As the year ends, the news from Syria becomes worse and worse.

Today’s Washington Post reports that 400 people were killed in one single day on Saturday, December 29, and “About half of them were civilians slain in an alleged mass killing carried out by government troops at a petrochemical university in central Syria, opposition groups reported.” Read more »

A bombing today in Beirut assassinated the head of the Intelligence Bureau of that country’s Internal Security Forces, Wissam Hassan, a Sunni officer who was a leading foe of the Assad regime and of Hezbollah.

The White House has now issued the following statement : Read more »

Fears are expressed almost every day that the war in Syria will spread to Lebanon, or to all of Syria’s neighbors. The problem, however, is not that the war “will spread” as if by nature, inevitably, the way spilled water spreads, but that it will be spread–deliberately, by the Assad regime. Read more »

This past week, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told an audience in Norfolk, Virginia that an American or Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear sites would be “catastrophic” and that American officials should make it clear to the government of Israel that “they do not have a blank check to take action that could do grave harm to American vital interests.” Read more »

Lebanon’s sovereignty and its territorial integrity were for decades violated by Syria, during the years of Syrian occupation: 1976 to 2005. After the occupation ended, the Assad regime in Syria continued to intervene in Lebanon, but less openly–for example by secretly arranging the murders a long series of Lebanese leaders and journalists who opposed Syrian interests. Read more »

What do Syrian rebels want? “The vast majority of Syrian opposition activists, according to a new, systematic survey of more than 1,000 of them, express relatively moderate views about Islamic issues. They also voice support for many key democratic values — and most look to the West and other democracies for inspiration and protection.” Read more »

The Syrian dissident and human rights activist Ammar Abdulhamid entitles his very powerful blog entry today at the Syrian Revolution Digest site “Redline and Greenlight.”

What does he mean?

Secretary of State Clinton’s blast at Russia and China last Friday blamed them for holding up international action against the Assad regime in Syria, but surely their position on Syria was not news. Clinton complained that they were “blockading” progress and “paying no price.” Read more »

Much scorn has been directed at fashion magazines that lionized Asma al-Assad, the wife of the Syrian dictator. This is fair enough, but we don’t really expect careful judgments about world politics from the likes of Vogue. We do expect them from statesmen, government officials, diplomats, and journalists who claim expertise in world politics. In the case of Bashar al-Assad, careful judgments were long absent–until he became a pariah in the last few months. For years, indeed for a decade, he was seen as a potential peacemaker and possible liberal force by people who willfully ignored the facts about his murderous regime. Read more »