AS’AD AbuKHALIL: Syria Now

December 9, 2024

The Assad family regime, sustained by force, was destined to collapse and the infighting between the various armed militias now may produce a situation not unlike Afghanistan.

Police booth in central Damascus, 2008. (Vyacheslav Argenberg/Wikimedia Commons)

By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News

This moment in Syrian history was inevitable: the Hafiz (Hafiz) al-Assad, and his son’s Bashshar al-Assad regime was destined to collapse. It is gone.

Ba`th Party rule in the Arab world, which is now also gone, has proven to be an abysmal experience in Arab tyranny. There are varieties of Arab tyrannies, most of which have been agreeable to the Western alliance and Israel. For example, the normalization deals with Israel at the behest of Washington, which require the consolidation and expansion of Arab despotic order.

The Syrian people have lived through many decades under the rule of the Assad dynasty. How could a party that was founded on the principles of Arab unity, socialism and liberation of Palestine wind up as a minority-based regime (especially in the period of Hafiz, but also of his son) which sowed divisions and fragmentation in Syria and the Arab world?

How could a republican party founded on ideas of modernity establish a republican family dynasty, where the son inherits the presidency from his father? It was a dynasty successful only in the preservation of its rule by the deployment of sheer brute force. The Syrian people were not consulted on the dynastic succession, and the Syrian constitution had to be amended when Hafiz died in 2000 because his son was too young to become president.

The Father

Hafiz Al-Assad had been instrumental in ruling Syria since 1963 (seven years before he launched the coup which made him the undisputed leader of Syria), when he was part of the conspiratorial military clique that later would wrest control of the Syrian branch of the Ba`th Party, and the government of Syria.

Hafiz was part of the Ba’thist military clique that took over power in 1966, but Salah Jadid was the man in charge (and he was at odds with Hafiz, his minister of defense. Jadid was, unlike Hafiz, principled despite being a ruthless dictator like his fellow cohorts.

Jadid believed the people’s liberation war to recover Palestine, and he helped arm and finance Palestinian resistance groups. Hafiz did not approve what he saw as adventurist streaks in Jadid and feared for the survival of the regime in the face of Israeli threats.

In the summer of 1970, during Black September (when the Jordanian regime clashed with PLO forces) Jadid wanted to deploy Syrian troops to support the Palestinians, but Hafiz (as minister of defense) refused to provide air cover. Hafiz would topple Jadid in a few months.

Historian Hanna Batatu told me that Hafiz feared Jadid even when Jadid was languishing in prison because Jadid had a base within the armed forces and he was admired for his low-key manner and avoidance of publicity.

The people of Lebanon lived—on and off—under the domineering rule of Hafiz al-Assad, who sent his henchmen to Lebanon to kill his opponents. His entire rule was marked by the use of internal and external force.

The bloody feud between Hafiz Al-Assad and Saddam Hussein tore the region apart, triggering many episodes of violences and dominating Arab summit meetings. Hafiz was shrewd and calculating but brutality was the mark of his experience of government. It was what put and kept him in power.

Please Support CN’s Winter Fund Drive!Hafiz crushed his opponents inside Syria and Lebanon. He fought the 1973 war with Israel but, as was the case with Egyptian leader Anwar el-Sadat, Hafiz used the fictitious victory in order to solidify the legitimacy of his regime.

That he fought in 1973 enhanced Hafiz’s credentials given the abysmal performance of other Arab armies in 1967. But the 1973 war ended with Israel still in occupational control of the Golan Heights and other territories.

The regime could have fallen, and should have fallen, in 2011. Syrians were fed up with the brutal rule from father-to-son. Living conditions in Syria were deteriorating and the service economy was creating a wealthy business class which did not care about the poor, especially in the countryside.

15 Reasons for the End of the Regime

Damascus. (Vyacheslav Argenberg/Wikimedia Commons)

There are many reasons for the sudden collapse of the al-Assad rule over the past week, culminating in the fall of Damascus on Sunday, but it was years in the making:

1. The regime lost support in rural areas especially after the neo-liberal policies adopted by the regime to appease Western powers. In the early years, the Ba`thist regime championed peasants and workers but that did not last. The Bashshar regime wanted to replicate the open-door policy of neighboring economies which widened the gap between rich and poor.

