Obama's Syria Problem: <i>The New Yorker</i> Takes On The President's Conflicting Policies

: Obama's Syria Problem

The Damascus Spring of 2001 was so called because Syrian democrats hoped that President Bashar al-Assad, a mild-mannered doctor trained in London, who had been installed as the successor to his ruthless father, Hafez, might forswear tyranny. That Spring ended, and some of the hopeful landed in torture rooms. Four years later, activists issued the Damascus Declaration for Democratic National Change, which called on Assad to hold free parliamentary elections, "launch public freedoms," and "abolish all forms of exclusion in public life." Instead, he imprisoned the document's leading signatories.

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