Louis Proyect writes: One can’t help but feel that the pro-Assad left is in some kind of time-warp. They see Syria as it was in 1969, when it was on the leading edge of economic change in the Middle East—or so it would seem. You get the same thing with the Qaddafi or Mugabe fan club, mostly involving the same people. Of course, there are pro forma acknowledgements that such governments have adopted neoliberal measures, but you are left with the impression that if not for them, things would only get worse. In many ways, this is the same “lesser evil” politics that leads to supporting Obama over Romney, but transposed to the “anti-imperialist” realm. It is necessary to back Bashar al-Assad because his foes would be worse. The same line has been applied to Zimbabwe and Qaddafi’s Libya. Mostly, it is inspired by a kind of bastardized version of “Defend the USSR”, making no effort to really come to grips with the nature of the Syrian economy.

Part of the problem is the tendency for figures such as al-Assad senior and junior, Mugabe, and Qaddafi to use the term socialism in describing their governments. Baathist Socialism has ruled in Syria for over 50 years while Qaddafi’s “Green Socialism” was around for over 30. Mugabe, of course, had the authority of a successful Marxist guerrilla struggle behind him, even though his economic policies were not that different from what could be seen throughout the continent under the rubric of “African Socialism”.

What marked these experiments apart from Marx’s original vision was the utter lack of democracy. [Continue reading…]

Al Arabiya reports: Russian ambassador to France Aleksandr Orlov has said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is ready to step down but ‘in civilized manner,’ but the claims were dismissed by the Syrian state television as “baseless.”

Ambassador Orlov told French RFI radio that Assad, facing a surging uprising against his rule, signalled readiness to step down when he accepted a recent international declaration which foresaw a transition towards a more democratic Syria.

“At the Geneva conference, there was a final communiqué that foresees a transition towards a more democratic system,” Orlov said. “This final communiqué was accepted by Assad. Assad nominated his representative to lead the negotiations with the opposition for this transition. That means he accepted to leave, but in an orderly way.”

Syria’s Information Ministry quickly denied this, saying Orlov’s remarks were “completely devoid of truth.”

Orlov further said his personal opinion Assad would not be able to remain in power. “I think it will be difficult for him to stay after everything that has happened. But essentially, he has accepted that he will have to leave.”

Al Arabiya is also reporting that Russia will delay shipment of attack helicopters to Syria.

The New York Times reports: Fighting seized neighborhoods encircling Damascus for a fifth straight day on Thursday, a day after President Bashar al-Assad’s key security aides were killed in a brazen bombing attack in the sharply escalating conflict.

The bombing, close to Mr. Assad’s own residence, called into question the ability of a government that depends on an insular group of loyalists to function effectively as it battles a strengthening opposition.

The outlook for a peaceful outcome in Syria darkened further on Thursday, when Russia and China vetoed a Britain-sponsored resolution at the United Nations Security Council that would have penalized Mr. Assad’s government with sanctions for the first time for failing to implement the six-point peace plan negotiated by Kofi Annan, the special Syria envoy. The double veto also called into question the viability of a 300-member United Nations mission sent to Syria to monitor the peace plan. Its mandate expires Friday.

Opposition activists reported battles between the Army and opposition forces in the southern district of Damascus and in the northern suburb of Qaboun, with residents who were not trapped by fighting fleeing many areas. In a second statement in two days, the Syrian military said on Thursday that the bombing had left it more determined to “clear the homeland of the armed terrorist groups” — the term it uses for the insurgents seeking Mr. Assad’s ouster.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in Britain, said that the government assault had intensified, with more helicopters firing rockets that were igniting and destroying houses in Qaboun. It said that snipers were deployed around the exits of the neighborhood and that water and electricity had been cut off with numerous families trapped and no one able to excavate dead bodies from the rubble.

One activist reached in Damascus, using only the name Omar, said that the government had been asking residents of Tadamon and parts of Yarmouk, the capital’s southern neighborhoods, to leave their homes. That is usually a sign that government forces are on the verge of a violent attack.

Residents of Mezze and Kafr Sousseh, western neighborhoods even closer to the center of the city, fled unprompted because of the intensity of the shelling there, activists said.

The ability to control borders is probably the most fundamental symbolic expression of state power. At least one border crossing between Syria and Turkey is no longer under government control.

