Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak has yet to answer his people’s demands to step down, but echoes of that call are reverberating around the region. In a frantic effort to stave off the potentially destabilizing protests that already ushered out the Tunisian government, Jordan’s king dismissed the Prime Minister and the cabinet, and Yemen’s president has promised that neither he, nor his son, will run in the 2013 elections. Speculation on who will be the next to fall has taken on the aspects of a Middle Eastern Mad-Libs game: swap out the proper name here, change a negative adjective qualifying a corrupt regime there, and substitute a few action verbs describing the government reaction to produce the new narrative for each country. The latest name to come up? Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. Middle East watchers, perhaps more hopeful than informed, point to a new facebook page — The Syrian Revolution 2011 — which has garnered 15,000 fans in the scant week it has existed, as proof that Assad’s regime is the next to go.
But don’t expect the successor of the 47-year-old regime, which he inherited from his father in 2000, to be packing his bags anytime soon. Syria may suffer the same political alienation, economic dislocation and corruption that plagues most of the region’s regimes, but its government also holds a unique position that sets it apart from the others: that of a pariah state. Assad’s Syria is the only country in the Arab world that is not beholden to Western influence or support.
