Patrick Kingsley: “Revolutions Swept the Middle East in 2011. Will Syria’s End Differently?”

“Mr. al-Assad’s stunning fall finally allows Syrians to feel the joy that their counterparts experienced more than a decade ago in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen — the four Arab countries where dictators were toppled far more quickly. Yet while those four states provided a template for revolutionary success, their trajectories since the Arab Spring…

Richard Wood: “The Syrian War and the Western Left’s Myopia”

On Islamic radicalism and revolutionary movements:  ‘The diverse Islamist organizations’ visions of future social organization may not be that of Western leftists, but to defend or applaud regimes like Russia (with its imperialist history vis a vis Muslims) that intervenes to crush them is shortsighted indeed.  Syrian and Libyan societies have been wrecked amid a…