchestrating this pattern of intimidation and violence,” says David Schenker, director of the Arab Politics Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.  “This is happening every day in Syria,” says Schenker. “How many family members of opposition figures have been rounded up, tortured, killed?”

Syria’s opposition appears to be following the good example set by Libya’s diverse opposition, motivated by the need to prepare for a post-Assad transition and to assuage misplaced concerns over Islamist influence.

As The Henry Jackson Society’s Michael Weiss observes, the mainstream Syrian opposition has been consistently moderate and democratic in its demands.

“From Dr Radwan Ziadeh’s National Initiative for Change, a umbrella movement founded in late April and built around a manifesto of the same name, to the Local Coordination Committees, which released their statement of principles after the Good Friday massacre, the demands of most opposition groups within and without Syria have been remarkably consistent,” he notes.

A consortium of Syrian political parties has formed a Libyan-style Transitional National Council, to develop a democratic alternative to Ba’athist dynastic rule which will likely be headed by Sorbonne professor Dr Burhan Ghalioun, seen here telling Al-Jazeera that the Arab world’s two biggest problems are dictatorship and religious control of the media:

These clerics have no true knowledge of society or politics. Whoever turns on Al-Jazeera or any other channel sees that the clerics control everything. It is not true that they are a minority. Today, the intellectuals and politicians have no role. Arab societies are held hostage by two authorities: The authority of political dictatorship — arrogant dictators, who are inhuman in their oppression of liberties, and in their crushing and humiliation of the individual. The other authority is that of the clerics — even those opposing these regimes — who tyrannize Arab public opinion nowadays. Arab public opinion is held hostage by the clerics of all types. Muslim clerics and Islamists from all groups. There is a kind of undeclared, practical alliance between the political dictatorship and the dictatorship of religious authority from all groups, who do the impossible in order to remove all the people who hold different views — politicians, thinkers, and intellectuals — whether by accusing them of secularism, which means heresy, or by accusing them of modernism, of having ties with the West, or of collaborating with colonialism. In their conduct, they do not really differ from the Arab dictatorial regimes. The leaders of the Islamic movements are, without a doubt, the ones winning the war. Whoever watches Arab media realizes that they have won the war of culture. The slogan “Islam is the solution” — in my opinion, 90% of Arab public opinion believes nothing else.

The international community can help Syria’s opposition to facilitate a democratic alternative to both secular and religious authoritarianism by pressing for answers to a range of practical issues, writes Peter Harling, the Iraq-Syria-Lebanon project director with the International Crisis Group:

How to ensure that the collapse of the regime not provoke or lead to the simultaneous collapse of the weak state? How to deal with a military that has not stepped up to its task as a national army? How to maintain security with an inept and corrupt police force? How to ensure the well-being of the Allawite community, without which Syria cannot be soundly rebuilt? What will be needed to kick-start economic recovery?   

Forget about crafting a power-sharing arrangement, he says.

“The focus should be on thinking through how to manage the transition’s early stages, sustaining basic governance, and reviving the economy,” Harling suggests. “By raising and answering such questions — which the protest movement has little time, space, energy and experience to contemplate — dissident intellectuals could gain relevance on the ground, reassuring both demonstrators who resent their perceived claim to leadership and citizens who currently back the regime for lack of trust in the alternative.”

Put away the metaphors. Forget the Arab Spring, the wave of protests, the snowballing of dissent.

Dictators watch Al Jazeera too and they have drawn the necessary lessons from recent events, a Washington meeting heard today. Ruling elites are recalculating and adapting to enhance their survival prospects, but external factors are marginal as there are no instruments in the democracy promotion toolkit likely to influence autocrats’ strategic decisions to resign, reform or repress.

The region’s rulers have gone through an accelerated process of authoritarian learning, said Steven Heydemann, an analyst with the United States Institute of Peace, reassessing and reinforcing their capacity to survive. Regimes have adapted tactics, framing unrest in sectarian terms to deter citizens from joining protests, and identified the degree of “acceptable violence” that entails minimal costs in terms of international or domestic reaction.