2. Support for resistance groups brought Western and Israeli sanctions and recriminations, and the sanctions, typically, punished the Syrian people and not regime henchmen. When Gen. Colin Powell met with Bashshar Al-Assad in 2003, he laid out U.S. demands. They did not include reform or democracy or rule of law. Far from that: all the U.S. cared about was to mend fences with the regime and end its support and hosting of of Lebanese and Palestinian resistance groups.

3. Corruption grew and widened among the ruling elite and it only got worse in recent years with the proliferation of the illegal drugs trade and prostitution reportedly run by Maher Al-Assad, Bashshar’s brother and henchmen.

4. The assassination of Lebanese businessman and former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and accusations of involvement against Bashshar resulted in the near isolation of the Syrian regime (which was later expelled from the Arab League after the eruption of the uprising in 2011). Gulf regimes succeeded in mobilizing Arab Sunni, sectarian hostility against the regime in the wake of the assassination. (So was it the Syrian regime or Hizbullah which was behind it? Because the Western-Israeli alliance can’t make up its mind, it seems. Sometimes they accuse Hizbullah and other times they accuse the Bashshar).

5. The Syrian regime in recent years made a Faustian bargain with the UAE — and with Saudi Arabia to a lesser degree. It seems it was recently negotiating indirectly with the U.S., through the UAE, to gradually distance itself from Iran in return for loosening some of the sanctions. t was reported that Bashshar’s deal with the UAE (archenemy of Turkey) angered Erdogan who ultimately pushed the rebels to mount their offensive. Iran and Hizbullah must have received news of those overtures to the UAE and could not have been pleased. Iranians and Lebanese died fighting for the regime while he was making deals with their enemies behind their back.

6. The regime refused to learn the lessons of 2011. Once Bashshar consolidated his rule over part of Syria in 2016 he refused to offer concessions to the moderate opposition (some of those opposition elements were secular leftists with ties to Moscow). He was intoxicated with his victory against the rebels as if victory was achieved by his own army. He did not want to share power and considered compromises as a betrayal of the legacy of his father.

Hafiz al-Asad with his family in the early 1970s. From left to right: Bashar, Maher, Mrs Anisa Makhlouf (then the new First Lady of Syria), Majd, Bushra, and Basil.(Unknown/Wikimedia Commons)

7. Bashshar is more arrogant than his father. Hafiz used to speak to the people, delivering (especially early in his rule) long speeches and giving interviews to the Arabic and Western press. Bashshar preferred only Western media (and later Russian media). He never bothered to address his own people, not even before fleeing the country to safety in Moscow. His arrogance showed throughout the years of the Syrian war. He never was interested in reaching out to people, even when he assumed power right after his father’s death. This is a man who grew up in the house of a despot, and who was raised as a royal by the entourage.

8. Bashshar is an unprincipled man, who never expressed belief in the tenets of the Ba`th Party, the ruling party. His father was also unprincipled but at least paid lip service to the cause of Arab nationalism. Bashshar even flirted with Syrian nationalism which is at odds with the Arabness of the Ba`th party. On economic matters, he championed neo-liberal reforms while the ruling party preached Arab socialism.

9. The regime badly handled the Arab-Israeli conflict. While it had provided support to various resistance groups beginning in the 1970s, it also fought against the Palestinian resistance in 1976 when it invaded Lebanon to save the right-wing, pro-Israeli militias from a crushing defeat.

From 1973, the regime never bothered to liberate the Golan Heights while Lebanon mounted a very successful resistance campaign that eventually pushed Israel out of Lebanon in 2000. And the Assad regime received hundreds of Israeli airstrikes from Israel without mounting any response. In the Arab world, the Syrian regime was mocked for years for offering this response to successive Israeli attacks: “Syria chooses the time and place of the battle.” In the last year, Bashshar and the regime were muted in response to the savage Israeli war of genocide.

