Cracks in the House of Assad

Snapshot

The Sturdy House That Assad Built

Michael Bröning

Despite various parallels with Tunisia and Egypt, a close look at Syria reveals that the Assad regime is unlikely to fall.

This article appears in the Foreign Affairs/CFR eBook, The New Arab Revolt.

 

Snapshot

Time to Back the Syrian National Coalition

Michael Bröning

For several sound reasons, Western decision-makers have up to now rejected the idea of comprehensively arming Syria's opposition. But the facts on the ground have increasingly overrun those arguments, and the case for arming the rebels grows stronger by the month.

On April 21, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad declared an end to 48 years of emergency law. Protests escalated despite this effort to quell them. And today, Damascus is in a higher state of emergency than ever before. The course of Syria’s protests has taken many observers by surprise. I argued on ForeignAffairs.com in March 2011 that the regime’s “credible threat to use force” and the alliance that the country’s anti-American, minority ruling cadre had built with the military and elite to sustain its rule would “prevent oppositional forces from gaining a critical mass in the near future.” The fear of brutal repression and sectarian tensions, I wrote, would encourage Syrians to “pin their hopes on a slow but stable process of reform.”

These factors have indeed delayed pro-democracy activism. Whereas social networks mobilized hundreds of thousands of demonstrators quickly in Egypt and Tunisia, in Syria the momentum has been building slowly. Protests have erupted nationwide, but some would-be activists remain deterred by the military’s threat of force. Calls for a nation-wide general strike remained largely unanswered this week. At the same time, the positive examples of change in Egypt and Tunisia further infuriated the thousands who did decide to take to the streets. And the regime’s violent reaction to the demonstrators’ initially modest demands has hardened their resolve. As time has gone on, they have moved from calling for the end of Syria’s emergency law and condemning the regime’s corruption to calling for the outright dismantling of the country’s system of government. Momentum has shifted against the Syrian regime, and Assad has proved unable to escape the demand for political change sweeping the region.

Repeating the failed approach of his ousted counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt, Assad has responded to the protests both by attempting to delegitimize them as a “foreign conspiracy” and by offering limited concessions in the hopes of subduing the masses. His promises to lift the ban on teachers in public schools wearing Islamic headscarves, to grant citizenship to stateless Kurds, to dismiss the government, and to end the unpopular emergency law might well have appeased calls for change had they been offered at the outset. But given the regime’s delayed response these steps were seen as disingenuous...