Syria's ship of state listing dangerously

Here's how we know this.

The Syrian Arab News Agency is more or less the official government propaganda outlet.

What's interesting about this story is that it appears that the Assad government is relying on Agence France-Presse for its intelligence on the rebels. Note the reference to AFP a few paragraphs in.

I'd read the story about that particular smuggler on AFP's English language service France 24 before I saw it at SANA.

This is a government that was so sure of itself that it offered to do the out-sourced torture for Britain and Canada and the USA. A police state so confident that it knew it had every possible source of opposition well in hand.

Now they rely on foreign media to find out what's going on in their country.

Is this a good thing?

If you listen to the official nonsense emanating from London and Paris and Washington you'd be tempted to think so. After all, Assad is an evil tyrant who slaughters his own people while he's not busy doing our out-sourced torture for us, and we've been telling him for a year and a half he has to go.

So good riddance.

But then what?

As the Doha debacle this week showed, there is no such thing as a unified Syrian opposition. They've come up with a Christian communist who is going to direct the Salafist rebels on the ground in Syria?

Good luck with that.

If the Assad government collapses, there will be 10 million Syrian refugees fleeing the country instead of half a million, and the country will be the proxy battlefield for the war between the US and Iran for the next twenty years.