The Ways of Syria
Stasis in Damascus
Article Summary
As Washington considers a rapprochement with Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Itamar Rabinovich’s commanding new book makes clear that change will not come quickly or easily -- and, if the past is any indication, it may not come at all.
FOUAD AJAMI is Professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
The View From Damascus: State, Political Community, and Foreign Relations in the Twentieth-Century Syria
Vallentine Mitchell
2008
365 pp.
$49.95
Reading List
An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on Syrian politics.
Bashar himself had warned that he would "break Lebanon" over Hariri's head if Hariri ran afoul of his wishes. The Syrians did not even bother with a convincing cover-up; an early United Nations investigation, led by a meticulous German prosecutor, Detlev Mehlis, made official and public the involvement of both the Syrian regime and its closest Lebanese satraps. (An unedited version of the report named Bashar's younger brother Maher, his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, and high functionaries of the Syrian intelligence services.) Hafez, it was understood, would have gotten his way without outright murder. The father had secured hegemony over Lebanon in a meticulous, deliberate drive that took well over a quarter century. The son lost that dominion in the blink of an eye. He had misjudged the world around him. Pax Americana was right next door, in Iraq, determined to punish the Syrian regime for its subversion of the Iraqi-Syrian border, and Hariri was a friend of powers beyond -- France and Saudi Arabia.
Five years earlier, there had been hopes that the young man, who had had some exposure to the West, would open up his country: U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had turned up for the father's funeral, returned from Damascus with praise for Bashar -- he was a "modernizing reformer," part of the Internet generation, she and her advisers said. The inquiries into Hariri's murder shone a floodlight on the workings of the Syrian regime. This was less an organized government than a huge criminal and financial enterprise held together by a security apparatus built around the children and in-laws of Hafez al-Assad and the intelligence barons. In Damascus, it is the rule of the Sopranos.
PRESENT AT THE CREATION
It is not just the style of the incumbent ruler that has put the Syrian state at odds with the order of nations. The flaw lies, Rabinovich notes, in the origins of the independent Syria that arose in 1946. It was born "weak and beleaguered" and has remained a brittle, uncertain state, oscillating between claims of grandeur and a feeling of being persecuted by mightier powers.
"Syria," Rabinovich points out, "has had adversarial relations with all its neighbors -- Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinians." The Syrian nationalists who secured the state out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire and the doings of an uncertain French colonial policy were never content with the hand that history had dealt them. They had irredentist claims in Lebanon, Palestine, and Turkey. A big idea of a "greater Syria" tugged at them, and the delusion of Damascus as the seat of a pan-Arab state was toxic.
There were also deep troubles within -- restive minorities of Alawis, Druze, and Kurds to assimilate and a fault line between the Sunni urban population of the principal cities and the communities of the hinterland. Syria was an agrarian society outgrowing the land and pressed by explosive population growth: when the older Assad claimed power, Syria's population was six million; by the end of his reign, it was 18 million.
Syria's rulers escaped from these burdens into political fantasies and adventures. A Lebanese state had arisen on their western border, midwifed by French diplomacy in 1920, with the Christian Maronites as the principal bearers of its national ethos and no small role for the Sunnis. Lebanon was truly a land apart, with its geographic core of Mount Lebanon long accustomed to political independence from the plains below. But the Syrians began to ceaselessly war and intrigue against the sovereignty of this Lebanese state. Additionally, in the late 1930s, a region of mixed population of Arabs and Turks on the Turkish-Syrian frontier -- Alexandretta, with Antioch as its principal city -- had been annexed by Turkey, with French acquiescence. Its "restoration" would also become part of the heritage of Syrian nationalism.
Nor, of course, could the Syrian nationalists reconcile themselves to the triumph of the Zionists in the struggle for Palestine. There was a particularly Syrian refusal of Israel that went beyond the wider regional rejection of Israel's statehood. Israel's territory was "southern Syria," Hafez al-Assad once openly proclaimed in 1974. "Consequently," Rabinovich writes, "Syria's position in the Arab-Israeli conflict emanates not only out of pan-Arab solidarity, as in the case of Egypt or Iraq, but out of direct relationship of one part of Greater Syria to another part of the same entity."
But the Syrians, and Assad in particular, knew that the verdict of 1948 could not be reversed. They were no match for Israel, and their quest for parity was always hopeless. Soon, however, they would have a narrower claim of their own: the loss to Israel of the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War of 1967. Syrian diplomacy was now faced, as Rabinovich elegantly frames it, with a delicate challenge: how to separate the "problem of 1967" (the Golan Heights) from the "problem of 1948" (the bigger question of Palestine). Syria's leaders found a way, of sorts: ideological and rhetorical belligerence combined with exquisite, unsentimental diplomacy. And what better proof of that diplomacy than the peace that has held on the Israeli-Syrian frontier since the guns fell silent in October of 1973? The cease-fire that then Secretary of State Kissinger secured has not been breached. Syria can have it both ways.
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