The Loom of Time, page 27
It was Sadat’s ability to recognize that Egypt had different interests than did the Arab world as a whole, and Kissinger’s stark insight into what Sadat really wanted, that led to a political and emotional embrace between the two men. Excepting China’s Zhou Enlai, I have never heard Henry Kissinger speak more tenderly of a foreign leader than he did of Anwar Sadat. Indeed, Kissinger always warmed up by a few degrees at the very mention of the Egyptian leader’s name. The historical cliché—one adopted by Israel’s friends in America—is that Kissinger had seen the 1973 war and Israel’s initial battlefield losses as a useful turn of events, since it would force all parties to the conflict to require America’s assistance to extricate themselves from it. There was a deeper truth, though. Kissinger saw an opportunity to decouple Egypt from the rest of the Arab struggle, thereby gaining a strategic victory for Israel while also forcing Syria to mend relations with the United States, for the sake of a disengagement of forces with Israel. Seale calls Kissinger the “diabolus ex machina” of the post-1973 war: the evil manipulator of events that robbed Syria and the Arab people of their rightful war victory. Of course, from Seale’s pro-Syrian viewpoint Kissinger was just that. Still, Seale understands the essence of what Kissinger was able to accomplish for Israel and the United States perhaps better than did the pro-Israel community in Washington, which never felt altogether comfortable with Kissinger. (They always expected Kissinger to deliver a bit more for them.)[*7]
Assad, according to Seale, saw most of this in a flash. And why shouldn’t he have? Sadat had the luxury of his warmth and theatrics because Egypt was a more stable polity than Syria, and did not require the restitution of Palestine for its historical well-being. Assad, only three years into his rule in 1973, knew that he sat atop a political volcano in Syria, where one false move could mean the crumbling of his power base, even as he had no choice but to include Palestine in his war aims. Assad was made of hard, undressed stone—like the house he grew up in—because he had to be. He was the dry cynic whom journalists rarely find appealing and never make heroes of, but that didn’t mean his analysis was flawed. To be sure, Assad proved to be right in the end: despite all the disadvantages of his situation, he survived to die a natural death; unlike Sadat, who despite all of his advantages and human qualities was assassinated.
Ever the self-disciplinarian, and also because he genuinely was fascinated with Kissinger, a Jew, Assad went out of his way to be polite in their meetings, even as he saw that Kissinger was threatening to turn his own strategic goals in Greater Syria upside down. The late Harold Saunders, a State Department official present at the meetings, remembers Assad telling Kissinger: “I profoundly disagree with your strategy. But I don’t want it to affect our personal relations.”[18]
Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in 1974 resulted in a troop disengagement accord between Syria and Israel on the Golan Heights: an arrangement honored scrupulously by Assad, ever the realist, who understood his own limitations. Kissinger, in effect, had negotiated a de facto peace treaty between two sides that swore they were not at peace, a treaty that lasted until the Syrian civil war that began in 2011. Assad had been negotiating from a point of weakness, since Israeli columns were on the far side of the Golan Heights at the end of the 1973 war, threatening Damascus itself. He was nevertheless able to secure reasonable terms with his archenemy. Later, by diplomatically isolating Egypt following its 1979 peace treaty with Israel, and by making Syria the ally that the Palestinians were ultimately forced to rely on, Assad molded Syria into a pivotal regional power. In Seale’s words, Assad made Syria “Israel’s only remaining Arab opponent of any stature.”[19] (Iraq, after all, the other Ba‘athist rejectionist state, would be distracted throughout the 1980s in a war with Iran.)
In 1976, a year after the Lebanese civil war began, Assad (quietly encouraged behind the scenes by Kissinger and the Israelis) intervened on the side of the Christians against the Druze and Palestinians. It was a way for the Syrian leader, in vintage Machiavellian style, to exert dominance over a country that was part of Greater Syria, while also taming the Palestinians and Lebanese Sunni Arabs, who, left to their own devices, might very well have forced Syria into a war with Israel that it was not prepared to fight.
Assad truly defined an era in the Middle East, less because of all of the above than because of the way that he was able to keep a frightfully artificial and unstable country—at the region’s very epicenter—relatively stable for decades. This would have been impossible had he any less emotional discipline, analytical rigor, and discriminating savagery than he did. The political geography of the Fertile Crescent is so illogical and tragic that it demands a ruler of absolute brilliance and (or) of absolute brutality as the admission price for stability.
For even Hafez al-Assad was barely able to keep Syria together.
