The Loom of Time, page 26
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The British traveler and Arabist Freya Stark wrote in 1928 from Syria that “I haven’t yet come across one spark of national feeling: it is all sects and hatreds and religions.” Years later, though, she would both reconsider and elaborate, saying, “Out of such diversity the idea of unity can grow.”[4] Whichever quote more accurately represents the feelings of this romantic yet deeply studied area specialist, whose life was a testament to Clifford Geertz’s “thick description,” clearly Syria, as it had emerged as a multiethnic and multiconfessional region out of long-standing Ottoman neglect, was a challenging prospect for modern statehood.
What emerged following World War I, in the words of historian Ali A. Allawi, was an “uncertain and ramshackle” entity, with “numerous armed groups,” little governance outside of Damascus, and provincial notables jealous of their power, too few of whom were competent and honest.[5]
Throughout most of history, Syria had belonged to empires ruled from elsewhere, and had never constituted a cohesive state of its own. Its two principal cities, Aleppo and Damascus, had served as centers of rival regions, with the merchants of Aleppo looking to business connections in Mosul and Baghdad (in today’s Iraq) rather than to Damascus. Syria was sort of like Scandinavia or New England, or pre-nineteenth-century Germany and Italy before unification, a vague region rather than a specific country, Pipes observes. Though it was a truncated territory in one part of the Middle East, within its borders lived every warring Middle Eastern schism and heterodoxy: Sunnis, Shi‘ites, Alawites, Isma’ilis, Druze, and literally every manner of Christian sect.[6] Precisely because internal unity was so impossible to achieve—and also because Syria occupied such a central geographical position in the struggle against Zionism and European colonialism—as Patrick Seale, perhaps the most knowledgeable twentieth-century observer of Syrian politics, puts it: Syria “can claim to have been both the head and the heart of the Arab national movement.” That is, Syria required a grand project to hold its warring internal forces at bay. The fact that Syria suffered under French imperialism rather than the British variety as in Iraq, where the pace of constitutional reforms was quicker, only made the political frustrations and differences inside Syria more volatile.[*6]
The French separated Greater Lebanon from Syria in 1920, so as to bring a large population of mainly Sunni Muslims under the domination of the Maronite Christians in Beirut, who were allied with France, spoke French, and had a concordat with the Vatican. Shorn also of the sanjak of Alexandretta in northwestern Syria in 1938 by the Turks (with the connivance of the French), Syrians seethed with political venom at the sight of their country’s dismemberment. In any case, because the various sects and minorities were identified with specific regions, there was little fundamental basis for geographical unity. Rival paramilitary youth groups, one more extreme than the other, engaged in brawls and mass demonstrations in 1939–40. The organizational aspect of politics barely existed: it was all a matter of competing mafia-like bosses and strongmen, themselves identified with different ethnic and sectarian factions. The French departed in 1946, after having incited sectarian loyalties for the sake of a divide-and-conquer strategy, so that Syria was now, in the words of the Dutch area specialist Nikolaos van Dam, “a political entity without being a political community.”[7] The first free elections were held in 1947, leading only to further confusion, nepotism, and gross mismanagement, as the new country’s politicians were often encumbered by the twin beasts of illiteracy and corruption.
Of course, it is tempting to blame the French League of Nations mandate, that is, European imperialism, for the whole tragedy of modern Syria. As a Syrian envoy to Paris, Habib Lutfallah, warned in 1920, “In Balkanizing Asia Minor, in multiplying small principalities, dust particles of states, [France] leaves the road open to anarchy that will create an endemic state of war.” Nevertheless, it is by no means clear that a united Syria in the interwar period would not have been violently torn asunder by its communal contradictions. In fact, the French weren’t all bad. They offered a measure of political freedom, allowing political parties and a relatively free media.[8] To blame the European imperialists entirely for today’s Middle East, as some in the academy do, is too easy: it denies the Arabs of the Levant their own agency.
