At one level it’s crazy and even a bit demeaning to call the on-going protests in Syria “silent”. There are large protests, a big death toll and you can easily find multiple reports on the on-going unrest and crackdown on various sites across the web. Somehow though, it’s just never quite come into focus, at least not in the US media.
Syria is a pivotal country in the region on many counts. The Assad regime has been in place for more than 40 years — so its downfall would be a huge story on multiple fronts. Even in purely US terms, only through the American prism, it’s pivotal to both Israel and to Iran and a lynchpin in the regional jockeying between the two powers. And both in terms of the threat to the regime and the level of firepower aimed at unarmed demonstrators, the protests seem at least on a par with anything else in the Muslim Middle East over the last several months.
And yet it’s remained somehow marginal in most of the news.
There are some straightforward partial explanations.
Syria is an extremely closed society. So you just don’t have the density of foreign press, the relative press freedom or established public or semi-public opposition groups as, say, you had in Egypt. Similarly, the US isn’t on the line for the regime in the way we were say in Egypt or Bahrain. So every new violent crackdown doesn’t require an answer from the United States. Meanwhile, the administration has been, I think rightly, reluctant to engage publicly since a vocal US role could allow the regime to discredit protestors as stooges of the US or the West. The other possible, partial explanation is oil. Libya has really big reserves of oil. So that both focuses the interest of countries who want a part of those oil profits and makes the immediate international economic repercussions more serious.
Still, I’m not sure any of these factors really explains it? One thing I’m curious about is how much this is just the US? Is it revolution fatigue for lack of a better word? Curious to hear your thoughts.
