A Syrian opposition supporter sent me this (he wishes to remain anonymous): "The reason the people did not react with the Syrian revolution in the same way they did with Egypt and Tunisia is not related to NATO. The reader assumes reading your reason that March 15th protests start in Daraa , march 18th they demand NATO to interfere. You know very well that the requests for foreign intervention did not come early on, but required months of brutal , savage repression for a peaceful protests. Plus it took over 6 months for the opposition to agree on something and before that the revolution was going without it.
Arabs from March 15th did not feel the same way about Syrian revolution and that has nothing to do with NATO or more accurately months before the whole talk about NATO. The reasons are as follows:
1) People were burned out , they could not keep up and Tunis and Egypt were exciting but when it became replicated in Yemen , Bahrain , Libya ...etc people had enough "revolutions"
2) People viewed Syria differently due to its ambiguous role in the region: Regime talks big against Israel , supports Hizbullah but every person who knows regime well knows that this stance is untrue. Syria was never allowed to do more than bark and their support for Hizbullah is sectarian and to allow the regime to remain in power by giving it this fake credibility. There are so many things over the past 40 years that shows how the regime helped Israel/US directly that this whole notion of "mumana'a" is just as credible as Obama's progressive credentials ( a PR campaign that has no basis in reality). US opposes Syria now because there is NO REASON for regime to be hiding anymore, and the regime can not get out of the closet and support openly US/Israel because doing that means the end of its "populous" stance. Regime is caught in catch 22 it tries to continue to appease Israel but Israel and US want none of it, they want more.
3) Because of reason 2 , Arab "progressives" and especially Lebanese have taken a unprincipled stance against the revolution : crying conspiracy , belittling it , belittling the casualties, exaggerating the media role, and keeping a blind eye on regime crimes and absurd lies ...etc so in short they played a negative role for those arabs that were neutral. At the end of the day Syrians must rely on themselves only, they don't need NATO or arab hypocrites support."