In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [113]
On the domestic scene, the regime reached out to Syria’s majority Sunni Muslim community in unprecedented ways that changed the nature of Hafez al-Assad’s secular Syria. It also launched the biggest crackdown on the Syrian opposition since the regime’s brutal repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s. The Assad regime used all these factors to divide the United States and its allies on what to do when things did not go according to plan—most notably during the 2006 Lebanon War. Assad’s plan of “flexibility and steadfastness”—which was announced at the Baath Party conference of 2005 but implemented in the aftermath of the October 2005 report on the murder of Rafik Hariri—allowed Syria to pragmatically adopt and adjust policies to resist and reverse Washington’s pressure campaign.
Washington’s ability to deal with Damascus’s responses improved substantially after the United States launched the “Surge” and “Awakening” campaigns in Iraq. Washington also showed great skill by cooperating with Israel in its firm but nuanced response to Syria’s nuclear reactor at Al Kibar. But in Syria and Lebanon, the United States was simply not creative or flexible enough to counter Assad’s moves. An unfortunate ancillary side effect of American isolation was Washington’s inability to respond to the Assad regime’s skillful use of the chaos of sectarian bloodshed in US-occupied Iraq and war in Lebanon to rally the Syrian people around the flag and arrest domestic pressure on the regime. Washington’s lack of a response to Hezbollah’s “takeover” of west Beirut in May 2008 and the subsequent veto power given to the Party of God over the Lebanese state showed that when push came to shove in Lebanon, the Bush administration was unwilling—and perhaps ultimately unable—to push back. It also was unable to develop a diplomatic strategy to arrest Hezbollah’s rise in Lebanon.
When US engagement finally resumed in 2009 in the name of creating tension between Iran and Syria, the Assad regime’s deepening of relations with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon clashed directly with the Obama administration’s objective of using a Syrian-Israel peace treaty to reorient Syria away from Iran. Insisting that he sought peace with Israel but was unwilling to give up Syria’s close relations with Iran and Hezbollah, Assad attempted to have his political cake and eat it too.
But then the winds of change blew through Syria. In January 2011, antiregime protests in Tunisia and Egypt brought down the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes. Suddenly the strongly held notion in Washington and throughout the world that autocratic Arab regimes were stable was called into question. Dramatic scenes spread around the world of knife-wielding regime thugs riding horses and camels and assaulting pro-democracy protestors, who were using Facebook and Twitter accounts via smartphones to demand civic and human rights, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Clearly, there was a gap between these regimes’ anachronistic and brutal idea of governance and the protestors living their lives in the twenty-first century.
True to form, Assad reacted with hubris. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2011, Assad claimed that his regime was impervious to the kind of protests that brought down the governments of Ben Ali and Mubarak, because his policies were so “closely linked to the beliefs of the people.”14 He quickly lifted the regime’s Internet