*I have to assume that a week of being 'kidnapped' for an American News crew in Syria is essentially a career-making deal.      Somewhat akin to winning the lottery. Letterman, Leno, books, speaking tours, yuppie groupies, the works. It is certainly  much more profitable than for the soldiers taking rounds and shipped home minus parts or in bags.

*Curiously, neither this heroic news crew nor their compatriots are reporting from Central Africa were mass murder (My  apologies, I mean 'Ethnic Cleansing') is orders of magnitude beyond what the noble Caucasians are inflicting on each other in  the Middle East.

*Fourteen hundred years of Islamic mass murder. It will change eventually, ignorance is not a survival characteristic, nor is  genocide. Encouraging the natural fragmentation ( active or passive) of Islamic radicals to their time-honored, tribal, tradition of  internecine butchery is now the favored, if unofficial and quite effective, US policy.

Whenever attempting to assess the economic viability of an "Arab Spring" political change, it's worthwhile to pay some attention to the ways in which the economies of these nations worked (or didn't work) during the dominance of the predecessor thuggeries which the revolutions were fought to overthrow. 

 

Bearing in mind that the institutionalized woggeries of the Middle East have always been socioeconomically crippled by the influences of Islam (a reality recognized by the Young Turks when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and the reason for the longstanding adamant "de-Islamacization" of Turkey instituted by Kemal Ataturk and continued by the Turkish military), just what the hell does Syria have to offer in the international marketplace that makes it potentially viable as a national economy?

 

What do they mine or build, grow or otherwise produce, manufacture or do, that can make them welcome participants in commerce?  For so many decades, the Syrians have been seen - justly - as the authors and facilitators of international military aggression and Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party terrorism, wreaking havoc in attacks against literally all their neighbors at one time or another, but that's their government. 

 

Is it possible that the rebels' replacement of that Ba'ath Socialist kakistocracy will enable the Syrian people to live their lives in peace and productivity at long last?  And if so, is there anything that Foggy Bottom can do to help except keep their flinkin' hands off? 

 

The history of revolutions, unfortunately, is that most make things worse, not better. Egypt and Libya are both in danger of falling into that column. I see little reason to hope that Syria will be better off in the long run.

 

 Islamic fundamentalism will persist an an ineffectual response to the weakness of the Arab, Persian and South Asian Muslim world, until it's own excesses and failures discredit it in the eyes of the Arabs, Iranians and Pakistanis. Hopefully that happens soon, but the West has very little influence over the process.