Syrian president blames protests on conspirators.

After waiting for days for the president's address, many Syrians said it would be better if he had not spoken.
"The fact that he is blaming everything on conspirators means that he does not even acknowledge the root of the problem," said Razan Zaitouneh,
a Syrian lawyer and pro-reform activist. "I don't have an explanation for this speech, I am in a state of shock ... There are already calls for a day of anger on Friday. This cannot sit well with the Syrian people."
A Syrian dissident who lives in Lebanon said Assad's speech was disrespectful to the protest movement.
"It was a speech of defiance," said Khalil Hassan of the Beirut-based Committee of Torture Victims in the Prisons of the Syrian Regime. "He showed no respect to opposition figures or the martyrs who have fallen in Syria in the past years."
"Such a speech would have worked in the 1970s but now things are different," Hassan said.
Syria, a predominantly Sunni country ruled by minority Alawites, has a history of brutally crushing dissent — including a notorious massacre in which Assad's late father, President Hafez Assad, crushed a Muslim fundamentalist uprising in the city of Hama in 1982, killing thousands.
The unrest in Syria, a strategically important country, could have implications well beyond its borders given its role as Iran's top Arab ally and as a front line state against Israel.
When the unrest roiling the Middle East hit Syria, it was a dramatic turn for Assad, a British-trained eye doctor who said in January that his country was immune to such unrest because he is in tune with his people's needs.
Assad does maintain a level of popular support, in no small part because of his anti-Israel policies, which resonate with his countrymen. And unlike leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Jordan, Assad is not allied with the United States, so he has been spared the accusation that he caters to American demands.
So far, few in Syria have publicly called on Assad to step down. Most are calling for reforms, annulling emergency laws and other stringent security measures and an end to corruption.