They recognize that the U.S. and other international actors – already overstretched in Libya – have adjusted their positions accordingly, he told the George Washington University event, and leaders have reassessed their exit options after considering the fate of formerly impregnable autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen.

The Obama administration has understandably adopted a “boutique strategy” or case-by-case approach that is necessarily driven by differing assessments of U.S. strategic interests. In any case, external actors’ options are relatively limited as there are no tools or instruments in the repertoire of democracy promoters that can influence leaders’ “strategic calculus.”

The military and security forces’ predisposition to violently suppress protesters is the critical factor distinguishing Tunisia and Egypt from other Arab states, said Brandeis University political scientist Eva Bellin.

The military’s decision as to whether to open fire or not depends in part on the size and conduct (whether peaceful of violent) of protesters, and on whether the unrest threatens the nation’s integrity. But it hinges primarily on calculations of the armed forces’ institutional interests which are largely determined by the military’s level of professionalism and political neutrality (high in Tunisia and Egypt) or, alternatively, its patrimonial links – by blood or marriage – to the ruling elite (extensive and intimate in Syria).

These factors explain why Mubarak and Ben Ali (below) got the “velvet glove” from the military, why al-Assad’s Ba’athist regime appears relatively secure and why the armed forces in Libya and Yemeni have fractured.

"We both got the 'velvet glove' - or is it the 'velvet shove'?"

While common structural factors have shaped the unrest, contingent events are also significant. The security forces’ violent overreaction to children scrawling irreverent graffiti sparked the Syrian unrest, while the Night of the Camels assault on the Tahrir Square protesters fatally damaged Mubarak’s legitimacy.

External actors have no legitimate role in forcing autocrats from office, said Bellin, but can play a constructive role after regime’s collapse, advising on institution building, party development and related aspects of democracy assistance.

She appears to neglect or underplay the significance and value of democracy assistance prior to regime collapse, including training, capacity-building and other forms of support that sustains or empowers civil society, labor and other democratic forces operating in authoritarian states, ensuring that local actors are well-placed to organize and shape events as openings emerge.

“There was something admirable about pro-democracy organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and the National Democratic Institute working under difficult constraints, trying to push Arab regimes to open up, even if slightly,” writes Shadi Hamid, research director at the Brookings Doha Center.

While successive U.S. administrations called for political reform in the region, promoting democracy was invariably subordinated to economic, security and other strategic interests.

“Supporting civil society and offering training and technical assistance to secular political parties seemed like a workable compromise,” he argues.

Preparing a 'self-inflicted coup'?

Syria’s ruling cabinet resigned today as President Bashar al-Assad’s government tries to placate anti-regime protests that have raged since March 18. But the move should be read as a sign of authoritarian adaptation rather than a concession to the protest movement that has raged since March 18.

Indeed, some analysts suggest, the protest movement has passed its peak without managing to develop the momentum or critical mass needed to present a serious challenge to the Baathist regime.

Some activists claim that the regime has already started a dialog with opposition figures to fashion a reform program.

The announcement of the cabinet’s resignation came as tens of thousands marched in several Syrian cities in orchestrated pro-regime rallies. Public sector workers and college students were pressured into attending the Soviet-style demonstrations, activists said.

Assad (above) is expected to use an address to the nation tomorrow to announce a series of reforms that may even signal a self-inflicted coup. His speech will partly reflect a covert dialog between the regime and opposition groups in which dissidents made demands they expect to feature in Assad’s program.

“As a first step, we want the regime to dissolve the security apparatus, amend the constitution and form committees to investigate corruption and the killing of protesters,” one activist told CNN.

The opposition is also demanding an end to the emergency law in place since 1963, dissolution of the political parties law to allow freedom of association, and several other constitutional reforms.

Another activist distanced the March 18th protest movement from “the traditional Syrian opposition” and insisted that a transition could be peaceful.

“We do not want bloodshed and we are honest about negotiation attempts with the regime,” he told CNN. The March 18th movement is a spontaneous one “representing liberals, conservatives, Christians, Sunnis, Alawites,” he said, and is “not related to Muslim Brotherhood nor the traditional Syrian opposition in any way.”

