{"id":7756,"date":"2011-06-15T14:14:28","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T10:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=7756"},"modified":"2011-06-17T07:48:33","modified_gmt":"2011-06-17T03:48:33","slug":"bad-news-for-assad-the-weathervane-is-moving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-politics-analysis\/bad-news-for-assad-the-weathervane-is-moving\/","title":{"rendered":"Assad Woes: ‘The Times, They Are a Changin’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Lebanon\u2019s Druze leader Walid Jumblatt is once again beginning to turn against Syria<\/a>. He\u2019s reaching out to his former allies in the \u201cMarch 14\u201d movement, feels emboldened enough that he can resume his public criticism of Bashar al-Assad\u2019s repressive regime, and is floating the idea of a \u201ccentrist\u201d bloc in Lebanon\u2019s parliament independent of the Hezbollah-led \u201cMarch 8\u201d coalition that he was recently forced to join at gunpoint.<\/p>\n

Jumblatt is often, and with some justice, described as a weathervane. Everyone who forms an alliance with him is eventually disappointed because he routinely changes sides in Lebanon\u2019s fractious and ever-shifting kaleidoscopic political scene. He has little choice. As the leader of a religious minority that makes up only a rough ten percent of Lebanon\u2019s population, he can\u2019t afford to be on the wrong side of the strong horse, whoever that happens to be at any moment.<\/p>\n

During Syria\u2019s occupation of Lebanon, he pretended to be a friend of the regime even though its assassins had murdered his father, Kamal Jumblatt. When the Cedar Revolution exploded in 2005, he became a more passionate anti-Syrian figure than any other, partly because he wanted to get out in front of public opinion, but also because history had finally made it safe for him to stand up to his father\u2019s killers.<\/p>\n

When Hezbollah invaded Beirut and his Chouf mountain stronghold in 2008, he surrendered and rejoined the pro-Syrian \u201cMarch 8\u201d bloc under duress. Now that Hezbollah\u2019s patron is mass-murdering civilians next door in Syria, it would be unseemly, as well as unnecessary, for him to pretend to be a stalwart friend of Damascus even if it isn\u2019t yet safe for him to fully rejoin his old comrades from the heady Beirut Spring days.<\/p>\n

Whenever things are in flux, as they are now, the middle is the safest place for Jumblatt to be, because he can plausibly jump to whichever side wins.<\/p>\n

The smart money is still on Assad\u2019s survival, however. He\u2019ll kill as many people as he thinks he has to, and\u2014unlike in Libya\u2014no one from outside will go in and stop him. What will probably change, though, when all this is over\u2014and this may be something Jumblatt is counting on\u2014is Assad\u2019s credibility and international standing. No more will Lebanon be quite so exposed as one Western diplomat after another makes a futile pilgrimage to Damascus for engagement and peace. Assad has always been a monstrous, blood-spattered thug who can\u2019t make peace even with Arabs let alone Jews, but finally, at long last, it\u2019s impossible even for fools to deny\u00a0this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Walid Jumblatt, Lebanon’s so-called political weathervane, is on the move again. Bad weather on the horizon for Bashar al-Assad, then? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":7757,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,82,60],"tags":[513,114,703,2734,18309,18332,18330,2213],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7756"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}