Assad's moment of truth

By Olivier Guitta

Syrian President Bashir al Assad is going to have to make a decision soon if he wants to cut its ties to Tehran and reintegrate the international community.
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I just wrote an article for the Middle East Times on this topic.
You can read the whole piece here.

Here is an excerpt:
The international community had shunned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad completely since 2005 when he was forced to "officially" remove his troops from occupied Lebanon. But he is not a pariah anymore. He has now become a hot ticket courted from Jerusalem to Ankara and Paris, to name a few. How did Assad realize this tour de force?

While many analysts viewed Assad as a weak pawn, facts are contradicting this assessment. Indeed, on the contrary Assad turns out to be an astute strategist playing his cards quite well.

First he weathered a nasty storm in 2005, clinging to power and fending off successfully all his adversaries including former French President Jacques Chirac, U.S. President George W. Bush and Saudi King Abdullah. Then, he started "secret" peace negotiations with Israel while at the same time closing ranks with Iran and profiting from Tehran's financial largesse.

But now the crucial time has come and Assad is going to have to decide in the next few months which camp he really belongs to: the West's side or Iran's.

The first major public event that really put things in motion was the assassination in February in Damascus of Hezbollah's terror master Imad Mughnieh. In an article for the Middle East Times, right after Mughnieh's murder, I made the case of Syria's involvement and the possibility that this was part of a deal with Israel.

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