Better in their words…

Review & Outlook: Saving President Assad – WSJ.com.

Hearty salutations and reassurances from Damascus. After killing more than 600 (and counting) and arresting and injuring thousands more in a seven week crackdown, the Syrian regime wants you to know that it thinks it has the upper hand over protestors. And Bashar Assad appreciates the support and understanding in these trying times from so many in the Arab world, Europe and the U.S.

That’s the word this week from Syrian President Bashar Assad’s adviser Bouthaina Shaaban, who called in the New York Times man in Beirut for a security update. It’s all under control now, she said, and the world can relax. “I hope we are witnessing the end of the story. I think now we’ve passed the most dangerous moment.”

The regime’s confidence is playing out in towns like Homs, where reports filtering out via Facebook and smuggled phones tell of indiscriminate artillery shelling of entire civilian neighborhoods. Mass arrests are common and intensified this week. Human rights groups estimate that more than 10,000 people have been detained.

A correspondent for the Times of London, Martin Fletcher, who snuck into Syria on a tourist visa last week, reported that he found “scores of young men” held at secret detention centers in Homs. “It was quite obvious that . . . the regime had been arresting almost every young man of fighting age that they could find on the streets of Homs.”

A French journalist spent 23 days inside Assad’s jail and tells a harrowing story about his ordeal. He was beaten in the first few days, but “the psychological torture was hearing the screams of all the other detainees,” said Khaled Sid Mohand, who reported for Le Monde daily and France Culture radio from Syria before his arrest. “Any time they would take a detainee from his cell you would hear him scream like hell. Sometimes for 15 minutes, sometimes as long as an hour.”

And the world’s reaction? The U.N. Security Council couldn’t muster the courage to put out a press release. Iran, Russia, China, India and the Arab states all have President Assad’s back. Six weeks into the crackdown, the U.S. did impose financial sanctions on three top Syrian officials, the intelligence agency and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The European Union followed by freezing the assets and putting a travel ban on 13 officials.

Statements have also been issued. “There may be some who think that this is a sign of strength but treating one’s own people in this way is in fact a sign of remarkable weakness,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday in Greenland.

But neither the U.S. nor the EU put President Assad on the sanctions list or travel ban. President Obama didn’t call for him to step down or even pull the U.S. Ambassador from Damascus. In an interview with the Atlantic website published Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton elaborated on the U.S. approach to the Syrian dictator: “What we have tried to do with him is to give him an alternative vision of himself and Syria’s future.”

In other words, America thinks Bashar Assad may still reform, cut ties with Iran, seek peace with Israel and therefore deserves to be treated like a potential friend of the U.S.—notwithstanding the brutality of the last two months.

Damascus certainly appreciates the forbearance, and it looks forward to normal relations once all this unpleasantness passes. The comments by U.S. officials were “not too bad,” Ms. Shaaban told the Times. “Once security is back, everything can be arranged. We’re not going to live in this crisis forever.”