In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [74]
Over the next few days, the Syrian media’s pro-Hezbollah propaganda campaign made it hard to determine the depth of popular support for “the resistance.” State-owned Syrian television’s morning and evening news programs—the only two that most Syrians now watch (besides soap operas) in an era of pan-Arab TV satellite stations—led in with video footage of women and children being pulled from the rubble in Lebanon. Marching music played in the background, complete with war drums. The ruckus suddenly stopped, only to be followed by an audio recording of US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s statement of July 21 that the war in Lebanon was part of the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” The linkage between Washington’s democracy agenda, Israel, and death and destruction was clear. Rice’s dictum was repeated every day on Syrian television for weeks, and many Syrians parroted it back to me with the addendum, “a new Sykes-Picot”—referring to the secret 1916 agreement between Britain and France that led to the division of the Ottoman empire into the Arab states we know today.
In many ways, history seemed to be repeating itself in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria in the summer of 2006. The late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was famous internationally for turning his country’s military defeat into a “diplomatic victory” over Israel, Britain, and France in the 1956 Suez Crisis and defiantly shifting Egypt into the Soviet camp during the Cold War. However, in the Arab world, Nasser is better known for his subsequent embrace of authoritarian socialism and its export during the pan-Arab revolution across the region. The domestic political reforms Nasser and his “free officers” promised when they seized power in 1952 were postponed until Arab “dignity” was restored by Israel’s defeat. The policy, which dramatically ended when Israel routed the Arabs in the Six-Day War of June 1967, was encapsulated in the slogan “No voice louder than the cry of battle.”
The question remained whether Syrians would buy into the regime’s version of “the plot.” After six years of Syria’s “reform process,” most Syrians were unhappy with the way they were ruled. A host of European countries had stepped forward to support Bashar al-Assad when he assumed the presidency in July 2000 following the death of his father, Hafez. The primary reason for engaging the son was political: Syria bordered Israel and controlled Lebanon, and Hafez al-Assad had nearly signed a peace agreement with Israel only three months before his death. The secondary, but nevertheless related, reason was to reform one of the most corrupt and authoritarian systems in the Arab world, to bring it into a Western orbit, and to arrange for a smooth transition toward democracy. Overly centralized decision making, combined with Syria’s continued socialist ideals a decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse, weighed heavily on Syrians. Their innate Levantine entrepreneurial spirit ensured that the private sector survived, however distorted it was by triple bookkeeping and a system of bribes that substituted for taxation.
What held the Syrian people back in the autumn of 2005 from rioting in the streets and demanding the downfall of the Damascus regime at perhaps its weakest point in the last forty years? Fear of arrest by the security services, for sure, but also serious doubts over Washington’s intentions for a post-Assad Syria. The Hariri investigation coincided with a rapid increase in the bloodshed in neighboring Iraq. If television news footage of the slaughter of civilians was not enough to raise questions in Syrians’ minds about Bush’s agenda, waves of Iraqi refugees flooding into Syria certainly was. Some brought suitcases full of money, but most did not. The Syrian government offered Iraqis basic support, but budgets ran out in early 2006. Charities and international relief agencies tried to fill the gap.
The “chaos” raging next door in Iraq was no accident, Syrians told me again and again. They said it was part of an Israeli-inspired plan, forged with neoconservatives prominent in the