I can’t think of a single head of state anywhere in the world I’d be less interested in interviewing than Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The man lies like he breathes, as a friend recently put it. Just about everyone who interviews him comes off looking ridiculous, partly because he would never sit down with someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, but also because he’s a master manipulator.

He has never fooled me, not for even five seconds, but I’ve been documenting his crimes for the better part of a decade, so he has no chance. He has, however, successfully jerked the chains of some of our most powerful leaders in both political parties who should have known better but scandalously did not. He’s able to do this, or at least he used to be able to do this, because he knows exactly what gullible Westerners yearn to hear.

The hacker group Anonymous broke into the email accounts of some of his presidential aides and published the preparation notes for his recent interview with Barbara Walters. Read the whole thing at Foreign Policy, but here’s a taste:

After doing a major research on the American Media’s coverage on the Syrian issue and the American Society’s perspective of what is happening on the Syrian ground, I have concluded some important points that might be helpful for the preparation of the upcoming interview with Barbara Walters.

I based my research on online articles written about the Syrian issue, my personal contacts with the American journalists, my father and Syrian expatriates in the States.

The Major points and dimensions that has been mentioned a lot in the American media are:

Mistakes:

· It is hugely important and worth mentioning that “mistakes” have been done in the beginning of the crises because we did not have a well-organized “police force”. American Psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear that there are “mistakes” done and now we are “fixing it”. Its worth mentioning also what is happening now in Wall Street and the way the demonstrations are been suppressed by police men, police dogs and beatings.

Bloodshed:

· Bloodshed is another subject brought up in the American media. There is no mention of how many “soldiers and security forces have been killed”. They think that bloodshed is done by the government to attack the “innocent civilians” and “peaceful demonstrators”. Mentioning “armed groups” in the interview is extremely important and we can use “American and British articles” to prove that there are “armed gangs”.

The Comments:

· The comments that follow any article in the American Media are a very important tool to use in the interview. The Americans now believe that their government has failed two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are asking their government to stop interfering in other countries businesses and sovereignty and to start taking care of the American internal issues.

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A few years ago I interviewed Paul Berman shortly after he published his must-read book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, about writers who have done good work in the past but who now draw a perverse sort of moral equivalence between Somali-born human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Swiss-born Islamist Tariq Ramadan.

Now a person named Deborah Scroggins has decided to spend 539 pages arguing that Hirsi Ali is the “mirror image” not of a non-violent Islamist academic, but of a convicted Pakistani terrorist. The British historian Andrew Roberts deftly rips her to pieces in Tablet.

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Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi won a Golden Globe last month for his most recent film, A Separation. I haven’t seen it yet, but he has done fine work in the past.

Regime censors somehow tolerate his work even though they don’t like him and he doesn’t seem to like them. But now he’s coming under fire for winning an award in the West. “The image of our society that A Separation depicts is the dirty picture Westerners are wishing for,” Masoud Ferasati, a government-backed writer, recently said on state television. The film looks good, though depressing. And now that all the right people in Tehran are squawking about it, far more Westerners are likely to watch it than if the local Islamists would have kept quiet.

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My essay on the Arab Spring in the January/February issue of World Affairs is now out from behind the pay wall.

The phrase “Arab Spring” is a misnomer. The political upheavals sweeping Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria are concurrent yet different phenomena, and it’s premature to assume that any of them, let alone all of them, will bring their respective countries out of the long Arab winter of authoritarian rule. In the medium term, the number of genuinely liberal democracies to emerge in the Arab world is likely to be one or zero.

I’ve been to all three countries that overthrew tyrants last year—Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya—and I rented an apartment in Lebanon while the government of Syria, which may well become fourth on the list, waged a murder and intimidation campaign against Lebanese journalists and elected officials. The only things these countries have in common with each other is that they’re in turmoil and that they are Arab.

Large parts of Tunisia appear so “Westernized,” at least on the surface, that visitors might think they’re in Greece or even in France if they didn’t know better. Egypt is an ancient and crushingly poor nation ruled, as it has been more often than not, by a military dictatorship. Libya under Muammar el-Qaddafi was an oil-rich dungeon state that had more in common with North Korea and the former Soviet Union than with its neighbors. Syria, meanwhile, unlike any place in North Africa, is a sectarian tinderbox with the potential to Lebanonize or to Iraqify almost immediately upon the overthrow of the state.

