Eight Years Later: Lessons and Implications of the Syrian Civil War, Part One

The West confused longevity with stability, and image with reality.

By Josef Olmert

In the eight years that have passed since the beginning of what has been widely—and perhaps misleadingly—termed the Arab Spring, there have been profound implications and conclusions drawn.

The Tahrir Square revolution was perhaps the most far-reaching of the regional eruptions due to its centrality in the Arab and Islamic worlds. The specter of an Islamic Republic in Egypt in the vein of Iran or Turkey could have undoubtedly shaken the foundations of Middle East politics.

Although the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has presided over flagrant abuses of human rights, it is a model of moderation and civility when compared to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Similarly, the government of the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was a royal dictatorship that employed secret, police, torture and executions to stifle political dissent, but the regime that followed is in line with some of the worst regimes of the past hundred years.

The lessons learned from Iran, Egypt, and the Arab Spring have contributed greatly to our understanding of Middle East politics. Now we know that to judge Middle East politics, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of those Middle Easterners.

For example, in the case of Syria, where one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars is taking place, Western observers did not expect such development.

When Bashar al-Assad came to power, he was considered a “new” type of leader; he was educated in the West, spoke fluent English, and was a secular Alawite. In fact, many Western observers public ally expressed hope—if not outright admiration—for the young leader. For example, David Lesch, an American biographer of Assad, called him a “national leader with a strategic vision, clear ideas, which he formulates strongly and quietly based on his people interest’’ in 2006. ’’He is clearly trying to introduce a new approach to the exercise of power…persuading people that they should not see their president as superhuman and all-powerful’,” said BBC television commentator John Simpson. Conservative British MP Nicholas Soames called him a “beloved president by the masses of the Syrian people,” in February 2011, just before the onset of the civil war. Even then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lauded Mr. Assad as a “reformer” in an interview with CBS News, while former President Jimmy Carter called him “very popular in his own country” in a January 2009 interview with Forward Magazine,  a Syrian English-language newsmagazine. 

Mr. Assad also gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal in January of 2011, after protests had erupted in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Egypt, where he emphasized the stability of Syria, and categorically rejected the possibility of an Arab Spring in Syria, while the interviewers tiptoed carefully around questions about sectarianism and tribalism, or even questions about Assad’s own legitimacy. Just over a month later, protests broke out and Syrian civil war unfolded.

The main lesson learned here is not an individual problem, but rather a structural one; namely, that Western observers refuse to discuss the legitimacy of Arab regimes—the very heart of the problem in most Arab societies—or differentiate between stability and legitimacy. In fact, the stability in these regimes is often the result of political suppression, not the result of a wide-range free, democratic civic agreement between the various ethnic and religious elements of a diverse country.

In the case of Syria, we are dealing with the most extreme form of suppression-mass murder. Stability in Syria was, to a large extent, the product of the bloody suppression of the Hamah Revolt in early 1982, initiated by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, in which the Alawite military slaughtered 30,000 Sunni Syrian Muslims. Patrick Seale, the friendly biographer of Hafiz Assad, wrote in The Observer, on May 9, 1982, that after the massacre, the dictator met the governor of Hamah, and asked him just one question; ‘’Can the Muslim Brothers ever revive’’?  So much for legitimacy. 

What about Bashar himself and suppression of any dissent?  In March of 2004, Kurds rioted in Eastern Syria toppling the statue of Hafiz Assad, and then dozens of Kurds were slaughtered by the Alawite army. Violent political suppression was just the most visible side of the Assad regime, something which was obvious enough for all those who wanted to understand what was going on in the country of the ‘’reformer’’ Bashar Assad. There was also poverty, corruption, nepotism and all this under the cover of a modern, reformist regime headed by a beloved leader. The truth is that the longevity of regimes in the Middle East is not a sign of actual legitimacy. Muhammar Gadhafi came to power in Libya in 1969, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 1981, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia in 1987, Abdallah Salah in Yemen in 1990 and the Assads in Syria in 1970. It was in the West where the prevailing sense was that longevity of regimes meant stability, and stability meant normalization.

However, there was one important group of people who did not share these false impressions of politics in the Middle East: the citizens and local populations of all these countries. When they revolted in 2010, and afterward, they shattered so much of the conventional, wrong Western wisdom about the Middle East. In the case of Syria, the people of the country showed the world, that perception and reality are two different scenarios in the Middle East, and they continue to show it to this very day. However, again now we are told by governments and experts, that the Syrian conflict is over, that Bashar Assad won. Not really, as we shall see in my next article on this subject.

Dr. Josef Olmert is a Senior Fellow at the Palm Beach Center for Democracy and Policy Research and an adjunct professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina

Photo by aladdin hammami on Unsplash