“It was not lines on a map that prevented unity,” writes the Oxford-educated Arabist Tim Mackintosh-Smith. “Blame it as they might on other people’s empires, Arabs have never been a happy family: not since the division of the spoils of Islam; not since the pre-Islamic War of al-Basus, that forty-year super-squabble over grazing rights. They had never really been a family at all, except in tribal fictions of shared descent. If empires were entirely to blame, it was as much as anything for inspiring, by reflex, the myths and mirages of unattainable union.”[9]
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Early 1949 saw independent Syria’s first coup d’état, and the first coup in the postcolonial Arab world in fact, led by Colonel Husni al-Za’im. It demonstrated, according to Patrick Seale, “the fragility of a western constitutional formula stretched like a new skin over the fissures of a traditional society.” The coup solved nothing, however, as continued strikes and demonstrations led to further political fragmentation, with the army, meanwhile, busying itself with everything from smuggling to secret police work. Al-Za’im’s regime “lay somewhere between political gangsterism and musical comedy,” Seale observes. Before 1949 was out, there would be two further colonels’ coups, led successively by Sami al-Hinnawi and Adib Al-Shishakli. Al-Shishakli proved to be postcolonial Syria’s first serious ruler. He abolished multiparty democracy, consolidated military power, and instituted reforms. For a while, observers thought of him as the Syrian Atatürk.[10] Therefore, it is worth listening to Shishakli for a moment, whose words sum up the impossible nature of Syria’s ethnic, sectarian, and regional divisions.
“My enemies are like a serpent: the head is the Jabal Druze, the stomach Homs, and the tail Aleppo. If I crush the head the serpent will die.”[11] Al-Shishakli, while he was president, referred to Syria as “the current official name for that country which lies within the artificial frontiers drawn up by imperialism.”[12] Alas, there was no denying, even by its leaders, the artificiality of a state that made better sense only as a vague geographical expression. As it happened, Nasserists, Communists, Ba‘athists, Druze officers, and other religious and ideological interests made for another coup in 1954 that toppled Shishakli.
Seven months after Al-Shishakli’s downfall, Syria held free, fair, and peaceful national elections. The results only exacerbated ideological tensions, did little to assuage ethnic, sectarian, and regional ones, and increased the power of men committed to rejecting all formal ties and compromises with the West.[13] What’s more, it did not prevent future coups and upheavals, which continued unabated for the next sixteen years. By “the late summer of 1957 the country was on the verge of complete political disintegration,” writes Oxford professor Eugene Rogan.[14] Whereas American and European liberals have seen democracy as a humanizing, progressive, and stabilizing force in the world that would ultimately enhance the power of the West itself, Syria was a country (and not the only one) where this was just not proving to be the case.
In the twenty-four years between 1946 and 1970, Syria experienced twenty-one changes of government, almost all of them extralegal, and ten military coups.[15] In November 1970, the forty-year-old Ba‘athist Air Force general Hafez al-Assad, a member of the Shi‘a-trending Alawites from the mountains of northwestern Syria, took control in a calm and bloodless coup, a “corrective movement,” as he called it. Assad would govern until his natural death thirty years later in June 2000. He would prove to be among the most historic, if underrated, figures of the modern Middle East, turning a virtual banana republic—the most unstable country of the Arab world, no less—into a stable police state. Assad had taken power in Damascus after the twin fiascos of the June 1967 war against Israel and the Black September crisis of 1970 in Jordan, when Syrian officials displayed both strategic confusion and utter incompetence in reacting first to advancing Israeli forces on the Golan Heights and later to the botched Palestinian attempt to topple Jordan’s King Hussein. Assad, who fiercely sympathized with the Palestinians but detested their impulsiveness and lack of judgment, brought something entirely new to independent Syria’s politics: a combination of deliberate planning and policy discipline, aided by what was to him a necessary ruthlessness when the situation demanded it.
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No Western observer so minutely and perfectly understood Assad and the forces swirling around him as did the late Patrick Seale, an Oxford-educated foreign correspondent in the Middle East. Seale was born in Northern Ireland; his father, Morris Sigel Seale, had been a Jewish convert to Presbyterianism and a missionary in Syria, where Patrick spent much of his boyhood in the 1930s and early 1940s. Seale in the second half of the twentieth century emerged as a type: the classic British foreign correspondent and area specialist emotionally and intellectually committed to the Arab struggle against Israel, who had, as a consequence, gained repeated access to Syria, a place where obtaining entry visas for journalists was problematic. Seale’s sympathy for Assad’s regime was unabashed—a principal reason for his repeated visas. In 1985, he married the Syrian journalist Rana Kabbani, the daughter of a Syrian ambassador. Seale leveraged all of this unequaled access into unequaled knowledge, and was therefore constantly sought out as an expert on Syria, including by the Israelis. I met Seale once, in the office of President Jaafar Nimeiry of Sudan in 1985. I was in Khartoum to interview the Sudanese president, whereas Seale was there, it seemed, for a friendly visit with Nimeiry. Seale’s contacts in the region were extraordinary and, in fact, I found him quite charming and friendly.