These nations differed dramatically from each other before the region-wide upheaval began, so it logically follows that the revolutions themselves, not to mention their conclusions and aftermaths, should also differ dramatically. The Arab Spring isn’t one thing, as the post-Communist revolutions in 1989 more or less were, with local variations in only a couple of places like Romania and Yugoslavia. Here each country and revolution is its own Romania or Yugoslavia, differing significantly from each of the others.

Tunisia might be okay. I am too young to have visited Spain in the waning days of General Franco’s regime, but Tunisia looked and felt as I imagine Spain did in the early 1970s, when, along with Portugal, it was primed to tardily join the Western democratic mainstream. It felt pre-democratic in ways that no other Arab country does, aside from Lebanon. (Yet even Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution didn’t pan out. The country was slowly but inexorably reconquered by Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian allies.)

Most Tunisian women in the cities eschew the headscarf and dress like Europeans. Alcohol is widely available and consumed more by locals than tourists. The economy is almost as advanced as those of southern Europe, and large parts of the cities actually look like southern Europe. The Mediterranean is a recognizable place despite the civilizational boundary that separates its northern and southern shores. Tunis, on the coast, has more in common with Provence than with its own Saharan interior. And its vineyards produce wine that is almost as fine.

Imperial France left a powerful imprint on Tunisia’s cultural DNA, as did Rome long ago. “The explanation for Tunisia’s success,” Robert Kaplan wrote in the Atlantic in 2001, “begins with the fact that modern Tunisia corresponds roughly to the borders of ancient Carthage and of the Roman province that replaced it in 146 B.C., after a third and final war between the two powers. ‘Africa,’ originally a Roman term, meant Tunisia long before it meant anything else.” This little wedge of a country in central North Africa has been at least partially oriented northward for most of its history ever since.

Tunisia signed an association agreement with the European Union seventeen years ago, the first in the region ever to do so. It is an Arab country, but it is just as much, and perhaps more importantly, a Mediterranean country, in look, feel, and to some extent in cultural values. Women’s rights are far more advanced there than they are anywhere else in the Arab world. The capital Tunis is visibly less Islamicized—and by an enormous margin—than any Arab city in the world aside from Beirut, which is almost half Christian.

Yet the Islamist Party, Ennahda, did very well in recent elections, winning forty-three percent of the vote. Some of its supporters at the polls could be fairly described as Islamic moderates or mainstream religious conservatives, but the party’s leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, cannot be. He praises suicide bombers who murder Israeli civilians and the terrorist insurgency that ripped the guts out of Iraq. “Gaza,” he said of the territory ruled by totalitarian Hamas, “like Hanoi in the sixties and Cuba and Algeria, is the model of freedom today.”

Read the rest in World Affairs.

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Hussein Ibish over at NOW Lebanon explains—accurately—why the United States has an interest in seeing Syria’s revolution wrapped up as quickly as possible.

A civil war in Syria would likely have a strongly sectarian character and the potential to spill over into neighboring states such as Lebanon and Iraq, posing a significant threat to regional stability. It could also prove a protracted, bloody mess.

At least as troubling from Washington’s perspective is that the outcome is very uncertain. What the aftermath would look like is even more unclear than it was in Libya, where the stakes were considerably lower. The possibilities of stalemate, regional conflict, de facto partition, communal cleansing, waves of refugees, empowerment of extremists and other grim scenarios all inform a strong American desire not to see the emergence of civil war in Syria.

This conundrum is shared not only by other Western powers but some Arab states and many in the Syrian opposition, including a large group in the Syrian National Council’s leadership, as well.

But none of these actors are in control of events on the ground, which seem to be moving inexorably toward intensified armed conflict and away from a political battle. The regime has presented the Syrians in general, as well as the international community, with a binary choice: Take us as is, or face an open-ended conflict with uncertain outcomes.

He is all but certain that every international solution proposed thus far is going to fail, and he’s right. Serious muscle, or at least the promise of serious muscle, is just about the only thing that can work at this point.

It was always the only thing that was going to work. Bashar al-Assad never had it in him to reform or go quietly. He left Lebanon quietly, at least compared with what he’s up to right now, but that’s because he had a place to withdraw to. You want him out of his palace? Then shoot him out of it.

Ibish thinks this means outside intervention is all but inevitable.

I can sit here all day and write up horrible-case scenarios that could unfold if we don’t intervene, horrible-case scenarios that could make the White House wish it had acted when it still had a chance. But I can also sit here all day and write up horrible-case scenarios that might unfold if the US or NATO (or Israel) does intervene.