10. The brutality and savagery of the Syrian regime since 1970 sealed its fate and put an end once and for all to the rule of the Ba`th Party (which was declared illegal in Iraq in 2003). There is something about Ba`thist regimes (both in Syria and Iraq) which marked them for extreme brutality and savagery in handling dissidents and opponents.

Both regimes would hunt down dissidents outside of the country to kill them. Many opponents of the Syrian regime were murdered in Lebanon. Ba`thist secret intelligence apparatuses were known for devising new and perverted methods of torture techniques. And torture was applied across the board, regardless of the charge and the age of the prisoner. Ba`thist regimes did not mind developing a reputation for brutality because the reputation spread fear among their populations.

Both Syria and Iraq under the Ba`th believed in fear as a tool of rule (not that other Arab countries don’t utilize fear, especially present-day UAE and Saudi Arabia). Syrian prisons were notorious for their inhumane conditions and for the widespread use of torture. Syria was able to spread the rule of torture and fear to Lebanon when it dominated the political system there from 1987 till 2005.

11. Bashshar never learned to manage his relations with Arab despots; his father would extract billions from Saudi Arabia in return for political concessions and compromises. Bashshar alienated Arab leaders early on especially when he would lecture them during Arab summit meetings. He did not have one friend among Arab leaders, while his father had strong ties to Egyptian and Gulf leaders.

12. The room for expression was extremely limited under the Ba`th. Any questioning or mild criticisms of the rule would result in severe punishment regardless the age of the offender. The right of political expression was reserved to those who wished to praise the regime in flowery language.

13. Ba`th of Syria and Iraq resorted to extreme cases of the personality cult, not known elsewhere except in Albania and Romania under communist rule. Statues of the leaders were erected in most cities and towns, and showing respect and reverence for the leader is part of the school curricula. Worship of the leader extends to his family, which is part of the construction of republican dynasties in both regimes.

14. The idea of a dynasty in a republic is anathema to the Syrian people. Syria is a modern country, and it has not been accustomed to dynastic rule a la Gulf countries. People tolerated the rule of Hafiz Al-Asad but only under duress and he had to resort to mass violence (like in Hama in 1982) to stay in power.

15. The regime is sectarian-based. Since Hafiz Al-Asad took power in 1970, the regime had an Alawite character and base, when the Alawites are only 14 percent of the population. Most of the top posts of government under Hafiz AL-Asad were reserved for Alawites who were often related to the president. Saddam’s regime was less sectarian in that regard. Bashshar tried to include even more Alawites in top posts of the government but the family still held the crucial threads of power.

Beautifying the Jihadists

Syria is a multi-sectarian country with a long record of tolerance and existence that was deformed and spoiled during Ba`thist rule. The new rebel offensive was orchestrated by outside powers, chiefly, the U.S., Israel and Turkey. The victorious militias trace their origins to ISIS and Al-Qa`idah although Western media insist on beautifying their image and refer to them merely as the “opposition.”

Aljazeera (and the Qatari government behind it) played a big role in supporting the rebels and spreading propaganda on their behalf. It is too early to predict the specific outline of governance in Syria, but it is unlikely that the Syrian people will enjoy a stable and democratic government.

Just like Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya and Iraq, the U.S.-Israeli alliance is engaged in a vicious campaign to destroy states and societies in many Arab countries, all to make the Israeli fascist state feel secure.

And the U.S. has a proven record: it can, nay it will, replace a regime — no matter how repugnant and vicious — with a worse regime. The regime that the U.S. established in Afghanistan in 2001 was so repugnant that the Afghan people preferred the Taliban. People in Libya and Iraq now look back fondly to the rule of the previous regimes.

The suffering of the Syrian people is unlikely to end soon, and the infighting between the various armed militias may produce a situation not unlike Afghanistan after the fall of the communists in 1992.

As`ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and America’s New War on Terrorism (2002), The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004) and ran the popular The Angry Arab blog. He tweets as @asadabukhalil

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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