Cracks Beginning to Show in Assad Regime

In the pantheon of Arab autocrat speeches made in response to uprisings in his country -- Hosni Mubarak's "I'll die on the soil of Egypt," Muammar Qaddafi's warnings that protesters were drug-fueled al-Qaeda insurgents, Ali Abdullah Saleh's bizarre audio-only statement issued after suffering a mortar attack -- today's address by besieged Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad does not particularly stand out in content or form. He made vague pledges of a "national dialogue," condemned the pro-democracy protesters his security forces have been killing by the hundreds, and warned, "no development without stability, no reform in the face of sabotage and chaos." As one of Syria's many Twitter-based activists noted, Assad used the word "freedom" once, "conspiracy" eight times, and "vandals" -- his favorite expressions for the protesters -- 18 times.

But what is significant about Assad's speech is that it happened at all. After two months of silence from the Syrian president-for-life, during which his regime has launched a campaign of violence so brutal that Human Rights Watch issued a report on it titled "We've Never Seen Such Horror," Assad's speech may be, like the other Arab dictator speeches that came before his, a desperate last-ditch effort to save an ailing regime.