The Freedom Movement Comes To Syria

It is unlikely that the Gadhafis and Mubaraks could have entertained thoughts of succession for their sons had they not seen the ease with which Syria became an odd creature—a republican monarchy..

By Fouad Ajami
This commentary was published in The Wall Street Journal on 25/04/2011

It was inevitable that the caravan of Arab freedom would make its appearance in Syria. It was there, three decades ago, that official terror hatched a monstrous state—and where practically everything Arabs would come to see in their politics in future decades was foreshadowed.

Hama was one of the principal cities of the Syrian plains. With a history of tumult and disputation, this Muslim Sunni stronghold rose against the military rule of Hafez Assad in 1982. The regime was at stake, and the drab, merciless ruler at its helm fought back and threw everything he had into the fight.

A good deal of the center of the inner city was demolished, no quarter was given. There are estimates that 20,000 people were killed.

After Hama, Hafez Assad would rule uncontested for two more decades. Prior to his ascendancy, 14 rulers came and went in a quarter-century. Many perished in prison or exile or fell to assassins. Not so with that man of stealth. He died in 2000, and in a most astonishing twist, he bequeathed power to his son Bashar, a young man not yet 35 years of age and an ophthalmologist at that.

By then Syrians had fled into the privacy of their homes, eager to escape the ruler's whip and gaze. Rule became a matter of the barracks, the ruling caste hunkered down, and the once-feisty republic become a dynastic possession. Assad senior had come from crushing rural poverty, but the House of Assad became a huge financial and criminal enterprise.

Around Bashar Assad were siblings, cruel and entitled. At the commanding heights of the economy were the Assad in-laws, choking off the life of commerce, reducing the trading families of yesteryear to marginality and dependence. And there was the great sectarian truth of this country: The Alawis, a mountainous community of Shiite schismatics, for centuries cut off from wealth and power, comprising somewhere between 10% and 12% of the population, had hoarded for themselves supreme political power. The intelligence barons were drawn from the Alawis, as were the elite brigades entrusted with the defense of the regime.

For the rulers, this sectarian truth was a great taboo, for Damascus had historically been a great city of Sunni urban Islam. That chasm between state and society, between ruler and ruled, that we can see in practically all Arab lands under rebellion was most stark in Syria. It is unlikely that the Gadhafis and Mubaraks and the ruler of Yemen could have entertained thoughts of succession for their sons had they not seen the ease with which Syria became that odd creature—a republican monarchy.

When the Arab revolutions hit Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, Bashar Assad claimed that his country would be bypassed because it was the quintessential "frontline" state in the Arab confrontation with Israel. Let them eat anti-Zionism, the regime had long thought of its subjects. Tell them that their desire for freedom and bread and opportunities, their taste for the new world beyond the walls of the big Assad prison, would have to wait until the Syrian banners are raised over the Golan Heights.

But the Syrians who conquered fear and doubt, who were willing to put the searing memory of Hama behind them, were reading from a new script. Bashar could neither hear, nor fully understand, this rebellion.

He sacked a subservient cabinet and replaced it with an equally servile one. He would end the state of emergency, he promised—though a state of emergency that lasts nearly half-a-century is a way of life.

But a new country is emerging from hibernation. When the Assads came into their dominion nearly 40 years ago, Syria was a largely rural society with six million people. The country has been remade: It has been urbanized. Some 15 million people have known no other rule than that of the Assads and their feared mukhabarat, the secret police. From smaller provincial towns, protests spread to the principal cities. The cult of the ruler—and hovering over him the gaze of his dead father—had cracked.

In the regime's arsenal, there is the ultimate threat that this upheaval would become a sectarian war between the Alawites and the Sunni majority. Syria is riven by sectarian differences—there are substantial Druze and Kurdish and Christian communities—and in the playbook of the regime those communities would be enlisted to keep the vast Sunni majority at bay. This is the true meaning of the refrain by Bashar and his loyalists that Syria is not Egypt or Tunisia—that it would be shades of Libya and worse.

Terrorism has always been part of the Assad regime's arsenal. It killed and conquered its way into Lebanon over three decades starting in the late 1970s. It fought and bloodied American purposes in Iraq by facilitating the entry of jihadists who came to war against the Americans and the Shiites. And in the standoff between the Persian theocracy and its rivals in the region, the Syrians had long cast their fate with the Iranians.

Under Bashar, the Syrians slipped into a relationship of some subservience to the Iranians—yet other nations were always sure that Syria could be "peeled off" from Iran, that a bargain with Damascus was always a day, or a diplomatic mission, away. It had worked this way for Assad senior, as American statesmen including Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were confident that they could bring that man, at once an arsonist and a fireman in his region, into the fold.

The son learned the father's tricks. There is a litter of promises, predictions by outsiders that Bashar Assad is, at heart, a reformer. In 2000, our emissary to his father's funeral and to his own inauguration, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, praised him in such terms. He was part of the Internet generation, she said.

But Bashar is both this system's jailer and its captive. The years he spent in London, the polish of his foreign education, are on the margin of things. He and the clans—and the intelligence warlords and business/extortion syndicates around him—know no other system, no other way.

"We need our second independence in Syria," an astute dissident, Radwan Ziadeh, recently observed. "The first was the freedom from the French and the second will be from the Assad dynasty." Would that the second push for freedom be as easy and bloodless as the first.

Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is co-chair of the Hoover Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.