In June 1979 at the artillery school in Aleppo, Sunni Muslim terrorists slaughtered thirty-two Alawite officer cadets and wounded another fifty-four.[*8] A school staffer had assembled the cadets in the dining room and then let the gunmen inside. It was a declaration of war against Assad, an Alawite. For the next year, Sunni gunmen established themselves in the narrow alleyways of northern cities such as Aleppo and Hama, where they set fire to buildings, vehicles, and shops, and stirred up anti-regime demonstrations. They also staged strikes and assassinations in the name of erecting an Islamic state. By 1980, “Syria seemed close to an Islamic revolution,” the Sunni equivalent of what had happened in Iran the year before, “as shops were closed to express support for the [Muslim] Brotherhood in all the major cities,” writes Edward Mortimer, the British journalist and United Nations official.[20] At heart, the Sunnis felt that they had fared better under Ottoman imperial rather than under Ba‘athist Alawite rule, as the Syrian Ba‘ath, despite its pan-sectarian and pan-ethnic rhetoric, had basically evolved into a ruling party of minority groups.[21] Assad’s intervention in Lebanon against the Sunnis and Palestinians only angered the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in Syria all the more.
Initially, Assad found it difficult to face the truth: that all of his disciplined organizational skills over more than a decade had failed to preserve unity, and now the only way to stay alive and in power was to resort to abject barbarity—by now the effective language of Syrian political quarrels. To show that he meant business, the authorities ordered a military van to drive back and forth in front of Aleppo’s best hotel dragging a knot of dusty bodies.[22] Assad’s more ruthless and emotional younger brother, Rif’at, subsequently had risen to be the effective number two in the regime. Rif’at unleashed his own private praetorian guard, the infamous Brigades for the Defense of the Revolution. The violence spiraled upward. During the night of February 2–3, 1982, in the conservative Sunni city of Hama, Muslim Brothers crying jihad (“holy war”) went on a looting and killing spree, murdering seventy men associated with Assad’s Ba‘athist regime. Hama had often been a hotbed of violent Sunni extremism going back to riots there in 1964, and now Assad had had enough. He and Rif’at ordered the city sealed off, and dispatched 12,000 government troops assisted by helicopters into the kill zone: for three weeks shelling and starving out insurgents and civilians alike, slaughtering as many as 20,000, perhaps even more. This heinous act, so out of proportion to what was required, left a deep moral stain on the elder Assad’s legacy in the West.
Assad had smashed the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood once and for all, but in the process he had strengthened the grip of his homicidal younger brother, whose private army went on to challenge Assad himself, nearly bringing the country to another civil war by 1984. The Baʽath party, the People’s Assembly, and the other institutions of state proved useless in this power struggle. Alas, behind the curtain there was no state after all, just a mafia-style network of crime and patronage. Assad operated as an almost supernaturally gifted medieval prince in a world that he could manipulate for the relative good, but had little possibility of fundamentally improving.
Assad eventually exiled Rif’at and restored stability. But though Assad had proved brave beyond any measure in attacking Israel in 1973, in siding with the Christians against his own Muslims in Lebanon in 1976, and in breaking with Arab solidarity by establishing an alliance with Iran, despite all of his skills he simply could not make Syria into a modern polity. His people had remained subjects, and never became citizens. As a minority Alawite in a country that had little identity except as a vague geographical expression, and was a hornet’s nest of tribes and sectarian and ethnic groups, he had all he could do merely to retain control.
Assad’s life is critical to an understanding of how the Greater Middle East has oscillated between empire and anarchy, with issues of democracy and authoritarianism of distinctly secondary significance. With the French empire in Syria extinguished in 1946, Syria teetered on the brink of anarchy until 1970. It was only Assad’s extraordinary and unequaled talents as a leader that staved off the next bout of anarchy, which would erupt under his son, Bashar, in 2011. In fact, the elder Assad’s life and struggles, and the failed elections and other futile attempts at stability that preceded his nonviolent coup of 1970, constitute the ugly facts on the ground that those in the West who blithely believed that democracy was the answer to Syria’s problems utterly and willfully ignored.
Bashar al-Assad was never meant to be the ruler of Syria. Educated at home and abroad as a medical doctor, he was placed in the line of succession only after the death of his older brother, Bassel, in a car accident. Bassel was the hard and somewhat reckless military man who was supposed to have succeeded his father. To be sure, Bassel was strong in ways that Bashar was weak. Bashar came to power because, being Assad’s son, he in his very person formed the only point of solidarity for Syria’s competing factions of military and intelligence chiefs. Bashar’s first impulse upon the death of his father was to liberalize the system, allowing more freedom of expression in society. But because changing such a system entails more risks than preserving the status quo, and because his military and security advisers—as well as a thoroughly corrupt business establishment tied to the Assads by marriage—were opposed to liberalization in any case, Bashar quickly retreated into his authoritarian shell. As for the Arab Spring, it quickly opened the door to anarchy in Syria, with dozens of competing armed guerrilla groups forming within a matter of weeks and months after the first anti-regime demonstrations. I suspect the utter brutality of the regime’s response to this internal challenge was driven less by Bashar’s personal evil than by his own weakness—his inability to control the behavior of the byzantine security structure just below him—and the fact that Syria, under the carapace of tyranny, was really a writhing nest of anarchy all along: it was only the elder Assad’s brilliance that for decades had kept the place relatively peaceful.