If Assad’s proposed measures are largely cosmetic, analysts suggest, it will confirm that regime hard-liners have won the internal “concession-or-repression” debate, but an end to the state of emergency would indicate otherwise.

“The emergency law is a cornerstone of Baathist rule, and once it goes everything else might go with it,” said Karim Emile Bitar, a Syria specialist at the Paris-based Institute for International and Strategic Relations. “Things could collapse for them if they’re serious about lifting it: liberation of political prisoners, multiple parties, no more harassing activists. People are going to use this to air more and more grievances.”

Others suggest that the devil is in the detail.

“Lifting the emergency law will not change anything on the ground without lifting the supplements of the emergency law and having radical political reform — especially the Constitution,” said Radwan Ziadeh, an exiled Syrian human rights advocate.

The ruling Ba’ath party has monopolized political power for nearly 50 years and exiled democracy advocate Ammar Abdulhamid believes the protesters will not be pacified by piecemeal reforms or deterred by stage-managed rallies.

“The protesters will continue until their goals are achieved,” he said. “Those who protested risked their lives, while those who came out to support the regime staved off harm or got a reward – this is the difference between the free and the enslaved.”

Assad’s words will need to be matched by appropriate and convincing actions if he hopes to take the steam out of the protests, activists contend.

“The issue is not what Assad will say, it is what will he apply?” said Ammar Qurabi, head of Syria’s National Organization for Human Rights. “We are tired of all this talk that the Syrian people have heard from the government for 11 years.”

Many dissidents view any proposed reforms as an attempt to deflect criticism and divert attention from the need for regime change.

“The reforms are tricks to divert the attention from public opinion,” said opposition figure Maamoun al-Homsi. “Listen to my advice, this is all to distract.”

But some observers suggest that Assad may now be in a position to introduce reforms that were previously stifled by hard-liners.

“I know positively that a lot of these laws they are promising have been under preparation for a long time,” a European diplomat told UPI.

Bashar’s fiercest opposition may come from within the ranks of his own family and Allawite clan, writes David Ignatius:

The Assad clan also has military power that could obstruct Bashar’s reformist moves. His brother Maher, for example, commands a tough unit of Syrian special forces, and his brother-in-law Assaf Shaukat has been a senior intelligence official. It’s anyone’s guess, at this point, whether the Assads will remain united behind Bashar or fall into a bloody internal fued, but so far Bashar has proved the master of the situation.

But the opposition movement has already crested and failed to generate the cross-class alliances or provoke the internal splits needed to force genuine reform, argues Joshua Landis, author of the Syria Comment blog and the director of the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Middle East Studies. The location of the protests’ epicenter is a significant factor in limiting their appeal and potential contagion, he argues:

Daraa is poor, and the population is religiously conservative. It’s hard for Sunni merchants to make common cause with them. The dusty border city – marked by tribal loyalties, poverty and Islamic conservatism – may inspire Syria’s rural masses who suffer from poverty, a prolonged drought and joblessness. But mass demonstrations there have frightened Syria’s urban elites.

He suspects that Assad will promise only superficial reform.

“Lifting the emergency law, which will be welcome to everybody, may not in the end mean that much because there are other laws in the books allowing police and intelligence forces to behave in ways that aren’t acceptable, to trample on individual rights,” he believes.

The regime’s reformist insiders may be able to leverage the unrest to force through much-needed incremental change, The Guardian reports.

“What we have in Syria is not yet a revolution. It is unrest in pursuit of legitimate reform,” a Syrian official said. “Assad is a popular president. If there was a vote tomorrow, I think he would win 60% or maybe more.

“We have the problem of economic corruption but not political corruption. Assad has a lot of credit in the bank. He needs to cash it in or else we are heading for the unknown. Whatever happens, Syria has changed. The wall of fear for expressing your views has collapsed.”

Syria's 'resistance' posturing won't address domestic demands, analysts contend

With protesters taking to the streets of Deraa for the fourth consecutive day, observers are asking whether Syria will be the latest Arab regime to confront a democratic upsurge. The protests today spread to the town of Jassem.

