‘Assad is facing assassination no matter what happens’ – Noam Chomsky

Last month Juvana Vukotic interviewed Noam Chomsky in The Voice of Russia:

NATO approved the deployment of Patriot missile interceptors to defend the Turkish border with Syria. What do you think, what is going to happen next?

I don’t think anybody knows. Syria is moving towards kind of suicide and there doesn’t seem to be any easy way out. This morning got even worse, as you may have seen there was a battle yesterday between the Kurdish and rebel forces. That adds a new complexity to the situation which of course very much affects Turkey. Turkey is quite worried naturally about the rise of the Kurdish autonomy region in Syria and how it might affect the huge Kurdish problem within Turkey. But inside Syria it just looks like a growing horror story with no real feasible solution insight. There are various proposals, there is another one coming along today in discussions, I believe in Dublin, with Al-Akhdar Ibrahimi and representatives of Russia and the US. But it is going to be extremely difficult to find a way out of this without just destruction of the country.

Assad himself is facing assassination no matter what happens, I mean if he agrees to leave the country – he would probably be killed by his Alawite associates because he is abandoning them to whatever fate would happen. If he doesn’t leave the country sooner or later it would be wiped out. There have been proposals, just a couple of days ago there was a proposal by one serious specialist Nicholas Noe that there will be temporary some kind of partition in which a region around Damascus is left under Assad’s control and the rest of the country is left under rebel control and see if they can work out some modus vivendi in which there could be a reduction of violence and maybe a negotiated settlement. But that’s a long shot and I haven’t really heard any other good proposal.

More here.