Seale may have been emotionally committed to the second most repressive regime in the Arab world after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (both regimes being, not coincidentally, Ba‘athist, a deadly mixture of Arab nationalism and East Bloc–style socialism). But by no means was he deluded or even shallow: he had a penetrating analytical intelligence as much as a literary journalistic one. I have known quite a few journalists who had brilliant, cocktail-circuit minds. Seale had more depth than that. Perhaps it was his half-Jewish background in the midst of the most fundamentally anti-Israel state in the Arab world that gave him a useful complexity. He may have been both conflicted as well as a bit uncomfortable in his own skin, I mean to say. Whatever it was, he put it to good use.
Seale’s biography Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East, is an essential classic, despite being published by academic presses and utilizing a rather unusual Latin alphabetic spelling for the Syrian ruler. It thoroughly explains an entire era in the Middle East from a viewpoint that Western observers rarely get—and still need to get. Analysis is impossible without comprehending the ground-level view of the far side of the moon. And as someone who lived for several years in Israel, and who served in its military shy of half a century ago, I am grateful for Seale’s emotional attachment to Assad’s Syria, since he turned it into something indispensable for me. I once heard a high-ranking Israeli security expert, referring to Syria, remark, “You have to be an animal to run that country.” But an animal is governed solely by instinct, whereas Assad, as Seale voluminously demonstrates, was governed by objective analysis. Assad did not need to study the classic works of realism from Machiavelli to Hans Morgenthau to have realism embedded in his bones. The fact that his interests were diametrically opposed to those of Israel and the West during the Cold War and its aftermath—and the fact that he operated in a social and cultural context that the West barely understood—did not make his analysis any the less brilliant or accurate.
Oh, and by the way, Seale also reveals Henry Kissinger’s goals in the post–1973 war Middle East far more insightfully than most people in Washington do. Seale strongly disapproves of Kissinger, but that is only because Kissinger’s interests were absolutely opposed to Assad’s, not because Seale misunderstood the American secretary of state. I say this as someone who has been a close friend of Kissinger’s for the last decades of his life, and had many discussions with him about the Middle East. Reading Seale’s pages, one realizes how little Washington really knows about Syria and Assad, a name that journalists in the American capital now identify with the far less substantial son, Bashar, rather than with the far more substantial father.
Hafez al-Assad was born in 1930 in a house of undressed stone in the Alawite mountains of northwestern Syria, one of his father’s eleven children by two marriages. It was a family of peasants and minor village notables. He learned by rote in a rural school, and achieved the highest ambition by the standards of his environment: a career in military service, in an era when the recently departed French authorities had been promoting the Alawites and other minorities as a hedge against the dominant Sunnis. Seale writes of how this dreadfully narrow cultural and psychological universe in which Assad emerged led him in the early, violently unstable days of the Syrian republic to become a young coupist, negotiating tribal and ideological factionalism at its most brutal, and at its most intense and obscure within the armed forces.
