Ten years ago this week, tens of thousands of Syrians took to the streets to protest against a reviled dictator. Bashar Assad’s security forces responded violently, shooting down unarmed demonstrators without a second thought. Mass arrests followed. In Washington, there was a frenzied anticipation that Assad’s demise was a preordained conclusion. “Look, Assad’s going to be gone,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confidently stated in June 2011.”[I]t’s just a question of time.”
Bashar Assad was never supposed to be the man who inherited power from Hafez al Assad, the family patriarch. That job was meant for Bashar’s older brother, Bassel, who was groomed to take over once the father died or retired. Bassel, however, died in a car wreck in 1994, forcing Bashar to step up and carry the family business on his shoulders. Whether it was his wimpish demeanor, his ophthalmologist schooling in the West, or the fact that he married Asma, a stylish, British-born investment banker, a faint hope hovered in U.S. foreign policy circles that Bashar would turn Syria in a more reformist direction. Before Assad was known as the world’s most notorious war criminal, Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry flew to Damascus to meet with him, entertaining the idea that he was a Syrian dictator waiting to become a reformer.
The last decade of war in Syria has shown just how naive those views were.
Assad has turned out to be his father’s son — far more brutal, durable, clever, and Machiavellian than many commentators could imagine. Defeat or a self-imposed exile was not an option for the younger Assad. In Bashar’s mind, a negotiated deal offered only a more humiliating surrender package. The men who chose to stick by him were just as emphatic about resisting to the end. U.S. officials consistently underestimated Assad’s willingness to preserve the regime. If it meant bombarding entire cities with barrel bombs, so be it. If it meant launching nerve agents into opposition-held neighborhoods, so be it. Assad was determined.
For Washington, Syria’s civil war then became the problem from hell. Despite the Obama administration’s decision to establish a CIA-facilitated program in Turkey and Jordan to train, arm, and equip the anti-Assad opposition, President Barack Obama himself was never particularly fond of this effort. There was the risk of American arms seeping onto the black market or into jihadist hands.
Sure enough, this is exactly what happened.
“We created, perhaps inadvertently, the expectation that the United States was coming, particularly as the revolution militarized,” State Department official Brett McGurk told Washington Post national security reporter Joby Warrick in “Red Line,” a new book about the Assad regime’s chemical weapons program. “Then, with so much money, weapons, and tens of thousands of foreign fighters pouring into Syria with little control or accountability, it becomes a total disaster.”
Today, Syria is a mishmash of misery, poverty, death, militias, with sovereign chaos. Thanks to his wiliness, brutality, and the valuable assistance from Russia and Iran, Assad remains in Damascus. What’s left of the moderate opposition is stuck in a quasi-statelet to the north, where they play second-fiddle to the much larger, wealthier, and more organized Hei’at Tahrir al Sham, a Salafi-jihadist organization.
Many in Washington still suggest that a more aggressive U.S. posture earlier on would have saved Syria from the tumult of the past ten years. But the more honest answer is that Washington’s ability to cobble together a Syrian peace, either through force of arms or diplomatic initiatives, was always highly limited. Ultimately, Russia and Iran had a greater interest in Assad’s survival than the U.S. had in his downfall. And for all his atrocities, Assad refused to give in.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
