By suspending Syria, Arab League finally breaks from its past - David Ignatius

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/by-suspending-syria-arab-league-finally-breaks-from-its-past/2011/11/13/gIQAjxudIN_blog.html?wprss=post-partisan

How "real" this is remains to be seen.

  Bashar al-Assad has never been as adept at operating in the Arab League’s hall of mirrors as was his father. Perhaps he lacks the talent for giving the big, empty speeches that were a specialty of such gatherings. He has also proved to be a man who starts things he can’t finish — reform of the Baath Party, constitutional change — which is a mistake his father never would have committed. Hafez was secretly admired by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and even by the Israelis — because if he made a promise, he kept it.

Well, yeah, sort of. But his father never had to deal with the pressures that Bashar has had assualting his regime. How would the Syrians had stayed afloat in 1982 if You Tube or Al-Jazeera had been broadcasting their atrocities across the Arab world while other corrupt regimes were swept aside? The slide of Syria into chaos may be because Bashar has tried to appease and hold on to power at the same time, but nothing his father could have told him would have saved him either.