Case

Ross, 12-21 (Dennis Ross, Counselor, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Why Syria's Regime Is Doomed, http://www.cfr.org/syria/why-syrias-regime-doomed/p26885?cid=rss-middleeastwhy_syria_s_regime_is_doomed-122111&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed %3A+region%2Fmiddle_east+%28CFR.org+-+Regions+-+Middle+East%29 And those who aren't certain about what the future will be can take some comfort from a group that is not sectarian, that is inclusive, that realizes that the future for Syria needs to be a future characterized by tolerance, inclusion, and basically progress. There were reports early on that Christians in Syria were alarmed. They were concerned that the Islamists would take over and make it tough on them. That seemed to ease, or am I wrong? The balance is shifting there. There's no doubt that for a while there was deep concern among the Christian community. One of the reasons to want to see the process of change accelerated and to see this regime leave is [that] the longer it goes on, the more violent the situation in Syria is going to become. The demonstrations against the regime were originally peaceful. There is increasing violence now because, frankly, you have a regime that declared war on its own citizens and there are those who are looking at how you can defend that within Syria. The SNC is trying to continue to emphasize a nonviolent approach. You have a regime that makes it increasingly difficult to minimize the violence within Syria. Kurd defection Manfredi, 11 (The Long Fall of Assad What are the prospects for the future of Syria? Federico Manfredi, a specialist on insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. He has conducted extensive field research in conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Colombia. Wednesday, 28 Dec, 2011 The Majalla, Online) The seasons go by but Syrias Arab Spring shows no sign of passing. Bashar Al-Assads strategy remains that of buying himself more time, in the hopes that a combination of domestic repression and international diplomacy will allow him to weather the crisis and hold on to power. However, as the ranks of the opposition continue to grow, it seems increasingly unlikely that Assad will manage to postpone his fall for much longer. The prospects for the future of Syria do not look bright. Even in the event of regime change and free elections, it would be difficult to avert a protracted sectarian conflict. Assad effectively holds the entire Alawi community hostage. Indeed, he has managed convince them that their fate and that of the regime are inextricably linked. It would be difficult to avert a protracted sectarian conflict. It is true that Alawi are overrepresented in positions of power. They make up only 12 percent of the population and up to 90 percent of army officers. They also dominate the upper echelons of the Baath Party and key state institutions. Yet, in a community of approximately two million, those who enjoy power and wealth are actually a very small fraction. The reality is that most Alawi are no better off than their fellow Syrians, who belong to other religious and ethnic groups. But communal loyalty and fear of retaliation in a post-Assad Syria make it easy for the regime to manipulate the community into resisting the uprising. What is most worrisome about the civil strife in Syria is that it pits Sunnis against Alawi, in a clear civil war dynamic. The Sunni Arab majority, which comprises over 60 percent of the population, spearheaded the uprising, and consequently bore the brunt of state repression. The battlegrounds of Homs, Daraa, and Hama are all predominantly Sunni towns. And the army defectors who joined the Free Syrian Army are also by and large Sunni. It is worth noting that the opposition has gone to great lengths not to appear sectarian. In a recent meeting in Tunis, the Syrian National Council, which claims to speak for the opposition as a whole, stated that Alawi have nothing to fear as long as they let Assad go. But it is unclear whether this organization truly speaks for the Syrian opposition as a whole, and what impact several more months of violence may have on the increasingly tense communal relations. In any case, the opposition now has momentum. The sharp rise in violence that began in mid-December is proof that the state is struggling to contain the uprisingand the growing number of army defections sustaining it. Moreover, the Kurds, which were for the most part neutral in the initial stages of the revolution, are now joining the ranks of the opposition in large numbers. Syrian Kurds, who represent approximately 10 percent of the population, at first refrained from taking one side or the other en masse. The Kurds cautious stance was due in part to the fear that their overall situation might worsen under a Sunni Arab governmentand to a lesser extent to the Assad regimes historical support of the PKK cause in Turkey. Some protests did break out in the Kurdish northeast in the early stages of the uprising. But the tipping point for the community was the assassination of a popular Kurdish

leader, Mashaal Tammo, in October. The Kurds have considerable political weight in Syria, beyond what their numbers would suggest. The fact that neighboring Iraq has a strong autonomous Kurdish region and that Turkey has a large, politically active Kurdish minority means that Syrian Kurds have considerable strategic depth and bargaining power. Their support for the uprising may ultimately prove crucial in the overthrowing of Assad. Assad collapse is inevitable- unified opposition is key prevent sectarian violence Serwer, 12-22 (Daniel Serwer is a professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Scholar at the Middle East Institute, 5 Ways the U.S. Can Help in Syria, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/5-ways-the-us-can-help-in-syria/250390/) Former Middle East advisor to the Obama administration Dennis Ross, fresh from a White House that still seems behind the curve on Syria, is touting the notion that the regime is doomed. I agree, but it makes a great deal of difference how it goes down. If it falls to a unified and nonviolent opposition, one with representatives from different sects and ethnic groups and a plan for the transition period, Syria has a chance to imitate Tunisia, admittedly a much smaller and more homogeneous society. But if the process is drawn out, with sectarian and ethnic violence as well as looting of state assets, the chances for a halfway democratic and unified Syria will be sharply reduced.

