“Amid Crisis, Syria Ruler to Speak”

“Government officials announced that the president, Bashar al-Assad, planned to address the nation on Sunday night.”

If anything has been uniformly ineffective during the current round of Arab uprisings, it is national leaders making televised speeches.

Another thing that hasn’t worked well is grooming apparently Western-leaning, ostensibly liberal sons to take over from dictatorial fathers.

That said, if I were betting on one regime in the region being able to succeed with a sheer brute-force crackdown, it would be Syria. I hope I’m wrong.