Barack Obama’s default position is one of confrontation avoidance. That doesn’t mean he’ll refuse to use force in all circumstances—see Libya—but he is less likely to pull the trigger than his predecessor, and he’s probably less likely to pull the trigger than whoever will turn out to be his replacement.

And it’s a hell of a lot harder to politically survive a disastrous outcome that results from deliberate action than from inaction. The genocide in Rwanda was orders of magnitude more violent than the Iraqi insurgency, but it damaged Bill Clinton’s presidency not at all while the drawn-out war in Iraq hurt George W. Bush’s considerably.

So if I had to wager here, I’d say the United States will not intervene in Syria unless Assad first widens the conflict. Nothing is certain and I could be wrong, but Syria ain’t Libya. And few things spook Obama like the thought of another Iraq.

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Mahmoud Salem, aka the Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey, is taking fat-headed Salafist preacher Yasser al-Bourhami to court for inciting violence against Christians.

Sandmonkey is a Muslim, by the way, not a Copt. And he’s a real stand-up guy. Last year he ran for parliament in Cairo and lost, which is a shame. Egypt could become a great country if someone like him were elected its president. I don’t expect to see that in my lifetime, but who knows. Perhaps when I’m old.

I doubt a civil lawsuit in Egypt can have any effect whatsoever on the likes of al-Bourhami, but good on Sandmonkey for trying.

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The Syrian army briefly lost control of suburban Damascus, but seems to have retaken it, at least for the moment. Things are moving fast there, though, and the regime could lose control again at any time.

Much of the country is apparently now a war zone. Syria has come a long way from non-violent demonstrations that were answered with repression and murder. Its people are fighting back, and for real. I’m frankly surprised it took them this long. If I were a Syrian democracy activist, I would have pushed for armed insurrection early last year. Sometimes it’s necessary. And even if democracy isn’t a likely outcome right now, Assad has long passed the point where it’s possible to put up with him.

It’s too bad NATO isn’t likely to help. Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi was a championship bastard who needed to go and I’m glad he’s gone, but Bashar al-Assad causes far more trouble internationally than Qaddafi has since Ronald Reagan bombed him back when I was a teenager. NATO most likely had only one shot in the region for now, though, and it was fired in Libya.

The butcher of Damascus does not have to know that, however.

Assad has long had a strategy of making himself the second biggest bastard in the Middle East. Being second protected him from an Iraq-style regime-change, and being a bastard gave him the clout he needed to be “indispensable.” He’s the biggest bastard at the moment, though, and he knows it.

If Barack Obama has it in him to bluff, now is the time.

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My friend and former PJ Media writer Nancy Rommelmann uses a review of Pico Iyer’s book The Man Within My Head as a jumping off point for thinking out loud about writing in foreign cities.

She says she always knows almost instantly when she arrives in a new city if she’ll be able to write there. I do, too. Two of her favorites are Savannah and Honolulu, which aren’t foreign in the international sense, but are from from her home in Oregon. Tel Aviv is my favorite city to write in. I like the idea of writing in Paris, but I’ve never actually done it. Of course, dreaming of writing in Paris is a total cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason. And it’s just a dream for most writers because it’s expensive.

Tel Aviv works for me because it has a pleasant climate, a comfortable café culture, it’s laid back enough that I can relax and sit still, and it’s stimulating without being distracting.

Cities in the Middle East, though, are generally difficult places to write. Beirut is a fantastic city in general, but it’s a fun and unserious place (really, it is), which isn’t great for productivity. Writing somewhere like South Beach in Miami would be hard for the same reason. Baghdad is stressful and uncomfortable both physically and psychologically. Cairo is loud, abrasive, and depressing. Tripoli may be the least writing-friendly place I’ve ever been. I haven’t written more than 2,000 words in Tunis, but it has enough of the positive aspects of Paris that it might be the best Arab city to wash up in to spend time on a book. Dubrovnik in Croatia might be an excellent place, but I’m not actually sure because I was only there for four hours.

The truth, though, is that it’s hard for me to write in cities. I’m most productive when I’m out in the wilderness, or at least near it. Periodically I rent the cheapest local cabin I can find during the off-season and write massive amounts of material for my books in the space of a couple of days. I plan to do that next week, in fact, as I’m nearly finished now with my third book, Where the West Ends.

I love how this book is turning out, and I think you will, too.

Someday, if I ever make enough money from one of my books, I’d like to buy a tiny one- or two-room cabin in the forest or the desert to use as a writing studio. I’ll seriously ramp up my productivity if and when that ever happens. (And I will gladly, by the way, dedicate a book to any wealthy patron who feels like buying a writing studio for me.)

