US blasts Assad, laments no progress for Syrians
The Obama administration on Tuesday harshly criticized President Bashar Assad’s latest effort to defend his regime’s crackdown on protesters, saying it illustrates how unfit he is to lead a democratic transition in Syria and that he has learned no lessons after 10 months of deadly repression and no political reform.
Assad vowed Tuesday to use an “iron hand” to crush what he called the terrorists and saboteurs behind Syria’s uprising, in which thousands of people have been killed. He adamantly refused to step down, as demanded by increasing numbers of Syrians and the United States.
For all its opposition, however, the U.S. conceded that no one’s efforts so far have been able to force Assad’s ouster or halt the violence against Syria’s people.
“Assad manages to blame a foreign conspiracy that’s so vast with regard to the situation in Syria that it now includes the Arab League, most of the Syrian opposition, the entire international community,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said. “He throws responsibility on everybody but back on himself. And with regard to his own responsibility for the violence in Syria, he seems to aggressively deny any responsibility or any hand in the role of his own security forces.”
Nuland said the Syrian leader’s first speech since June was delivered in the same tone as way back in March, when the first demonstrators began demanding greater democracy after four decades of dictatorship by the Assad family.
The 46-year-old ophthalmologist continued to defiantly paint Syria’s increasingly organized opposition as the tools of a foreign conspiracy. But Nuland noted that he failed to outline in any way how he would meet his commitments to the Arab League to end the violence, pull army tanks and weapons out of Syrian cities, release all political prisoners and allow for a meaningful dialogue to take place.
“That’s what we’re looking to see in Syria,” she said, “and obviously this was an effort to deflect the attention of his own people from the real problem.”