The Begining of The End Of The Ba'ath In Syria

The Security Council resolution 1636 calling on the Syrian regime to cooperate with the UN special investigator regarding the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Al Harriri is not the beginning of the end of the Ba’ath Regime in Syria. The beginning of the end of that regime started with the fall of the other Ba’ath system in Iraq led by Saddam Hussein. Both branches of this ideologue party came to power in both Iraq and Syria almost in the same period. In Iraq in 1968 and in Syria in 1970. Both embody the same theory on how a group of people, well organized, not necessarily related to the majority of the country they are in can rule that country effectively. It's what I call the dictatorship of the few. In Iraq, a group of the minority Sunni that did not even belong to the elite sunnie ruled a country of a Shiite majority for almost 40 years; the same in Syria, where a group of a sect called Alawite, kind of a Shiite on the fringe, ruled the country of a sunnie majority. I do not think this would have been a problem had these parties ruled their countries in a democratic fashion or if they had reached power through democratic means. The similarities between the two Ba’ath regimes in Syria and Iraq are great. Both were chapters to this so called pan Arab party that was created by a Christian Syrian by the name of Michel Aflak. After the fall of Saddam, Things have changed for The Baath; it became a strange body in an area that is changing rapidly into open political systems though not yet fully democratic. The assassination of Rafik Al Harriri came to expose Syria and its military regime and helped to escalate the departure of its forces under domestic and international pressure especially from the United States. Recently the former Syrian vice president Khaddam who happened to be a Sunni Muslim defected to France and aligned himself with the banned Syrian Muslim Brotherhood which is a Sunni organization though they would never admit it, and created a front to topple the regime of President Bashar Al Assad. The exact way of the end of the Ba’ath regime in Syria is difficult to predict but the continuation of this regime as it is now is almost impossible. We just need to look at Iraq, though the end might not be similar.