President Bashar al-Assad confronts many of the problems that fuelled protest movements elsewhere in the region, including the denial of basic freedoms and a demographic youth bulge creating an unmet demand for jobs and opportunities.

In a move derided by its critics, the interior minister last week announced 20,000 new jobs — in the police force.

The Baathist dictatorship has missed the opportunity to reform and now faces a democratic revolution, a prominent dissident said today.

“The revolution is at the door and the regime is still flirting with change,” said Haitham Maleh, a former judge and human rights activist.

“All the Syrian provinces will erupt. There is near consensus that this regime is unsustainable. The masses do not want it,” he told Reuters.

The 80-year-old dissident, released from jail two weeks ago under an amnesty, was first imprisoned Maleh in the 1980s for opposing a Baathist takeover of professional unions.

Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, the conventional military is unlikely to emerge as a power-broker since the regime’s repressive capacity lies in the paramilitary Republican Guard and Special Forces that are deeply politicized and tied to the ruling Allawite minority.

But recent events may provide the grounds for restraint.

“This year’s Arab spring so far shows that force works a lot less than it used to – and the price of using it has gone up,” one analyst notes.

Even observers who have been notably cautious about prospects for change in Syria are now hedging their bets.

“I don’t think the regime is going to fall any time soon, but then again no one knows what’s going to happen anymore,” admits Syria Comment’s Joshua Landis. “We thought the Arab regimes were stable until this year, and we were proved wrong.”

But analysts caution that while the Baathist dictatorship’s distinctive characteristics may not render it immune from the current wave of protests, its proven willingness to violently suppress discontent makes a Libyan or Bahraini scenario more likely than a relatively peaceful Egyptian or Tunisian transition.

Security forces killed at least four protesters in Deraa when large crowds took to the streets after Friday prayers on 18 March chanting “God, Syria and freedom — that’s enough!” Police dispersed Saturday’s funeral march for the victims with tear gas and water cannon, and reportedly shot another protester on Sunday when thousands gathered to demand democratic reforms and an end to the 48 year-old state of emergency.

Up to 30,000 civilians were killed in 1982’s Hama massacre, when Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, suppressed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising and dozens were killed in 2004 when Bashar himself turned security forces on protesters calling for Kurdish autonomy.

The United States today urged Damascus to exercise restraint against anti-government demonstrators and condemned the weekend’s crackdown.

“We call on the Syrian government to exercise restraint and refrain from violence against these …protesters,” said Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman. The regime should “live up to its obligations under the universal declaration of human rights and allow the Syrian people to exercise the universal right of assembly,” he said.

The government reportedly cordoned off the city to prevent the protests spreading to other cities. Bashar tried to appease protesters by ordering the release of those detained on Friday, sending a high-level Baath delegation to express condolences to the bereaved and reportedly reaching out to known dissidents to discuss possible reforms.

The protests appear to have flared spontaneously, as in Tunisia, and evidently caught both the government and its critics unawares.

“We were surprised [by the Deraa protest] on Friday, because we didn’t know about it,” said a Damascus-based dissident.

Recent attempts to orchestrate anti-government protests through social media fizzled out or were quickly repressed.

On 16 March, 150 activists were beaten by plain-clothed Mukhabarat agents and at least 30 arrested at a protest organized by the Syrian Human Rights Observatory, calling for the release of political prisoners.

But some observers suggest the government may now face a serious challenge.

“It is the start of a Syrian revolution unless the regime acts wisely and does the needed reforms,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, a former political prisoner who runs a dissident website in exile. “It will continue in all cities, even small groups,” he argues, but fears that the Baath may “show its Gaddafi face, the one it has been trying to hide for the last 30 years after the Hama massacres. ”

Others are more cautious, if not fearful that the much-feared and omnipresent Mukhabarat secret police will take advantage of open political agitation to identify and arrest dissidents as it did following Syria’s last brief flowering of democratic aspiration when a coalition of opposition groups issued the Damascus Declaration, calling on Bashar to initiate gradual democratic reform.

