In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [75]
The Syrian regime exploited the Iraq fiasco by issuing daily statements attributing the region’s problems to the “Zionist-American” conspiracy and implicated the Syrian opposition with a wave of arrests following the signature of the Beirut-Damascus Declaration. The regime also made Washington’s worst nightmare come true: the permitted burning of the Danish embassy in Damascus in response to caricatures of the prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper, along with news reports of radical takfiri Islamic groups carrying out operations in Syria (with American weapons), fit in nicely with the regime’s newly strengthened alliance with Iran.
When Hezbollah and Israel went to war, therefore, it was a perfect regime safety valve for releasing popular aggression toward its enemies. Hezbollah is a Shiite Islamic movement, so Syria’s majority Sunni population, and its supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood, could not control it. It also helped people to feel that they were fighting the Western powers that supported Israel and were overseeing the carnage in Iraq. Last but not least, because the Israeli and American threat to Syria turned to violence in Lebanon, it allowed the regime to put off reform until the “enemy” was defeated and “dignity” restored.
The first government-organized demonstration for “the resistance” on July 17, 2006, indicated that popular support for Hezbollah was lukewarm. When I called Syrian friends and journalists that morning to ask if they were going to the rally, most were still in bed shortly before it kicked off at 10 AM. Only a few thousand state workers, who had been given two hours’ leave, attended.
The giant television-camera booms I had first seen at the pro-Syrian demonstrations in Damascus in March 2005 were back in action. TV cameras used close-up images of the crowd to exaggerate its true size. This technique was repeated at several Damascus rallies over the next week.
The demonstration was so uninspiring that a group of journalist colleagues and I decided to visit the nearby Rouda Café—an opposition hangout adjacent to parliament. As they sucked down cups of tea to wake up, a Syrian colleague leaned over the table and whispered in my ear to look behind me. Sitting only three feet away was Hussam Taher Hussam, the thirty-year-old witness cited in the first report of the Hariri investigation who had recanted his testimony against the Syrian regime the previous November. There was a brief but comical moment of excitement when I snapped a photo of Hussam stealthily over my shoulder. Meanwhile, the café’s patrons were extremely laid back, seemingly unconcerned about the war raging next door.
As civilian casualties increased, however, Syrians got behind the resistance. For weeks, I noticed that my friends’ cell phones had ringtones featuring excerpts from Nasrallah’s speeches. Some even bothered to play longer clips for me; they traded these among friends. As the war dragged on, my Syrian friends began including me in mass e-mails showing photos of dead women and children being pulled from bombed-out buildings in Lebanon and in the occupied territories. Some were even arranged into PowerPoint presentations, though they were badly made, with photo captions that had bad English and Arabic spelling and grammar mistakes. They were genuine expressions of popular concerns, however, and were a far cry from the state’s clumsy propaganda. Such sentiments grew after Lebanese refugees began flooding into Syria in the war’s second week.
“See, like Iraqis,” Othaina said to me as our car approached the swarm of Lebanese cars piling across the Syrian border crossing at Al-Jdeida. Iraqis continued to stream into Syria from Iraq every day too. The fact that Othaina made the connection helped me realize