In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [91]
A few days after the article’s publication, I received a phone call from the US embassy’s public-diplomacy department asking for an appointment. When we eventually met, the embassy official—who knew I had helped carry out journalism training in Syria in the past—encouraged me to carry out journalism training through Syria Today. This seemed like a great idea—not only did I have the chance to engage directly with Syrians and promote American values, but it was a chance to test my theory as well. Could the United States reach out to the Syrian people directly and effectively?
After putting an ad in the daily Arabic papers for the training, we were swamped with applications. I and some of the other Syria Today staff weeded out the applications to a final list of twenty-five interviewees. Following the interviews, we narrowed down the list to five finalists. Leila hired them on a small salary to, in her words, “ensure their loyalty.” We then arranged to have secondary training with existing Syria Today writers as well. I taught the course, along with a few American journalist friends from Beirut, using the basic textbook used at Columbia’s journalism school.
In many ways, teaching Syrians who had never studied writing, or never worked for state-dominated newspapers, was a treat. “Going to the tree”—finding people uncontaminated by these influences—for recruits allowed us to attract a number of Syrians who proved intelligent and well-meaning. It was frustrating as well, though—the Syrian educational system had not taught them the basics of composition, let alone to distinguish between basic concepts. For example, the students did not know the difference between the subject of a story and a theme. The idea that the opening of a story should introduce the reader to the subject was completely foreign to them. This was largely the product of the writing style of Arabic newspapers, which tended to “bury the lead” or soften the point of stories in order not to offend influential people. Many of the students not only didn’t do the homework—a common occurrence in any school—but when they did, they failed to grasp the basic concepts of the assignment. Many used their writing not to construct a rational or compelling argument but simply as an opportunity to vent their spleen against whatever angered them that day.
In the end, two writers joined Syria Today magazine. Eager to get more writers and build on our relative success, I opened another training session. This time, however, Syria Today didn’t have the funds to pay the trainees, which forced me to offer the course for free. Like the previous class, I advertised in the local newspapers, vetted candidates, and selected a dozen new students for a course that met once a week. But with each passing week, more students dropped out of the course. Some had other commitments; others just stopped showing up. A core of six students remained, but they showed up intermittently. Few did their homework, and those that did cobbled it together on the way to class. Each worked two or three jobs to keep up with the rising cost of living in the country. While the same number of students finished the course as the first time, only one continued writing. I realized that reaching out to the Syrian private sector would take considerably more effort than one-off, small-scale projects—it needed institutional support in order to make an impact.
During the two months following Bashar’s “reelection,” Syria experienced a massive heat wave, which transformed the Syrian capital into a polluted oven. During the height of the crisis in Lebanon, Bashar had cut the high tariffs on cars from more than 200 percent to less than 40 percent. Syrians who had been saving for decades to buy a car could finally afford to do so—the results were traffic jams in Syria’s major cities and rapidly declining air quality.
From atop Qassioun Mountain overlooking Damascus, a lead-colored smog cloud hovered over the world’s oldest most continuously inhabited city. To escape the heat and bad air, Syrians purchased air conditioners,