Assad’s innate caution and common sense manifested itself early in life. It is what separated him from all his more impulsive comrades and what ultimately would separate him from the barbaric nihilism of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein decades later. Assad grasped politics early, unconsciously almost. He lacked any big ideas, the kind that allowed Anwar Sadat to captivate the Americans, but he did have a knack for espying other people’s weaknesses and limitations, and at the same time seeing honestly his own constraints. That is, he quietly acquainted himself with a world of bitter truths and even worse options. In his thirties, he understood the pathetic disunity of the Arabs along with the complete strategic incoherence of the various Palestinian groups. As for Gamal Abdel Nasser, the romantic hero of Assad’s youth, Assad quickly became aware of Nasser’s tragic circumstances: despite Nasser’s public bravado, stoked by the Arab masses demanding action of him, the Egyptian leader knew that he lacked the military and technical means to defeat Israel. There was, too, Nasser’s inability to deliver any sort of victory to the Palestinians and his destructive war in Yemen, battling tribesmen supported by Saudi Arabia. In fact, Nasser had lived amid public adulation and private misery. All this, Assad intuited. It was such realizations that gave Assad no illusions about himself or his situation either. This would allow him to erect order where before there had only been chaos: the true mark of a Machiavellian prince. Assad was remorselessly all business, and thus opaque and colorless to the outside world, a reason why the media dealt with him as a fact of life, but no one to obsess about or become fascinated over. Only Seale has succeeded in bringing him alive. Elie Kedourie, the Iraqi Jewish analyst of the Middle East, with all of his bitterness against the Arabs, and with all of his disdain for the worldview of those like Seale, was known to have appreciated Assad’s accomplishment.
A minority Alawite who kept Sunnis in powerful positions, Assad had a personal distaste of ethnic politics, even as he was forced to practice it. He associated Syria’s backward, amateurish political dealings with bad Ottoman habits. His coup was preceded by a methodical consolidation of power beforehand, so that no violence was necessary. In Seale’s meticulous telling, by Syria’s chillingly bloody standard Assad was rather a reluctant warrior, who in a better world and under better circumstances might even have opted for the rule of law. As a dictator, he was as moderate as the situation allowed for, while keeping himself, his family, and his extended clan alive.
The truth was, Syria was a summation of dangerous parochial interests: of Sunni Arabs in the Damascus-Homs-Hama central corridor; heretical Shi‘ite-trending Alawites in the mountains of the northwest; of Druze in the south, with their close tribal links to Jordan; and of Kurds, Christian Arabs, Armenians, and Circassians in Aleppo and beyond. In such a milieu, hatred of Israel offered an escape from Syria’s internal contradictions, allowing Syria a substitute for a very weak national identity. For as Seale writes, Assad was “a man of 1967. The defeat inflicted by Israel made an indelible impression on him and in the agony of it was born his ambition to reach the top and to put things right.”[16] But Assad’s intransigence against the Zionist entity, his making of Syria the home of Arab “steadfastness” in the struggle with Israel—thus making Syria the throbbing heart of Arabism—never once made him trigger-happy.
Assad saw Israel as the impossible-to-swallow impediment preventing the restitution of Syria’s rightful political influence within its natural geographical frontiers. Greater Syria, the story of an ambition, could live with a quasi-independent Lebanon and an implicitly subservient Jordan: Assad cared about real power more than he did about formalities. But Greater (or historic) Syria could not live with a non-Arab enemy state that was dominant rather than subservient. Israel would be tamed within Greater Syria or there could be no real peace, in his mind. Syria, though a Greek word, was after all the exalted bilad al-Sham in Arabic, “the nation of the Levant,” the key Arab terrain after Mecca itself, which Allah had blessed above all nations, according to the Koran.[17] The Levant was synonymous with Syria more than with any other state in the eastern Mediterranean. Assad felt all of this in his bones.
But as a practical man who knew his own country’s limitations, Assad forced himself into an alliance with Egypt’s Sadat, a man he fundamentally distrusted. Assad’s quiet, patient, and disciplined war planning paid off, though. This was not the Syrian banana republic of the 1967 war. The result was an impressively well executed surprise military attack by Syria and Egypt on Israel in October 1973. Yet, while Egypt’s and Syria’s immediate war aims were similar—to redeem Arab honor in the face of the 1967 humiliation—their political aims had always been different. For Egypt, the goal was simply to recover the Sinai Peninsula, taken by Israel in the 1967 war. Syria’s goal, rather than limited like Egypt’s, was all-encompassing. Syria needed to solve the Palestinian problem altogether. Not that Assad liked the Palestinian leadership; he despised it. But only by recovering Palestine in some legalistic manner could he make Greater (or historic) Syria whole again. It was also a matter of geography. Egypt was in North Africa; so Palestine meant much less to Sadat than it did to Assad. Sadat understood that Nasser’s tragedy—the reason his life ended in failure in the wake of the 1967 disaster—was not to execute a policy of limited aims.
