JIM DUNNIGAN WRITES ON SYRIA’S TENUOUS TERROR CONNECTION. Syria does have longstanding terror-group connections, but — unlike Iraq — it doesn’t seem to have been trying to run a proxy-war against the United States with them.

My sense is that Syria is a late-stage corrupt kleptocracy. Unlike Saddam’s Iraq, there’s more power in the oligarchy than in the dictator himself. As Dunnigan writes:

When Bashar took over at age 34, he initially talked of reform and cleaning up the endemic corruption and turgid economy. He soon changed his tune as he realized his father had surrounded himself with a bunch of thieves and cutthroats. These guys ran the police state, and expected to be paid. Or else. So Bashar is a dictator who can dictate a lot, but can’t touch any of the private empires his father’s cronies have set up. It’s all about money.

I’d still like to see the Ba’ath regime collapse, or be knocked down, and replaced by something better. But it’s not an immediate threat, and it’s likely that it will respond to pressure in a way that Saddam didn’t. In a way, it’s the difference between the Stalinist Soviet Union and the Krushchev- or Brezhnev-era Soviet Union.