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Assad likens bloody crackdown to surgery - Sydney Morning Herald

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has defended his government's crackdown on opponents, saying a doctor performing messy emergency surgery does not have blood on his hands if he is trying to save a patient.
In his first speech since January, Assad appeared unmoved by scathing international criticism of his ferocious response to the 15-month-old revolt against his rule, which has killed up to 13,000 people, according to activist groups.
He also denied responsibility for last week's Houla massacre of more than 100 people, saying not even "monsters" would carry out such an ugly crime.
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He said terrorists have pushed his country into war.
"When a surgeon in an operating room ... cuts and cleans and amputates, and the wound bleeds, do we say to him your hands are stained with blood?" Assad said in a televised speech to parliament on Sunday. "Or do we thank him for saving the patient?"
Assad insisted the revolt was the work of foreign-backed extremists - not reformers seeking change.
Although the country has faced widespread international condemnation since Syrian troops unleashed a relentless crackdown on protesters last year, a massacre last week in the central region of Houla has brought fresh urgency to solving the crisis.
The opposition and the government have exchanged accusations over the Houla killings, each blaming the other for the house-to-house killings of more than 100 people, many of them small children.
UN investigators have said there are strong suspicions that pro-regime gunmen are responsible for at least some of the killings.
Members of the Syrian opposition brushed off his comments as meaningless.
"It is a desperate and silly speech that does not merit a response," said Adib Shishakly, a Saudi-based member of Syria's main opposition group, the Syrian National Council. "He didn't offer anything to the Syrian people during the 70 minutes he spoke."
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has pressed Russia to join international efforts for a political transition in Syria that would see Assad driven from power, and suggested greater flexibility could come from a previous recalcitrant Moscow.
She told reporters in Sweden she made clear in a telephone conversation this weekend with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that Moscow must do its part to help Syria turn the page after four decades under the Assad family control.
"My message to the foreign minister was very simple and straightforward," Clinton said. "We all have to intensify our efforts to achieve a political transition and Russia has to be at the table helping that to occur."
AP