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Sectarian violence in Syria between Sunnis and Alawites is worsening by the week. Now that a non-violent movement for reform and change has molted into an armed insurrection, Bashar al-Assad’s Shabiha militia is shooting and hacking even children to death.

Syria is part of a pan-Arab nation, according to the Assad family’s cynically adopted Baath ideology, but the truth is that Syria is hardly even a stand-alone nation. Like Lebanon and Iraq, it’s a disastrous mess of a place riven by sect and ethnicity. With its fractious collection of Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, and Druze, it’s more of a geographic abstraction than a coherent nation-state. It’s very unlike Egypt and Tunisia that way, both of which have coherent identities transcending sect, region, and tribe.

Until recently, the sectarian monster has spared Syrians the grisly communal bloodletting Lebanon and Iraq know only too well. That’s not because Syrians are inherently more tolerant or enlightened, but because the monster was locked in the basement by a total surveillance police state. It’s out now and running loose in the streets.

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Eric Trager, who has forgotten more about Egypt than I have yet learned, writes in The New Republic about the unhappy birthday of Egypt’s botched revolution.

Egypt is now headed for radical theocratic, rather than liberal democratic, rule…

It is tempting to believe that things might have turned out differently had Washington worked harder to bolster the young revolutionaries who seemingly exemplified America’s own liberal values when they took to the streets last January. These brave activists, after all, had won America’s hearts to the tune of an 82-percent approval rating at the height of the revolt, and their photogenic faces carried the promise of a more democratic, friendly Egypt.

But the activists were never who we hoped they were. Far from being liberal, their ranks were largely comprised of Nasserists, revolutionary socialists, and Muslim Brotherhood youths—an alliance of convenience for opposing Mubarak and, later, for denouncing the U.S.

Thus, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Egypt in March 2011, a group of leading activists refused to meet with her. They also turned out to be intolerant conspiracy theorists: When classically Cairoesque rumors that a “Jewish Masonic” ceremony was to be held at the pyramids on November 11, the April 6th Youth Movement’s Democratic Front declared that this non-existent event should be prohibited. “We are committed to the achievements of the revolution, which emphasized freedom,” they said in a statement. “But freedom is not absolute freedom, and … it is constrained by the regulations and beliefs of the Egyptian people, who do not accept that these celebrations be protected in the wake of the revolution.”

I know a few Egyptian intellectuals and activists who are authentic liberals, but they’re not remotely a majority. The percentage of Egyptians who genuinely support most or all the tenets of Western-style liberal democracy is in the high single digits at best.

Of all the Arab Spring countries so far, the odds of a successful outcome were always the bleakest in Egypt. The place is just so painfully backwards and dysfunctional. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia, remember, and one of the reasons I was initially optimistic about democracy’s prospects there is because Tunisia is the Arab world’s great anti-Egypt. It differs so radically from Egypt in so many ways that it’s sometimes hard to believe the two countries belong to the same civilization. They are both Arab countries, and they are both in North Africa, but they are nearly at opposite ends of the Arab cultural and political spectrums.

I’m far from certain that it’s springtime even in Tunis, but there should be no doubt at this point that it’s winter in Cairo.

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My second book, In the Wake of the Surge, is on sale.

You can get a trade paperback for 17.99. The price on the Kindle version has been temporarily lowered to just 7.99.

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“I used to think, ‘Life is great, but people suck,’ but now I’ve had to learn the opposite, ‘Life sucks, but people are great.’”

Neil Peart, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road

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I want to sincerely thank all my readers who donated money last week so my wife and I could visit her brother in Boston one last time before he died. It was a rough week, but I’m glad she didn’t have to go by herself. I will send everyone a personal thank-you note, but in the meantime here is a general thanks. And thanks also for being patient and for your warm words in email, in the comments section, and on Facebook.

I’ll need a little more time before I can reboot–we’re both exhausted and coming down with a cold from the plane–but things will be back to normal here shortly.

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My brother-in-law Scott Trockman died from cancer in Boston a few days ago. Nearly everyone who knew him thought he would beat this, partly because he was so young, but also because he bravely suffered in silence and didn’t want to worry and frighten everyone else. My wife and I did not know his cancer was terminal until almost the end, but even his mother, a doctor of internal medicine who cared for him in her house, was surprised at how suddenly and rapidly his condition worsened.

He spent his last few days in a hospice where he was comfortable, though not always conscious, and surrounded by people who loved him.

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My wife’s brother is terribly sick. He has what we all thought was a minor case of cancer, but all of a sudden it’s bad. Real bad. He is way too young for this to be happening to him. I am stunned and haven’t really processed this yet.

