Following The Assad Regime's Year-Long Crackdown 
EYES ON SYRIA: What You Missed This Week 
One Syrian Journalist on Houla, Assad and Why He Hasn't Left 
Romney Should Read the News Before Repeating Himself 
Chronicle of Some Deaths Foretold
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Much about Syria's continuing carnage remains unclear -- above all, what outsiders can do to stop it. But there are also undeniable facts.
Russia has, from the beginning, made it clear to the other major powers with permanent membership at the Security Council that it rejects the rise of Islamists to power in Syria.
Last month I wrote that there were grounds for cautious optimism in Russia's stance on Syria. Unfortunately recent events threaten to overwhelm them.
An election has a funny way of suspending our rationality abroad. Maybe there is something of Arab Spring fatigue setting in among Western policymakers. Still, one has to wonder that if this were not an election year whether there would have been a more forceful U.S. response to the bloodshed in Syria.
The international community knows that the situation is bad and getting worse but lacks the unity and political capital to do anything about it
When we think of armed conflicts, we think of battlefields, of soldiers in arms, of trenches and tanks. But wars tragically are also about civilians, particularly women and children, caught on the margins of the battlefield yet at the centre of warfare.
Two weeks ago the crackdown on peaceful protests at the university in Aleppo triggered a hemorrhage of support for the government. The international reaction to the Houla massacre seems set to accelerate that erosion.
Administration officials keep gravitating to the simplistic assertion that when it comes to Syria, there is no Plan B since Plan B may compel direct military intervention. But I can drive a ten-wheeler between existing U.S. policy and putting boots on Syrian ground.
Recently, the House unanimously passed an amendment to the House Defense Authorization bill that bans the purchase of weapons from any firm "controlled, directed or influenced by" a country providing weapons to state sponsors of terrorism, including Syria.
There has been much speculation as to how central a role social media has played in catalyzing the Arab Revolution or the Global Occupy Movement. But little has been discussed about its role in spurring the media revolution.
Those who engage in fighting are not party 'supporters' as is often supposed. They are trained gunmen. Killers. And as long as they continue receiving tacit instructions from leaders to remain so, don't expect Lebanon to have picked its last fight with itself.
Will France do for Houla and Homs what she has done for Benghazi and Misrata?
The government have done something right. Hoorah. On the Andrew Marr show, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said that any individual that has abused human rights would not be able to enter the country.
With the horrors becoming a household story, at least in the west, it is useful to remind ourselves what prominent world figures said about Bashar Assad until very recently.
Talk of the "Grand Bargain" is once again finding its way to theories on the relationship between the United States and Iran, in light of their mutual...
Shaker al-Barjawi's Arab Movement Party is by no means a political heavyweight. How then did it rise out of nowhere to take the streets of Beirut?
