Homs, Syria
Homs is Syria’s third-largest city, a mid-sized industrial town along the Aleppo-Damascus highway best known for its oil refineries and as the home of Baath University. I watched George W. Bush’s inaugural address here last month at the house of my friend Abu Darwish, a programmer who lives in a modest middle-class neighborhood with his wife and three young children, all studying English at their father’s insistence. “He loves the USA,” his wife told me. The children laughed when she rolled her eyes behind their father’s back as he was blowing kisses at Bush’s image on TV. She doesn’t love America right now and thinks that Bush hates Muslims and Arabs. “No,” Abu Darwish argued gently with his wife, “he’s talking about freedom for Muslims and Arabs. God bless you, Bush.”
Abu Darwish believes that there aren’t many Syrians like him, and while it’s true his is hardly the mainstream opinion in the last stronghold of Arab nationalism, during my recent trip to Syria I found that there are more like him than he knows.
“The ripple effect that the White House wanted in the Middle East is actually starting to happen,” says Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian writer and rights activist who has just returned to Damascus after spending the last six months in Washington as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Since coming back, Abdulhamid has been put under a travel ban by the Syrian government for his sharp criticism of the regime in the Western and Arab press, and has been repeatedly interrogated by several security branches. Nonetheless, he believes things are beginning to change. “The presence of U.S. forces in the region,” he told me, “and the pressure brought to bear on the Syrian regime has begun to create a new political climate.”
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad seems to understand this, which is why he is fighting back. The White House, angry that Syria has continued to support Hezbollah and Palestinian terror groups and has done nothing to stem the flow of cash and fighters into Iraq, has used Syria’s occupation of Lebanon to flog Damascus. Along with sanctions, tough talk, and threats of military operations, Washington joined with France to support a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon.
Last week, Damascus tested the White House’s resolve by assassinating former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, with a massive car-bomb attack in Beirut on the onetime Syrian ally who had become Lebanon’s highest-ranking opposition figure. The next move belongs to Washington, which has already recalled the U.S. ambassador to Syria. If the administration fails to respond forcefully, this will signal to the entire region that it is dangerous to side with an ally who cannot be counted on for protection. Syria has calculated that the Bush White House has neither the troops nor the political credibility to do anything about it.
Perhaps the best way to understand Syria’s foreign policy–especially in Iraq and Lebanon right now–is as an expression of the regime’s keening anxiety over its own lack of domestic credibility. The most serious taboo in Syrian political discourse is the subject of minorities. Like Iraq’s former Sunni-dominated regime, Syria’s ruling cadre is made up of a minority, the Alawites, adherents of a somewhat gnostic variation of Shia Islam. In Syria, the Sunnis are a majority, but to date, many are so taken with the “heroic resistance” to the occupation in Iraq that they have not even noticed how free elections might serve their interests. The idea that Syria’s Sunnis might soon put two and two together terrifies the Alawite regime at least as much as the threat of a missile strike.
“The prospect of Sunnis coming to power in Syria is a can of worms that no one wants to open,” says Joshua Landis, a University of Oklahoma professor in Damascus for a year on a Fulbright. “On one hand, you have the fact that minorities are traditionally oppressed in the region; on the other, there’s the fact that minorities have held power in Syria for over 40 years. The Alawites have managed that feat by denaturing the essence of Arab nationalism and using it as cover.”
That is, through ideological posturing, political juggling, and even marriage (Bashar’s wife is a Sunni), the Alawites, who constitute a little more than 10 percent of the population, have camouflaged themselves to look like Syria’s majority. It has not only helped them consolidate power and establish their regional credentials, it is a self-preservation tactic.
In a document (posted on Landis’s website, Syria Comment,) written not long before the end of France’s Syrian mandate in 1943, one Alawite notable petitioned the French authorities to align Alawite areas with Lebanon, not Syria:
The spirit of hatred and fanaticism imbedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation.
The author of this letter was Sulayman al-Assad, whose observations can’t be far from the mind of his grandson, Syria’s current president.
It’s worth noting, then, that the Bush administration and the Alawite regime fundamentally agree on what’s wrong with the Arab Middle East: not Muslim fundamentalism per se, but Sunni Arab radicalism, whether Islamist or Arab nationalist in coloring. The Iraqi Baathists directing the insurgency from Damascus are a big headache for the White House, but they’re potentially disastrous for Assad.
To Washington, his failure to crack down on the Iraqis signals the intractability of an immature politician who doesn’t understand that the regional rules have changed. That’s true, but we should also recognize that what the Syrian president sees in Saddam’s former colleagues is not a band of like-minded brothers, but a Sunni Arab political elite enraged by their loss of power in Iraq and potentially energized by the possibility of coming to power in Syria–even through free elections. If Iraq has appeared to be on the verge of civil war, Assad understands that the same fate may befall Syria. By letting the Sunnis fight next door, he is preempting a civil war in Syria that he cannot possibly win.
In a sense, the Iraq insurgency is an ideological debate by other means. Washington thinks the Middle East is ready for democracy and pluralism, while Syria, as Landis says, “believes that the region is too divided and sectarian.” Assad has gambled that the United States will have no choice but to learn Middle East reality and put away dangerous ideas like democracy, but he may have overplayed his hand in Lebanon. Local sources there have reported that Sunnis are nervous and angry, assuming the assassination of Hariri, the country’s most powerful Sunni, was meant as a message for them specifically.
“In Lebanon the regime tolerates more from Christians and Druze than other Muslims,” says Hassan Mneimneh, a native Beiruti and director of the Washington-based Iraq Memory Foundation. “And the Sunnis are at the bottom of the totem pole. Opposition from the Sunnis shakes the foundations of the Assad regime since it is capable of generating sympathy throughout the Arab world.”
Washington should be reading these signals. The tricky part is how to rebuke Syria without adding luster to the Alawites’ Arab nationalist appeal. What they most fear at this point is being isolated in a region where they have little natural-sectarian-constituency.
The Bush administration is right–democracy is changing the rules of the region, and eventually Syria will have to address its minority issues democratically. But that is not going to happen under the current regime in Damascus. To many ordinary Syrians, the Hariri assassination has been almost as devastating as it was to the Lebanese. If they once thought Bashar al-Assad’s mafia was capable of reform, they now recognize they have been deluding themselves.
Lee Smith ([email protected]) is writing a book on Arab culture.
