Reuters Syria's assault on the recalcitrant city of Homs has shredded an Arab peace plan and exposed the failure of world outrage to force President Bashar Al-Assad to halt a violent crackdown on an eight-month popular uprising. Tanks and snipers have battled to cow protesters and hunt army defectors in Homs, killing more than 100, activists say, since the Arab League said on Nov. 2 that Damascus had accepted a plan to pull the army out of cities and talk to its foes. “The Arab peace plan died on arrival,” said Murhaf Jouejati, a Syrian-born scholar in Washington. “There has been no let-up in the violence. The Assad regime is in complete defiance mode.” Arab foreign ministers will review the plan on Saturday, but Syrian opponents of Assad show no surprise at its fate. “I don't think anyone in his right mind was expecting Assad to pull his troops out of the streets and allow peaceful protests,” Walid Al-Bunni, a lawyer and often-jailed dissident who left Syria for Paris two weeks ago, told Reuters. “Lack of even a threat of international intervention is viewed by the authorities as a licence to kill,” he said. Assad has played on fears that without him Syria could slide into civil war, militancy or Iraq-style sectarian carnage, causing what he has called a regional “earthquake”. Nadim Shehadi, of London's Chatham House think-tank, said Assad had already lost power, in the sense of legitimacy, but argued that the outside world had effectively propped him up with unheeded calls for reform and dialogue. “The people who are protesting in Syria seem to have crossed the barrier of fear, but the international community hasn't.” Many Syrians have defied a feared security apparatus to keep up demands for change, despite bloodshed which the United Nations says has cost more than 3,500 lives — as well as those of 1,100 soldiers and police, according to the government. Armed with a UN Security Council mandate to protect civilians, Western powers lent air support to Libyan rebels who toppled Muammar Gaddafi, but have disavowed any intent to repeat the feat in Syria, in a far trickier area of the Middle East. Russia and China, stung by the robust Western reading of the UN resolution on Libya, oppose even UN criticism of Syria, whose uprising was inspired by others in the Arab world. Assad's own doom-laden warnings have reinforced the fears of Syria's neighbors about the possibly seismic consequences of a power shift in a nation on the faultlines of several Middle Eastern conflicts. Instability in Syria, Iran's only Arab ally, could spread to Lebanon or Iraq, which have volatile sectarian divides. Syrian refugees have already spilled into Lebanon and Turkey, which is also wary of any revived Syrian support for rebel Kurds in its southeast. __