He lives far away and we need to leave town and see him as soon as possible. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but I need to check out for a while.

UPDATE: I have to buy two plane tickets to the East Coast and leave within 24 hours. I don’t exactly have money stashed away for this sort of thing, so if any of you can help out I sure would appreciate it.

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Andrew Tabler lived and worked in Damascus for years. He visited Beirut most weekends—you would, too, if you had to live in Damascus—and that’s where I met him.

He came up with a great phrase to describe the utter inscrutability of the Syrian regime. He called it “the blackness.” “Fog” isn’t the right word because fog eventually clears. No, what went on behind the scenes among the elite was utterly dark even to Andrew who had excellent connections with the elite.

Syria is hardly the only place in the Middle East shrouded in blackness. Just look at Iran. Somebody killed an Iranian nuclear scientist yesterday with a car bomb.

Who?

The first country that came to my mind when I read that was Israel. The second was the United States.

But car bombs aren’t exactly the modus operandi of either. Who else, though, wants so badly to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program that they’d send someone in there or recruit somebody local to whack scientists?

I suppose it might have been the Saudis, but that’s a wild stab. I have no evidence.

Maybe the Iranian government thought the scientist was spy? Maybe the scientist was a spy?

I do not know.

This sort of thing happens a lot, not just in Iran, but also in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Conspiracy theories are common in the Middle East for all sorts of reasons. This is one of them.

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The Israeli Army’s Chief of Staff Benny Gantz says Israel is preparing to take in refugees following the downfall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The interesting part is that Israel is expecting refugees from the Alawite minority and to house them on the Golan Heights.

The Assad family and most of the regime are Alawites at war with the Sunni Muslim majority. The Golan Heights​ was taken from Syria in the 1967 war when Damascus used it as a platform to shoot at and shell Israeli civilians in the Galilee far below.

When Assad demands the Golan Heights back, he does not have it in mind as a refugee camp under the stewardship of his enemies for his overthrown clan.

Read the rest in Commentary magazine.

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A few days ago the U.S. Navy rescued 13 Iranian fishermen who had been held hostage on their own boat by pirates for a month in the Arabian Sea (between Oman and India).

Iran’s foreign minister described the rescue as a humanitarian act, but the state-run Fars News Agency says our Navy turned a routine incident into a “Hollywood” drama.

I don’t believe the United States military routinely rescues Iranians, but let’s leave that aside for right now. What Tehran’s propagandists are concerned about here is the imagery. That’s what they mean when they play the “Hollywood” card. Hollywood is all about imagery. They’re saying the rescue was also all about imagery.

Okay, so let’s take a look at the imagery. What we have here is a picture of an Iranian fisherman hugging a member of the United States military.

The odds that a random working-class American will ever voluntarily hug anyone in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is just about zero. The FNA would love to get its mitts on such a picture, but it’s never going to happen unless it is photoshopped.

We can’t know the political opinions of the Iranian man in that photo. We don’t even know who he is. The odds are decent, though, that the fisherman has a more positive opinion of the United States than he has of his own repressive government. It’s almost certainly true of at least some of the rescued 13, and it might even be true of most of them. The hacks at FNA know it, too, and it must be driving them crazy.

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I’m having technical difficulties at the moment. Blogging will resume when I figure out what the problem is and how to resolve it. Thanks for being patient.

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Earlier this year the Israeli government agreed to release more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, many of them terrorists, in exchange for the release of the captured soldier Gilad Shalit. If even two Israelis are killed by that batch, Israel will have gotten the raw end of the deal.

Everyone seems to understand this. The math isn’t difficult. They understood it at the time, too. The government, though, had been under enormous pressure from the entire society for years to strike even a bad deal. That pressure was fueled by emotion. The emotion was entirely legitimate, of course. Leaving an individual human being with the wolves—an individual human being with a name, a face, and a family—for the safety of the society in the abstract is a nasty thing even to contemplate, especially when Shalit’s name and face appeared on posters all over the country.

A thousand for one is bad math. More people will die with these sorts of exchanges than without them, especially since they give Hamas an incentive to kidnap even more people. Now that Hamas isn’t holding any Israelis captive, however, the math can be computed without emotion. New rules for prisoner exchanges will likely prevent any more similarly lopsided deals. The rational Israel of today is binding a more-emotional Israel of the future by law. Lives will be saved. We can’t know their names, but they will be saved. And there will be fewer kidnap victims to agonize over.

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