Conspiracy Abound

The speech given by Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, was less than inspiring for most people.  In the speech, he did not ease any of the restrictions on the political system, address the inequalities of Syrian society, or even talk about lifting the state of emergency that has been in place since 1963.  He did make a conscious decision to call this a conspiracy.  The New York Times reports:

“It is not a secret now that Syria is being subject to a conspiracy,” he said. “The timing and shape depends on what is happening in other Arab countries. “

Not uncommon in the all these crises, Mubarak blamed his protesters on a conspiracy, so did Gadhafi and the Iranian regime.  Why?  Attacking the other makes it easier to switch focus away from the failures of a regime.  Governing is hard and being a authoritarian figure requires that you keep a certain image of "perfection" towards your people to stay in power.  Unfortunately, that self delusion masks all the real problems existing in Syria.  Patrick Seale writes for Foreign Policy that these problems lye in the ethnic inequality of the Syrian regime:

On all these fronts -- Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel -- Syria is a key player. But its internal problems now threaten to reshuffle the cards, adding to the general sense of insecurity and latent violence in the region. And of all the threats facing the Middle East, perhaps the greatest -- greater even than of another Arab-Israeli clash -- is that of rampant sectarianism, poisoning relationships between and within states, and breeding hate, intolerance, and mistrust.
Several of the modern states of the Middle East -- and Syria is no exception -- were built on a mosaic of ancient religions, sects, and ethnic groups held uneasily and sometimes uncomfortably together by central government. But governments have themselves been far from neutral, favoring one community over another in cynical power plays. Many Sunni Muslims in Syria and throughout the region feel that Assad's Syria has unduly favored the Alawites, a sect of Shiite Islam, who constitute some 12 percent of the population but control a vastly greater percentage of the country's wealth. Open conflict between Sunnis and Alawites in Syria would profoundly disturb the whole region, creating a nightmare scenario for Washington and other Western capitals.

Let's face it, if Assad has the choice between solving massive economic, political, and cultural inequality versus just blaming the West and foreign plants, well the latter is most easy to do.