Assad And His Foes Find Common Ground

It seems that Syrian President Bashar Assad and his enemies have finally found something they can agree on:  Both blame Israel for their problems and accuse it of aiding the other side.

Assad has long said the uprising against his brutal regime has been instigated by foreign forces, saboteurs and a long list of enemies topped by the Zionists.

Now the leader of the leader of the Syrian opposition says Assad is actually in cahoots with the Jewish state.  Burham Ghalioun told a Saudi newspaper, "We are convinced that the Syrian regime's strongest ally is Israel," reported Israel's Ynetnews.com.

Ghalioun blamed the lack of intervention in the Syrian uprising by the United States and the international community on concern for Israel's safety.

He dismissed as foolish reports that Syria would establish relations with Israel after Assad's fall.  The Jewish state, he said, is "the main enemy of the Syrian revolution."

A bigger threat to the revolution isn't Israel but the failure of the opposition to be able coalesce around a unified leadership.

The uprising, after 14 months of fighting that has taken the lives of more than 9,000 Syrians, appears in disarray and, Ghalioun admits, suffers from "rampant infighting."

Backbiting and inernal power struggles could do more harm to the main opposition group, the Syrian National Council, than Assad's forces.  It has no real leadership on the ground nor does it have official recognition by the major powers, reports the Associated Press. All this plus the reluctance of the Western powers to intervene directly as they did in Libya plays to Assad's advantage.