No doubt, the father when grooming the son for power stressed the need to be strong (read violent) when the situation demanded it. And very likely the son at many junctures during the civil war believed that he was merely living up to the example set by his father in Hama. Bashar’s mother, Anisa Makhlouf, who died in 2016 and had been married to the elder Assad for forty-three years, reportedly encouraged Bashar to demonstrate an extremely tough response to his enemies. The elder Assad had mastered the art of survival, and had given his country relative peace for three decades. “[The elder] Assad staves off the future,” I wrote in The Atlantic in 1993. “It is Assad, not Saddam Hussein or any other ruler, who defines the era in which the Middle East now lives. And [the elder] Assad’s passing may herald more chaos than a chaotic region has seen in decades.”[23] Indeed, to what ultimate purpose was always the question about his rule, given the manifold increase in abject cruelty required by his son merely to keep the father’s creation together.
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The Washington foreign policy establishment generally believed that had the Obama administration intervened quickly in the early years of the Syrian civil war it might have reestablished order, erected a more liberal regime, and wrested Syria from an Iranian grip. I am skeptical that this was ever a possibility.[*9] The descent from a series of peaceful demonstrations to a violent and complex sectarian conflict happened in a matter of weeks and months, not years.[24] America’s monumental failure to rebuild Iraq in its own image, even as Iraq is next door to Syria and also Ba‘athist, should have served as a lesson about American military intervention in complex Islamic societies. Nevertheless, significant elements of America’s post–Cold War foreign policy establishment saw the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, as a mere extension of their own personal experience systems: as though the American history of freedom were more relevant to Syria and Iraq than Syria’s and Iraq’s own histories. Many in the Washington elite were obsessed with abstract ideals about democracy and human rights and therefore discounted the actual record of the past in specific places. In any case, one-man-one-vote in the context of an intense Sunni-Shi‘ite regional rivalry was often about entrenching one group over another through the tyranny of the majority. Tellingly, in the whole Washington foreign policy debate over Syria—a place where elections would merely have legalized Sunni domination—the history that I have recounted in these pages went virtually unmentioned and remained relatively unkown.
The great mid-twentieth-century Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote, “Breaking the continuity with the past, wanting to begin again, is a lowering of man and a plagiarism of the orangutan.”[25] Precisely because a long memory is given to man, to reject that godsend means to reduce man to the level of the beasts. Never was this truer than in some of the arguments put forward about remaking Syria, as well as remaking Iraq and Libya.
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Syria’s tragedy is that its people yearned to have no borders at all between the Taurus Mountains, the Nefud desert, and the Euphrates; and to be ethnic and sectarian communities under some distant and benign sovereign, sort of a postmodern version of the Ottoman Empire, for which collapse they and others throughout the Middle East have never found an adequate solution. Given this reality, various futures now remain open. For example, were Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite regime in Damascus ever to collapse, as many Western elites doubtlessly hope, the Syria-Lebanon border could be effectively erased as Sunnis from both sides of the border united and Syria’s Alawites gathered in the northwest to form pockets of resistance. None of this would be peaceful, of course. The only recourse would be the equivalent of imperial rule from the outside, which would require a measure of toughness that American officialdom is naturally unwilling to countenance—though the Turks, Iranians, and until recently the Russians certainly are willing. Given our own limitations, we have no solution for Syria. We never had.
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I’ll never forget my first visit to Greater Syria in 1976. I was young and of course did not conceive of it as such at the time, thinking of it as Syria, Jordan, Israel, and so on. But I do remember the effect that its borderlands had on me. Syria’s southern border with Jordan was a crude highway toll station in the midst of a featureless plateau on both sides: an artificial creation of man. The border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank was merely a narrow stream with a grand biblical name, the Jordan River: another rather artificial border. But I do remember being awestruck by the dramatic sight of the Euphrates River at Raqqah in eastern Syria, after a long bus ride across a desert wilderness from Aleppo. That was a border! For the opposite bank marked the end of Greater Syria and the beginning of Mesopotamia, though I was still deep within Syria’s legal borders. Finally, nothing in that months-long odyssey in the spring and summer of 1976 affected me as much as the first sight of the Arabian desert deep inside Jordan. I had been hitchhiking from Amman south to Aqaba. The flat, gravelly plateau continued monotonously for hours. Then the plateau suddenly ended. Hundreds of meters below as I peered over a ledge, extending to the horizon, was a howling sandy wilderness punctuated by steeply rising mountains of red and coppery-black rock, with a heat film veiling the vista like a thin curtain. This was Ras al Naqab, the beginning of the true Arabian desert. It was where Greater Syria in a strict geographical sense ended; just as it had ended on the Euphrates, and just as it had ended in the southern foothills of Turkey’s Taurus Mountains. Jordan and Israel, as brilliant as they were as political and modern historical creations, be damned: the geography told another story. The problem was that the Syrians of the postcolonial era took that Abrahamic geography quite literally: as their own patrimony. And that was always the master key to the bloody politics of Damascus.
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