Barry Rubin: Syria: The Forgotten–Including by the Obama Administration–Revolution

Syria: The Forgotten–Including by the Obama Administration–Revolution

by Barry Rubin

I feel guilty every day that I don’t write about Syria’s revolution. There are massive numbers of demonstrators taking high risks and often paying with their lives for their desire for change; Syria has a higher proportion of really democratic-minded people than in other Arab countries; and there is general international indifference to their battle in contrast to the “glamor” surrounding the far-shorter, much less bloody Egyptian uprising. The estimated death toll is over 4000 though, of course, nobody knows for sure.

In contrast to Egypt, and partly due to the inability of journalists to cover the story, the Syrian insurgents aren’t made into celebrities. And, curiously, the regime that is repressing them isn’t stigmatized anywhere near what happened to the far less repressive governments in Egypt and Tunisia or even, for that matter, democratic Israel.

Much of the news is the bare stuff about lists of demonstrations and acts of repression. At the end of this article I have appended the story of one province on one day alone to give some sense of the magnitude of the battle.


Meanwhile, the Obama Administration, so eager to overthrow friendly regimes in Bahrain, Egypt, and Tunisia, has a peculiar disinterest about doing more against the hostile regime in Syria. Of course, for almost three years the U.S. government considered that anti-American, terrorist-sponsoring, repressive regime to be friendly or at least potentially so. For the U.S. government to do more, I’m not talking about military intervention but far more basic efforts.

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Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press in January 2012. You can read more of Barry Rubin's posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media

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