“Everyone is waiting to see what happens – nothing is yet clear,” said an observer with links to the small human rights community. “The feeling is that now is not the time to start going public.”

Such caution is justifiable, not only due to the government’s repressive inclinations and capacity, but also because it is one of the region’s most adaptive and resilient authoritarian regimes.

As The Economist notes, Syria has “traditionally enjoyed a two-fold stability: it is one of the most authoritarian countries in the world and many on the streets like the president, Bashar Assad.”

The Baathist authorities have developed a robust ruling coalition and a genuine support base through a largely statist “social market economy” in which large swaths of citizens are government employees and beneficiaries of social services, a Washington meeting heard today.

The regime has demonstrated a capacity to effectively integrate or neutralize potentially independent sources of power – like a vibrant private sector, for example – by reshaping itself to accommodate a plurality of conflicting interests through a “recombinant” authoritarianism, said Steve Heydemann, launching a new report, Resilient Authoritarianism in the Middle East.

This adaptive form of governance has implications for democracy promotion because it challenges the “mental maps” which posit state and civil society as separate spheres, and envisage the latter as terrain for challenging the former, Syria expert Reinoud Leenders told a National Democratic Institute forum.

In resilient authoritarian regimes and in the absence of a genuinely independent civil society, he said, there is a case for working with state actors and institutions, such as the judiciary, and government-organized NGOs (GONGOs) which, while politically compromised, may nevertheless provide partners for gradual reform efforts.

The regime also derives a degree of legitimacy from its narrative of resistance to Israel, said Leenders.

But others note that the so-called “Syrian exception” – its anti-Western foreign policy alignment with the Islamic Republic of Iran – fails to address the protesters’ exclusively domestic agenda of demands for rights, jobs and better living standards.

The regime evidently believes it can escape the turmoil sweeping across the region.

“Syria is stable,” Assad told the Wall Street Journal, shortly after Tunisia’s president Ben Ali was deposed and Egypt’s pro-democracy demonstrations were in full swing. “We are outside of this; we are not Tunisians and we are not Egyptians,” he insisted.

The government appears to be betting that Assad’s apparently widespread public perception as a frustrated reformer and the regime’s fierce – and fiercely loyal – paramilitary special security forces will deter or defuse any serious challenge.

“Assad may be a bit more personally popular than some of his counterparts but his apparatus of repression, led by members of his own family, is fiercer than Mubarak or Ben Ali’s ever was,” writes Syria watcher David Hirst.

The regime has made minor concessions and economic bribes to buy goodwill, he writes, but Bashar has personally dismissed the prospect of democratic reforms before “the next generation.”

“That doesn’t augur well for dialogue, reconciliation, or a smooth transition of power,” writes Hirst. “So if uprising there is to be it will be more like Libya and Bahrain’s. Never would the army and police leaderships abandon the political one as they did in Egypt and Tunisia.”

Most Syria experts contend that the regime is likely to survive, albeit in a slightly adapted or revised form, but even the most cautious are having their doubts.

“It is unclear where this can lead, as the opposition has no leadership and Syria has no organized parties,” writes Syria Comment’s Landis. “All the same, we are in a new era. If demonstrations grow to the point that security forces are overwhelmed, the situation could change rapidly.”

“The Syrian exception has long rested on the regime’s skill in developing a foreign policy in synch with public opinion – a unique case in the Arab world. But popular sentiment has refocused around a host of domestic issues left unaddressed for too long,” said Peter Harling, a Damascus-based analyst with the International Crisis Group.

Barack Obama’s decision to deliver an address to the Muslim world from Cairo will bolster Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic regime, says a leading reformer, at a time when it is trying to close the political space it was forced to concede during the short-lived Arab spring of 2005.

The government’s media supporters were “practically ululating” at the news of Obama’s visit, publisher and human rights activist Hisham Kassem  told Democracy Digest today. The move was “definitely giving the wrong signals”, he said, especially in the context of the administration’s recent overtures to Cuba, Iran and Venezuela.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs insisted that the speech would not be an endorsement of Mubarak’s regime. “The issues of democracy and human rights are things that are on the president’s mind, and we’ll have a chance to discuss those in more depth on the trip,” he insisted.

