“If there is no stability here, there’s no way there will be stability in Israel,” he said in an interview Monday that lasted more than three hours. “No way, and nobody can guarantee what will happen after, God forbid, anything happens to this regime.”
Asked if it was a warning or a threat, Mr. Makhlouf demurred.
“I didn’t say war,” he said. “What I’m saying is don’t let us suffer, don’t put a lot of pressure on the president, don’t push Syria to do anything it is not happy to do.”
His words cast into the starkest terms a sentiment the government has sought to cultivate — us or chaos — and it underlined the tactics of a ruling elite that has manipulated the ups and downs of a tumultuous region to sustain an overriding goal: its own survival.
Yeah, lovely little stability you got there. Be a shame if anything was to happen to it.
I've noted the option for war to save the regime. This is supposed to be a reason for the rest of the world to look the other way while Syria slaughters its way back to "stability." I think it should be a warning to prepare to cope with the regime's desperation ploy:
But for all the potential problems of losing the devil we know should Assad's "stability" break, at least this is a crisis in an enemy state rather than in an allied state. And if we can avoid the worst bad things that could happen in Assad's fall, we'd have opportunities as all the bad things we know (and are strangely comfortable with) end or are greatly reduced. Remember, if this crisis had taken place in 2005, the near-civil war in Iraq might never have taken place (at least not on the same scale) with a Syria too much in chaos to facilitate the jihad in Iraq.
Too many Westerners and Israelis are strangely attached to the devil we think we know.