C.J. Chivers reports: The lethal attack on Wednesday on President Bashar al-Assad’s senior security chiefs aligned neatly with a tactical shift that had changed the direction of Syria’s long conflict: the opposition fighters’ swift and successful adoption of makeshift bombs.

Bombs have been in rebel use since violence intensified in Syria in late 2011. But since midspring, anti-Assad fighters have become bolder and sharply more effective with their use, and not only in what is apparently their hand in the assassinations in Damascus.

Improvised bombs have steadily become the most punishing weapon in the otherwise underequipped rebels’ arsenal, repeatedly destroying Syria’s main battle tanks, halting army convoys and inflicting heavy casualties on government ground operations in areas where armed resistance is strong, Western analysts and rebel field commanders and fighters said.

In this way, even as the anti-Assad fighters have appealed for international intervention and other forms of material and military support, local fighters have created their own informal buffer zones, pockets of the Syrian countryside that are now largely free of government ground troops.

“The bomb is not only essential, it is a main part of our success,” said a former Syrian Army artillery major, who called himself Abu Akhmed and leads a fighting group in Idlib, a northern Syrian province, in a meeting in a house in this Turkish city crowded with fighters.

“When you think of why we are improving and getting stronger, it is not because more weapons are coming in from outside,” he added. “The main reason is because we are becoming more organized, and because of our bombs.”

The bombs that Abu Akhmed described, known in Western military jargon as improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, have done more than kill Syrian soldiers and deny the Syrian Army access to Syrian terrain.

The weapon that has long been championed in the popular imagination and public discourse of underground fighters as a means to kill or drive off foreign occupiers — whether Russians in Chechnya or Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan — has been turned against a standing Arab army by its own people.

The shift happened subtly. Joseph Holliday, a former American Army intelligence officer who is now an analyst covering Syria for the Institute of the Study of War, in Washington, said the changes were not in the rate of attacks, but in a rapidly evolving prowess.

One factor behind the rebels’ success in bombing that this reporter does not touch up is intelligence. Unlike an insurgency fighting an occupying army, the rebels are probably receiving an unparalleled amount of intelligence from would-be defectors who are still embedded in the Syrian army.

This points to the most fundamental problem that any state faces in trying to crush a popular uprising: the state cannot seal itself off from the people. It cannot be composed throughout by unshakable government loyalists. Just as the state gets attacked from without it will also be undermined from within.

The Telegraph reports: Initial reports emanating from state media that a suicide attacker exploding a car bomb was responsible can now be discounted. The building’s exterior was undamaged and this assault was too well-aimed. The Free Syrian Army claims it was an inside job, that up to 10 bodyguards and aides to senior figures in the security apparatus had decided to defect. They were told to stay put and plant a bomb in the meeting room where the committee coordinating the regime’s response to the uprising met.

An Islamist subgroup – the Brigade of Islam – also claimed responsibility, but the two stories are not incompatible. There are Islamist groups both inside and co-operating with the FSA, and it would have taken a number of individuals with a number of talents to make it work. That would have included sophisticated bomb-making skills.

Anyone who has read a history of the Second World War will have been reminded of the Von Stauffenberg plot, when a disaffected army officer planted a bomb under a table during a meeting with Hitler. The Syrian opposition succeeded where elite German officers failed.

[S]enior rebel officials told The Daily Telegraph that bombs hidden in a flower arrangement and a chocolate box were remotely detonated by defectors working to bring down the regime from within.

Both the Free Syrian Army and a jihadi group calling itself Liwa al-Islam claimed responsibility, although they may have been acting in collaboration.

“There were two bombs,” Louay al-Mokdad, the FSA’s logistical coordinator said. “One was hidden in a packet of chocolates and one in a big flower pot that was in the middle of the table of the conference room.” He claimed that the operation was conducted by a group of FSA members in collaboration with drivers and bodyguards working for Mr Assad’s inner circle, a version repeated by other activists.

The two devices, one made of 25lb of TNT, and the other a smaller “C4” plastic explosive, were said to have been planted in the room days before the meeting by an opposition mole working for Gen Ikhtiyar. Mr Mokdad claimed that the meeting may have been led by Mr Assad or by his brother Maher, who has been the regime’s battlefield commander in the uprising. “I have just spoken with the driver who brought the explosive package,” he said. “He is trying to understand who led the meeting; whether it was Bashar or Maher.”