Kassem is in Washington to attend the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy. By happy coincidence, he was also able to attend the launch of a book – The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East – in which he is profiled.

The former publisher of Cairo Times and Al-Masry Al-Youm has “never taken seriously” the prospect of Gamal Mubarak succeeding his father as president. Suggestions that Gamal headed a modernizing faction of technocrats within the ruling National Democratic Party are risible since the NDP old guard makes all key policy decisions. The dynastic succession in Syria was based on the ruling family’s Allawite control of the military and political elite, but the Mubarak’s have no such base.

Despite the regime efforts to claw back earlier political concessions, a diverse range of forces, from bloggers to independent labor unions, is putting up a fight. “Egypt’s civil society is more active and stronger than many foreigners and even Egyptians themselves may credit,” notes Francis J. Ricciardone, recently returned U.S. ambassador in Cairo.

Yet Kashem lauds the “beautiful generation” of activists currently carving out more political space than their predecessors and challenging the “constants” of Egypt’s political life, including the stale orthodoxies of Arab nationalism, socialism and even anti-Israeli attitudes. Civil society is characterized by “confusion, but commotion”, showing vibrancy in the face of adversity.

Hala Mustafa, editor of Democracy Review, makes a similar observation. “It’s important in Egypt that there is such protest activity and that it’s searching for new ideas,” she said recently. “This is a real development, potentially a new generation that is neither just liberal or Islamist.”

Sustained U.S. pressure on Mubarak between 2003 and 2005 forced “important concessions that benefited and emboldened local activists“, notes Neil Hicks of Human Rights First, including more independent newspapers and human rights organizations. Democracy and human rights activists are demanding that Obama use the occasion of his Cairo speech to “speak candidly about the human rights and democracy deficit in the Middle East to allies and adversaries alike, and use the same levers of influence to promote this goal as he would any other core national interest. ”

The Obama administration has also been criticized for a 70 percent cut in funding for democracy promotion in Egypt from $50 million to $20 million this year. Democracy groups are unhappy that the State Department has capitulated to Cairo’s demands that only government-approved civil society groups be funded.  

Academic analyst Marc Lynch believes Obama should “take advantage of the location to forcefully speak out in favor of democratization and human rights” and even “reach out to the Muslim Brotherhood as an example of an organization facing a choice between ‘resistance’ and ‘constructive partnership’ and criticize the Egyptian regime’s repression of the Brotherhood at a time when it was trying to play the democratic game.”

But Kassem is dismissive of Western commentators who echo the regime in consistently overstating the influence and prospects of the Muslim Brotherhood [Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski makes a similar point, noting that "leaders like Mubarak actually gave more space to Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood than to more secular-minded democratic activists, to create the illusion that that the only alternative to their rule was an Islamist takeover."]

In the latest issue of the must-read Arab Reform Bulletin, Denis Sullivan speculates on whether the Brotherhood will run in the 2010 parliamentary elections, suggesting that the decision will reveal the respective strengths of reformist and conservative factions.

But Kassem insists that the Islamist movement remains ambivalent about democracy, has proven to be politically inept over eight decades of existence, and has never developed a credible strategy for taking power, while its “quasi-military structure” deters young activists.

Ayman Nour’s presidential candidacy demonstrated that liberal democrats could attract at least as much support as the Brotherhood, he contends. While the Islamists are able to exploit the mosque as a forum for organizing, democrats would emerge as a credible alternative if they were allowed similar space. 

Skepticism about the Brotherhood’s new-found commitment to democratic values is shared by others. “Whether the Muslim Brothers genuinely are liberals is an empirical question analysts will not be able to answer until they actually govern,” notes Steven Cook. “In recent years, arguments …. have been used to make the case that the United States should engage the Brotherhood as a progressive force for modernization and political change. Yet so far, the Islamists’ ostensible commitment to liberalism remains more assertion than fact.”