Predictions
Predictions in the context of demo promo are accurate and inherently valuable Gilley 5 (Bruce Gilley 2005, PhD candidate at Princeton, Should We Try to Predict Transitions to Democracy?: Lessons for China The Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations)
THE RECORD OF PREDICTION Even if theory says we should, or must, predict, the actual record of those who have predicted regime transitions in particular might give us pause. The history of LESSONS FOR CHINA 117 Winter/Spring 2005 political thought is littered with famous examples of inaccurate predictions of regime changes. Karl Marxs prediction of a replacement of bourgeois regimes in Europe by communist ones in the revolutions of 1848 was badly wrong. So too were American fears that communist victory in Vietnam would lead to a rise of communist regimes across Southeast Asia. As for predictions of democratic transition, the heady forecasts of democratic development in newly-independent states like Tanzania and Malaysia after World War II show how wrong predictions can be. Famous predictions of collapse of the North Korean regime have been, to say the least, premature.19 Still, it seems collective

memory is strongest with respect to inaccurate predictions. For there are just as many examples of accurate predictions of change from the many writers who foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union to the modernization theorists predictions of political change in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Still, it seems collective memory is strongest with respect to inaccurate predictions. In addition, collective memory has also erased many of the wrongful predictions of political regression or stasis. Since independence in 1947, for example, India has been the object of a steady stream of predictions of democratic failure, all of which have been
false. Those who predicted a continuation of authoritarian rule in places like Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, Brazil, and Yugoslavia were badly wrongfooted by events. To
express pessimism about prospects for democracy or democratization has long been seen as a reflection of the conventional wisdom within the academy, not subject to the normal rules of validation. The host of gloomy assessments of new democracies that arose in the 1990s was only the latest example of scholars making wrong predictions that were nonetheless remembered as valuable because of their admirable cynicism. The same might be said of predictions of doom for Latin America, which despite the unremittingly negative views of its Marxist-oriented area specialists has enjoyed steadily rising living standards and expanding democracy for the last quarter century. As a general statement, predictions

of democratization have been one of the best bets about regime change that one could have made in the past century, notwithstanding periods of retreat. They have tended to outperform predictions of
democratic retreat or failure. Still, even the wrongful predictions have served a useful role in stimulating debate about the future.
These two points are evident in a retrospective look at the democratization of the republics in the former Soviet Union. In the study of these places in the 1960s and 1970s, we can see these same dichotomiesthose predicting the future and those which do not; and, among the former, those predicting some form of democratization and those predicting something else, usually a post-communist neoauthoritarianism.

Perm
The permutation does the plan while also ____. It solves enough of the link- or else it cant overcome the many other orientalist representations that exist in the status quo. Were not severance or intrinsicness - we do the entirety of the plan and all of the alt that isnt rejecting the plan. Their disads to the permutation link just as hard to the alternative- because realism is already the dominant paradigm of IR if their DA is true then their authors cannot comprehend better solutions either. Pure critique fails and the permutation is key Bilgin, 5 (IR Professor at Bikent, Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective p 60-61) Admittedly, providing a critique of existing approaches to security, revealing those hidden assumptions and normative projects embedded in Cold War Security Studies, is only a first step. In other words, from a critical security perspective, self-reflection, thinking and writing are not enough in themselves. They should be compounded by other forms of practice (that is, action taken on the ground). It is indeed crucial for students of critical approaches to rethink security in both theory and practice by pointing to possibilities for change immanent in world politics and suggesting emancipatory practices if it is going to fulfill the promise of becoming a force of change in world politics. Cognisant of the need to find and suggest alternative practices to meet a broadened security agenda without adopting militarized or zero-sum thinking and practices, students of critical approaches to security have suggested the imagining, creation and nurturing of security communities as emancipatory practices (Booth 1994a; Booth and Vale 1997). Although Devetaks approach to the theory/ practice relationship echoes critical approaches conception of theory as a form of practice, the latter seeks to go further in shaping global practices. The distinction Booth makes between thinking about thinking and thinking about doing grasps the difference between the two. Booth (1997: 114) writes: Thinking about thinking is important, but, more urgently, so is thinking about doing Abstract ideas about emancipation will not suffice; it is important for Critical Security Studies to engage with the real by suggesting policies, agents, and sites of changes, to help humankind, in whole and in part, to move away from its structural wrongs. In this sense, providing a critique of existing approaches to security, revealing those hidden assumptions and normative projects embedded in Cold War Security Studies, is only a first (albeit crucial) step. It is vital for the students of critical approaches to re-think security in both theory and practice.