We'll miss Bashar Assad when he's gone
This miserable autocrat who kills his own people and bombs his own cities and has done so since March 2011 will fall. When? Who knows? Not today. Not tomorrow. But his fall will come. Then we will wish Bashar Assad were back.
We will wish he were back because the institutions of Syria, largely built by Hafez Assad, Bashar's father, will collapse along with the Assad regime.
Syria will become an anarchist's paradise. With no central state, the militias now fighting the regime will fight each other, seeking to control territory, expand their bases and control the center.
The most likely winners will be the Islamists. There are varieties of Islam competing with various secularist factions in Syria for control, but primarily the Salafists and the jihadists. The Salafists are the Muslims of the Saudi variety — an ascetic and strict interpretation of Islam with all the restrictions on human freedom we know from Saudi Arabia. The jihadists add to that war to spread the faith. Both carry powerful anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israel messages. Neither seems to have any understanding of economic development. (The Saudis have only recently come to realize that oil won't really get them prosperity and employment and there's not even much oil in Syria.) Forget women's rights, of course.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-perspec-0812-assad-md-20120812,0,6226963.story