Assad State of Affairs

“People are scared and angry,” says D, a 22-year-old student and journalist from Syrian television with whom I’m spending the day, walking around and speaking with ordinary Syrians whose most palpable fear right now is of what they believe is an imminent U.S. attack.

“We’ll fight the Americans,” says T, a 25-year-old businessman whose presence in this trendy café suggests that he probably will not fight but may have enough money to finance some fighting. “I’m a Christian,” he says, “but it doesn’t matter–Christian, Muslim–we’re all Syrians, and we’ll fight as Syrians.”

During my last trip to Damascus, in the winter, I was surprised to find Syrians who believed that they might be better off if the Assad regime fell. I am less surprised now to see how that enthusiasm has been tempered. It’s not that President Bashar al-Assad has finally won the hearts and minds of his people; rather, many Syrians see the sectarian violence in Iraq, and they are fearful the same might happen here.

T may say he’s ready for the Americans, but I wonder if he isn’t more concerned about having to fight other Syrians, especially the country’s overwhelmingly Sunni Arab majority. There’s a reason the ruling Alawites have cloaked themselves in Arab nationalism–it disguises the fact that a minority sect some Sunnis consider heretical is running the country. But D, like virtually all Syrians, is very sensitive about anything touching on the country’s confessional issues, so she won’t let me ask T, and we move along.

D is an Alawite whose father used to hold a high diplomatic post under Hafez al-Assad. By all accounts, Bashar’s father did a much better job of spreading not only the regime’s wealth and power among other sects, especially the Sunnis, but also its culpability. Right now Syria’s ruling class–Bashar, his brother Maher, and brother-in-law Assef Shawkat–can fit on the head of a pin. And with the U.N. report on the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri due to be released October 25, it’s hard to see how the family can entirely escape a day of reckoning.

How is Syria coping with the pressure? The way it always has, with violence. Last week, a popular Lebanese television journalist was maimed and nearly killed in a car bombing, the latest in a string of assassinations and explosions for which the Syrians and their Lebanese cut-outs are commonly thought responsible. Since Hariri’s death, all of the violence has been directed against Christian individuals or Christian areas in a transparent attempt to provoke sectarian fighting. It is worthwhile to note that a state fearful of sectarian conflict runs a regional policy in Lebanon, Iraq, and Israel that aims to provoke elsewhere its own worst nightmares at home.

Still, many Arab officials and Western analysts continue to believe that Washington should find some way to engage Assad. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, for instance, may truly fear the fallout of a collapse in Damascus, but what’s even more terrifying to him and other Arab leaders is that if Bashar falls, the Bush administration might think it’s on a hot streak. Who knows where the finger will point next? As for the Western analysts who want Bush to warm up to Syria, some are legitimately concerned about the possible fate of Syrian minorities, while others counsel engagement merely out of habit.

“The regime was already given lots of warning and advice,” says Farid al-Khazen, a first-term deputy in the Lebanese parliament and a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut. “But it has zero margin for flexibility or adaptation. Even Saddam had a larger base of support than the Syrian regime.”

One major difference between the former Iraqi regime and Bashar’s is that the latter has very little sectarian depth in the region. While Iraq’s once-ruling Sunni minority made up maybe 20 to 25 percent of the country, across the entire Middle East, Sunnis constitute perhaps 70 percent of the population. When Western journalists and academics argue that Sunnis cannot possibly win their insurgency in Iraq because they are a minority, or scoff when Iraqi Sunnis claim that they are actually a majority, it is we who are not recognizing the regional reality. The Sunnis of Iraq may not win back power through their insurgency, but the Sunnis in the region are not going to let their Iraqi coreligionists be decimated in a civil war, either. The problem for Syria’s Alawites is that, except for what currently seems like a pretty tenuous alliance with Shiite Iran, they have nowhere to turn for help.

This real fear of being surrounded and vulnerable not only drives the regime’s authoritarian apparatus, it is also the source of Syrian identity. “Because no one is allowed to touch on sectarian issues,” says Andrew Tabler, an American researcher who lives in Damascus, “the Syrians have forged a more or less viable Syrian identity.” There’s another factor as well. “The regime has been in a state of war with Israel for so long,” says Tabler, “that modern Syrian identity is carved out of the struggle against Israel.”

Thus Syria–a state that derives its sense of well-being from repression, fear, and hatred–is hardly ready for a peaceful democratic transition. “There is nothing left of civil society,” says Khazen. “The Syrian political landscape is a desert. There is no institution that can help the country make a transition.”

Washington may hope there is some plausible alternative to the Assads, but none is in evidence–not a secular, democratic opposition, not a reform movement in exile, not moderate Islamists. (Not even Islamist extremists, whose organizational capacity the regime has invariably exaggerated for its own purposes.) Thus, the regime has effectively booby-trapped Syria, and if it falls it is quite likely Syrians will shed each other’s blood.

Would a Syria in free fall cause trouble in the region and for the United States? Well, it’s unclear whether a failed state exports more violence than one already determined to export violence, especially if it is going to take that failed state a long time to exhaust its own sectarian furies. Moreover, the fact is that Syria’s intercommunal violence has already spilled over into Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Eventually, Syrians will have to learn how to construct a positive national identity out of a multisectarian, multiethnic society without dispatching their demons abroad or sweeping them under an Arab nationalist rug.

Lee Smith is writing a book on Arab culture.